Kickstarter held a block party in front of its new office this past weekend, offering food, music and games to anyone who wanted to come by and check it out.
The block party celebrated the opening of its new office as well as the company's fifth birthday.
A bunch of Kickstarter veterans were there to demonstrate their successfully funded projects. Kickstarter also opened up its office for tours.
On hand were projects like the 3Doodler, "the world's first 3D printing pen," and Oklahomo, a musical about a superhero, Jesus, and gay people.
The block party drew people of all ages.
Kickstarter's office was open for tours, but the real fun was happening outside on Kent Street between Franklin and West streets.
The entire block was shut down, so no cars were allowed.
If you get invited to become an Amazon Vine reviewer, you'll get free stuff from companies to review.
Vine is Amazon's invitation-only club for a small percentage of elite reviewers. Every month, Amazon sends selected Vine reviewers a list of products. Each person can select two products to review at a time, and they can keep those items as long as they provide a review within 30 days. Amazon insists that reviews don't have to be positive.
You can use Mechanical Turk to crowd-source "human intelligence tasks"— like identifying photos — to people all over the world.
Mechanical Turk basically gives users access to an on-demand workforce, and it gives people who want to make a little extra money a way to find quick-and-easy online labor. Here's some examples from the site: you can get paid $0.04 per picture to find images of specified real estate agents or $0.02 to copy text from a picture of a business card.
If you live in New York, Seattle or London, you can use Amazon Locker to get your packages dropped off at secure location while you're at work.
For people who work all day and don't want to get personal packages delivered to the office yet can never make it to the post office before it closes, Locker is a godsend.
Lockers are often in 24-hour facilities — like 7-Elevens — and when you go to pick up your package you just have to enter a code that was texted or emailed to you to get it.
Not all of us paid attention in high school English class, but that doesn't mean the assigned books weren't worth reading (or re-reading).
And maybe it's finally time to enjoy "The Grapes of Wrath" and other classics, instead of just the CliffsNotes version.
Miriam Tuliao, assistant director of central collection development at the New York Public Library, helped us create a list of 25 American classics everyone should read.
From John Steinbeck's masterpiece to Jack Kerouac's "On The Road," these 25 titles are worth your time (listed here in alphabetical order).
Do you think another book belongs on this list? Let us know in the comments.
"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith
Published in 1943
"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is the heartwarming coming-of-age story of the young and idealistic Francie Nolan as she grows up in the slums of Williamsburg during the early 20th century.
An avid reader and lover of penny candy, Francie is a sweet and lovable narrator who must also face the horrors of life — battling sexual assault, extreme loneliness, and lost love — in an effort to survive (and prosper) despite her environment.
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain
Published in 1884
Considered to be one of the great American novels, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" follows Huck Finn and his friend Tom Sawyer as they travel along the Mississippi River and through the 19th century antebellum South with a freed slave named Jim.
It was the first book written in vernacular English, and though it's frequently challenged for use in the U.S. public school system's curriculum due to racial stereotypes and frequent slurs, many modern academics argue the book is an attack on racism.
The lengthy "Atlas Shrugged" is set in a fictional dystopian United States where all the world's movers and shakers have abandoned society, leaving the world and the remaining people in a state of flux.
No matter your opinion on the underlying concept of the book — that capitalism is goodness itself — Ayn Rand's philosophical book is considered by many to be her magnum opus and one need not agree with her to appreciate it.
Activist investor Bill Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, is bullish Fannie Mae.
Ackman gave a 110-slide presentation at the 19th annual Sohn Conference yesterday, detailing why he's bullish on the government-controlled mortgage giant.
According to Ackman, the potential return is tenfold.
Fannie and Freddie needed massive bailouts amid the financial crisis but have in recent quarters become wildly profitable again. And a number of hedge funders have been bullish for a while.
Ackman's Pershing Square owns 115,569,796 shares of Fannie and 63,505,693 shares of Freddie Mac.
Pershing Square proposes a plan to reform the GSEs, rather than liquidate them.
"The best way to maintain widespread availability and affordability of the 30-year, fixed-rate, prepayable mortgage and provide substantial profit to the taxpayer is to reform the GSEs," according to the presentation.
