NEW YORK (Billboard) – In the wee hours of the morning on Monday, September 14, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne was signing autographs after his band performed at upstate New York’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival when a burly young fan approached him with a length of industrial strap. Coyne recognized it as one of his own, used for tying down equipment like the large cannons that shoot confetti into the crowd throughout the band’s stage show. The fan told Coyne the strap had been shot out of the cannon and hit him in the chest, but he calmly handed it…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Although it may seem like an easy solution to major financial difficulties, it is best to avoid bankruptcy at all cost. There are many reasons for avoiding bankruptcy and many tips for helping those in financial difficulty avoid resorting to bankruptcy. Before beginning to consider bankruptcy, it is best to weigh the negative consequences.
Although it may seem like an easy solution to major financial difficulties, it is best to avoid bankruptcy at all cost. There are many reasons for avoiding bankruptcy and many tips for helping those in financial difficulty avoid resorting to bankruptcy. Before beginning to consider bankruptcy,…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

MUMBAI (Reuters) – The rupee dropped on Monday in tandem with lower stock markets, which could slow down foreign inflows, and a stronger dollar overseas. At 10:57 a.m. (0527 GMT), the partially convertible rupee was at 48.68/69 per dollar, 0.4 percent weaker than its previous close of 48.48/49. It had risen 0.9 percent last week. “It is the same old story — stocks are down, so the rupee has also weakened,” said Ashtosh Raina, head of foreign exchange trading at HDFC Bank. He expected the day’s range at 48.50-48.80. Shares dropped 0.9 percent early as weak Asian markets encouraged…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

We were momentarily excited when we heard that CableCARD compatible tuners will be available for purchase by the end of the year. A card like this would allow you to hook up your digital cable to your computer and record programs natively. This has been possible for a long time with analog cable and PVR software such as MythTV. Up to this point, recording digital cable has required a dedicated cable box and workarounds to allow the computer to change channels.
Wait a minute though, the announcement was made by Microsoft? Indeed. Microsoft has been making a big push…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Today Zynga, the leading gaming company on Facebook, blew past the 100 million monthly active users level through their network of games. Much of the support has come from FarmVille which is not only the company’s largest game, but also the largest application on Facebook by an extremely large margin. FarmVille should also become the largest application ever on the Facebook application within the next day or two, surpassing the “How Well Do You Know Me?” application’s previous record of 35,554,755 monthly active users.

Based on daily active users