Ackman's recommendations include increasing capital requirements for GSEs, eliminating the fixed-income arbitrage business, subjecting GSEs to increased regulatory oversight, and developing appropriate compensation and government policies.
125 years ago today, the Eiffel Tower was officially opened to the public in Paris after 2 years, 2 months, and 5 days of construction.
It stood as the gateway for the 1889 Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) in honor of the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, and continues to make an impact on the world’s conscious today.
In honor of the famous world attraction’s official opening anniversary, here are 13 cool facts about the Eiffel Tower everyone should know.
1. The Eiffel Tower wasn’t the brainchild of Gustav Eiffel. Instead, his senior engineers Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier designed the building. Gustav Eiffel wasn't overly interested in the project, but sent the engineers to the head of the company’s architectural department, Stephen Sauvestre. With Sauvestre's edits, Eiffel got behind the final plans and bought the right to the patent.
2. The Eiffel Tower in numbers: 300 workers, 18,038 pieces of wrought iron, 2.5 million rivets, 10,000 tons, 984.25 feet high.
3. The tower was built as a symbol of modern science, or as Eiffel himself said, “not only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industry and Science in which we are living.” At the time that the tower was being built, another technology was also in its infancy phase — photography. As the tower was built, many photographers captured series of photographs to show the tower’s construction.
4. At the time of its construction, the Eiffel Tower was the tallest building in the world. It wasn't until 1930 when New York City’s Chrysler Building rose up to 1,046 feet that the tower lost that title.
5. The Eiffel Tower's elevators weren't operational at first. On May 6, fair goers were allowed to enter the tower, but the 30,000 visitors had to climb 1,710 steps to reach the top. The lifts finally entered service on May 26.
6. Parisian residents originally hated the Eiffel Tower, calling it an eyesore. Newspapers received angry letters that said the tower didn’t fit into the feel of the city, and there was a team of artists that rejected the plan from the get-go. One apocryphal story says that novelist Guy de Maupassant said he hated the tower, but ate at its restaurant every day for lunch. When he was asked why, Maupassant replied it was only place in Paris he couldn’t see it.
7. It changes height by the season. Because it’s made with puddled (wrought) iron, the tower’s metal expands when exposed to the summer sun, causing the structure to rise by as much as 6.75 inches.
8. The Eiffel Tower was only meant to stand for 20 years, but the French military and government began using it for radio communication and later telecommunication. When the permit expired in 1909, the City of Paris decided to keep it.
9. The Eiffel Tower has stood up to quite a lot during its lifetime. It transmitted radio signals during WWI, and during WWII the elevator wires were cut so that the Nazis could not use the tower (after Allied troops entered the city, the elevators were fixed). It even survived a fire on its top floor, and over 250 million visitors from around the world climbing on it.
10. The tower is not painted one uniform color. To counteract atmospheric perspective, the tower is painted darker at the top and becomes gradually lighter towards the bottom.
11. Speaking of paint, every seven years 50 to 60 tons of paint are applied to protect the tower from rust.
12. It’s not just a tourist attraction. The Eiffel Tower has housed a newspaper office, post office, scientific laboratories, a theater, and the first level becomes an ice rink every year.
13.It is the most visited paid monument in the world, attracting almost 7 million visitors every year (75% of whom are from other countries). Here’s the full breakdown:
For more cool facts on the Eiffel Tower, visit the monuments website here.
Twenty-eight years ago on April 26, nuclear disaster struck in the former Soviet Union.
An explosion and subsequent fire at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine released radioactive materials into the atmosphere, resulting in the most expensive and deadliest nuclear disaster in history.
In 2009, Timm Suess visited what he calls "ground zero of the 1986 accident," the now-abandoned town of Pripyat near the Chernobyl power plant. This town and its inhabitants — mostly power plant workers and their families — were the main victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The actual town of Chernobyl was farther from the power plant than Pripyat — about 10 miles — but it was also affected by the nuclear disaster. Still, Suess wrote wrote after his trip in March 2009, “Chernobyl is a more lively place than you might imagine: Nowadays it is repopulated with 500 people, many of them scientists.”
With its high radiation levels, however, the area still poses danger to its inhabitants. Consequently, those found within the radiation zone fall into either of two categories: “radiophobes” and “radioenthusiasts.”
To commemorate the explosion and its victims, Suess' photos show what the city of Pripyat looks like recently. You can follow Timm Suess on LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and DeviantArt.
To enter the city of Pripyat, Suess passed through three security checks. "Entry into the zone of exclusion is only allowed with proper authorizations and a tour guide."
With a lime shortage going on and summer fast approaching, people are turning to tiki drinks to sip on this season.
But none more so than the sweet, creamy, rum-based favorite, the Piña Colada.
“I think the rise in popularity goes back to the ‘everything old is new again’ discovery phase we are in right now with the millennial audience,” Andrew Freeman, founder of the hospitality consulting agency Andrew Freeman & Co, explained to Business Insider in an email. “There are so many classic items that are being re-introduced in modern ways for a crowd of people that never knew them before. Couple this with the rise of island food, fresh fruits and vegetables being used in cocktails, and the Piña Colada is the perfect drink.”
Three Puerto Rican bartenders claim ownership of the Piña Colada, which happens to be Puerto Rico’s national beverage. The most famous version of the story credits the drink to bartender Ramon "Monchito" Marrero of the Caribe Hilton back in 1954. According to the hotel, Monchito spent 3 months mixing, tasting, and discarding hundreds of combinations until he got the perfect blend.
Monchito made no secret of his original recipe, and today the Caribe Hilton features it proudly on its website: "Pour 2 ounces of light rum, 1 ounce of coconut cream, 1 ounce of heavy cream, and 6 ounces of fresh pineapple into a blender. Add ice. Blend for 15 seconds. Pour into a 12-ounce glass. Add a pineapple wedge and maraschino cherry for garnish."
This is a perfectly acceptable way to make a Piña Colada. Some would even say it’s the best way.
But there's a twist on the original recipe that takes the Piña Colada to the next level. Called the Rocket Fuel and invented by the bartenders of Fire Island, it's a liquored-up version made with Bacardi 151 floater and Amaretto.
The Island Mermaid, a Fire Island staple that has been around for 24 years, shared its own delicious recipe for making the island favorite, which owner Scott Hirsch warns can “sneak up on you.”
Here is the Island Mermaid’s seriously awesome take on the drink, courtesy of Hirsch:
Instead of mixing all the ingredients in the blender, we make the Piña Colada freshly with gold rum (not silver because it affects the flavor). You pour the gold rum over the ice in the blender and add the Piña Colada mix until the ice barely rises. Then blend.
Listen for the ice to disappear. Seriously, listen. It matters a little.
In the glass you are using, pour a shot of 151 rum. Then take the blended colada and pour it over the shot so it runs up through the drink. We recommend a 12-14 ounce pour. Then, gently circle the top of the drink with a floater of amaretto. The first sips are "sweet" getting you ready for the blast down below!
That's it. Garnish with a slice of pineapple. Blast off.
Whether you prefer your Piña Colada classic or with a serious kick, expect to see a lot more of these tiki drinks this summer.
Whether through money, talent, or just good publicity, certain families dominate American life.
There are legendary old money dynasties, twentieth century industrial dynasties, entertainment and sports dynasties, and political dynasties that hold a surprising amount of power for a democratic country.
We picked out today's most impressive American dynasties and ranked them, considering historical legacy, current influence, and estimated wealth.
23. The Trump-Kushner Family
Real estate royalty
One of the most powerful real estate tycoons today, Donald Trump started his career as real estate investor and developer at his father’s company. While he battled bankruptcy and SEC charges in the ‘90s, Trump has re-established himself as a successful businessman, and today is probably best known for his reality show, "The Apprentice."
Trump’s daughter Ivanka is proving to be just as shrewd in business. She acquired The Doral Resort and its Blue Monster golf course in Miami for $150 million, according to Forbes, and is planning to spend $200 million renovating it. She also has a successful jewelry, fragrance, and shoe line.
Ivanka's husband, businessman Jared Kushner, runs his family's real estate development firm, Kushner Properties; is the founder of investment fund Thrive Capital; and owns The New York Observer, which he bought in 2006 for $10 million.
Two-year-old Arabella Kushner and six-month-old Joseph Kushner, Ivanka and Jared's kids, have quite the empire to inherit: Donald Trump has an estimated net worth of $3.9 billion, while Ivanka is reportedly worth $150 million. Jared's net worth is around $200 million.
22. The Barrymore Family
Film and stage legends
Dubbed "Hollywood's first family," the Barrymores span the entertainment industry from screen to stage since before the American Revolutionary War. The family started with Maurice Barrymore — his stage name — who gave birth to actors Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore.
John, also known as "The Great Profile" for his aristocratic good looks, was the most acclaimed actor of the early 20th century. John's second wife, Dolores Costello, was also a well-known silent film actress. The two gave birth to John Drew Barrymore who, when his parents divorced, rebelled against his mother's wishes to keep him out of the limelight by signing his first acting contract at age 17.
John Drew's daughter, Drew, the youngest and best-known of the Barrymores, has been acting since the age of three. She's the goddaughter of director Steven Spielberg, who directed the movie in which she had her breakout role, "E.T." Drew went on to star in "Riding in Cars With Boys,""Charlie's Angels," and "The Wedding Singer." Drew, whose net worth alone is an estimated $125 million, gave birth to her first child in 2012 and had her second just last month.
21. The Ford Family
Auto tycoons
Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company in 1903, and the Fords have been the first family in American automobiles ever since. His only son, Edsel, took over the company in 1919 at the age of 26 and is credited with the sleek designs that made the brand so popular.
Edsel's son Henry II took the reigns of Ford Motor Company in 1943 at the age of 25, and he really revived the company after WWII. His brothers held high and powerful positions under him.
Today, the family is still involved in the company: Henry II's son, Edsel II, still sits on the company's board of directors, his granddaughter Elena is a vice president at the company, and William Jr. (a grandson of Edsel Ford) was the Chairman and CEO until 2006and still remains Executive Chairman at the company.
Today the descendants of Henry Ford control the Ford Motor Company, although they have a minority ownership of 2%. Based on a market cap of $48 billion, the Ford family holds $1.2 billion worth of common stock.
Beef has been and always will be what's for dinner.
Porterhouses, filet mignon, and strip steaks are staples on restaurant menus and in grocery aisles. But there are some lesser-known cuts that are just as tasty and often less expensive.
The American Angus Association shared this beef breakdown with us. Click through to find out more about the major cuts of beef, and the best ways to prepare them.
CHUCK: Blade Steak, Eye Steak, Arm Roast, Blade Roast, Short Ribs, Flatiron Steak, 7-Bone Roast.
The chuck contains connective tissue (including fat and collagen) which partially melts during cooking. The meat is prepared by stewing, slow cooking, braising, or pot roasting to make the meat tender.
Chuck is also commonly made into ground beef (for hamburgers, meatballs, etc.), and is one of the more economical cuts available.
Taken from the upper leg of cattle, the fore shank is tough, dry, and sinewy. The meat is commonly cooked in moist heat or used to create beef stock.
Since not many people buy beef shank, it's not typically found in stores as anything other than low-fat ground beef. It is fairly cheap in butcher shops though, and an ideal cut for beef Bourguignon.
Alex Rodriguez lost $22.1 million in salary as a result of his year-long suspension. But that hasn't stopped him from being the highest-paid player in Major League history.
Thanks to a pair of contracts worth more than $250 million, Rodriguez has made more than $350 million in his career.
But A-Rod is not alone.
Let's take a look at the 25 players who have made at least $144 million in their careers.
Japanese aerial photography company HEXaMedia flew a drone equipped with cameras through Tomioka, Japan, the largely abandoned town that played host to the Fukushima nuclear meltdown.
It edited together a number of spooky shots into a 7-minute video that you can watch here. Check out the most stunning shots in the gallery below.
Tomioka, Japan is an especially quiet town after the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactor.
A solar-powered device measures ambient radiation still left over from the event.
A few years ago, smartphone cameras were valued for their convenience rather than the quality of the images they produced.
Now, smartphone manufacturers are putting much more attention into beefing up the cameras on their mobile devices.
For example, Nokia has managed to squeeze 41 megapixels into the camera on its Lumia 1020.
Both Apple and HTC have focused on increasing the size of the microns on the camera sensors of their respective iPhone 5S and One smartphones.
In plain English, this means that these cameras are capable of absorbing more light than some of their rivals, which results in high-resolution photographs loaded with detail.
We've come a long way from the 8-megapixel cameras of 2012's flagships, and today's smartphones are giving you more reasons to discard your aging point-and-shoot and ditch the idea of investing in a pricey dSLR.
Here's a look at some of the most amazing images from across the web that you wouldn't believe were taken with a smartphone.
This image by Kim Hanskamp won first place in the People category for 2013's iPhone Photography Awards.
Most of iPhone photographer Hironori Mizuno's Instagram photos consist of colorful, surreal images like this.
This photo by Kartikey Smita Karnatak was taken with a Nokia smartphone and was featured on the company's blog.
Studying engineering can result in incredibly lucrative job offerings and salaries upon graduation.
In Silicon Valley, salaries for experienced engineers can start at $165,000 per year. The national average for a software developer is $89,000, according to data from 2013. A senior software engineer makes $98,000 a year, on average.
Some of the best engineering schools in the world serve as feeder programs for the best technology companies out there, like FacebookGoogle and Apple.
We also parsed LinkedIn to find the top tech employers, based on the companies with the greatest number of graduates employed per school.
50. Dartmouth University
Hanover, New Hampshire
Dartmouth's 270-acre campus in Hanover, New Hampshire, is both easy to get around and gives students a great quality of life.
The school's main library, Baker, is modeled after Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and boasts a fresco from Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco.
Over at Colorado School of Mines, they know how to work hard and play hard. When students aren't studying, according to U.S. News, they're taking in the outdoors by hiking, rock climbing, and biking.
Yale's 260-acre campus in urban New Haven, Connecticut, is known for its famous a cappella group the Whiffenpoofs, as well as its excellent programs in drama and music, according to U.S. News & Report.
The Ivy League institution was highly ranked for its library, and its Rare Book and Manuscript Library has a Gutenberg Bible on permanent display.
Kickstarter threw a block party at its Brooklyn headquarters this weekend, featuring booths and games from a host of successfully funded projects.
They also gave tours of the company's brand-new offices, located in what used to be the Eberhard Faber Pencil Factory in Greenpoint. For a team that used to work in a Lower East Side tenement building where they had to do their dishes in a bath tub, this historic building is a huge upgrade.
The renovated space includes plenty of reclaimed wood and industrial details. Many of the construction materials are sustainable, including the building's insulation, which also happens to be edible.
The 80-person team moved to Brooklyn in January, but this weekend was the first time they opened their offices to the public.
The new offices are located on Kent Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. We visited during their block party this weekend.
"Future Phenomena," a massive fabric mural by Brooklyn artist Amanda Browder, hung over the building's facade during the party. The piece was sponsored by NBArts, the Brooklyn Arts Council, and Kickstarter funds.
Inside, we got a peek at where the Kickstarter team gets their work done during the week.
RJMetrics, a business intelligence software company, looked at the dataset of 50,000 random Pinterest users and their pins to take a look at user engagement and what it could mean for the future of Pinterest.
Although Pinterest hasn't released numbers, the common wisdom has always been that there are more women on Pinterest than men. RJMetrics data confirmed this: 80% of Pinterest users are female and 20% are male.
*A note on the data: Pinterest doesn’t share gender data publicly, but they do share users' names. About 75% of users supply a name that maps to a name as recognized by the US Census Bureau. We mapped name data to census data to arrive at gender.
Not only that, but women Pinterest users are far more active on the site than men. 92% of all pins are made by women.
Turns out, the percentage of pins made by men has been consistently declining since July of 2011, the first month for which RJMetrics had reliable data.
The couple reportedly paid $14.85 million, $50,000 above the most recent asking price. The apartment was sold by real estate developer Alexandre Bosoni.
The five-bedroom, six-bathroom penthouse is located in the newly constructed 170 East End Avenue, which, according to the Corcoran Group, has a ton of perks.
The building includes features such as a Pilates room, golf simulator, and a children's interactive room with computer games.
This is what 170 East End Avenue looks like. Some of the perks include a yoga studio, squash court, and movie theater.
The apartment boasts 11.5-foot ceilings, which is especially nice when there are ceiling-to-floor windows. Here are the views you get in the living room.
The formal dining room includes a wood-burning fireplace, private balcony, and fits a 16-person table.
This week, hedge fund manager David Einhorn showed us what one of the "cool kid stocks" he mentioned in his latest investor letter looks like. It's not pretty.
"Cool kid stocks," according to Einhorn, are a pack of stocks that are way overvalued. His hedge fund, Greenlight Capital, is shorting a basket of them and on Monday he presented one, athenahealth to a room full of investors at the 19th Annual Sohn Investment Conference.
Athenahealth is a business that provides outsourced administrative services for healthcare providers that, until Monday, enjoyed a stock price of over $125. Einhorn's bull thesis for the stock is for it to fall to $50, his bear case is that it could go to $14.
And this presentation has everything: a kooky CEO, superenthusiastic Wall Street analysts, jokes, cartoons, YouTube clips, and more. By the time he was done presenting, the stock was down 7%, at Tuesday's close it was down almost 14%.
Wednesday morning the stock started falling; an hour after the open it was down 8%. Carnage.
Einhorn was kind enough to share the presentation on Greenlight Capital's website, and allow Business Insider to upload it with his comments here. Enjoy!
"This is the 19th Annual Sohn Investment Conference. The first time I spoke here was in 2002. It is amazing how this great event has grown, and I am honored to be here."
"A couple weeks ago, we wrote in our quarterly letter that we believe that a narrow group of cool kid stocks have disconnected from traditional valuations and formed a bubble. This got a lot of criticism. Half the critics thought we were talking our book, even though we didn’t name names. The other half were upset that we didn’t tell them which stocks we were short. Since we can’t seem to please anybody, I’ve decided to validate both criticisms. Today, I’m going to illustrate the bubble basket doing a deep dive into one of the companies, while not disclosing the others. This company is an excellent company with an excellent product, run by a well‐meaning and honest, though occasionally promotional CEO. The world may be a better place if it succeeds, and even though we are short, I am in no way rooting for it to fail. Its main problem is that it isn’t positioned to succeed the way the bulls hope, as the assumptions the bulls are making are not plausible. The stock is simply at the wrong price. It’s caught up in a bubble and could easily fall 80% or more from its recent peak. Let me introduce you to athenahealth."
The San Francisco home of Richard Thalheimer, founder and former CEO of The Sharper Image, has nearly everything you would expect from the domain of a tech executive.
Touch-screen monitors in each room control the home's sound system, security cameras, and window treatments. Nine flatscreen TVs situated throughout the house mean that you can get a high-definition movie experience in almost every room, and an internal elevator provides easy access to all three floors. There's even a C-3PO statue in the living room.
The 7,750-square-foot home is located just off San Francisco's Billionaire's Row in Pacific Heights, where Oracle's Larry Ellison, Apple's Jonathan Ive, and Zynga's Mark Pincus all own homes.
After initially hitting the market for $11.95 million in October 2013, the home reduced its asking price by $1 million back in February. According to Curbed SF, it sold for $10.12 million on April 29.
The Mediterranean-style home was built in the 1920s and renovated in 2004.
Pass through tall hedges to get to the glass-paned front door.
In the Great Room, spaces for eating and lounging flow together in one communal area.
1. The Eiffel Tower wasn’t the brainchild of Gustav Eiffel. Instead, his senior engineers Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier designed the building. Gustav Eiffel wasn't overly interested in the project, but sent the engineers to the head of the company’s architectural department, Stephen Sauvestre. With Sauvestre's edits, Eiffel got behind the final plans and bought the right to the patent.
7. It changes height by the season. Because it’s made with puddled (wrought) iron, the tower’s metal expands when exposed to the summer sun, causing the structure to rise by as much as 6.75 inches.
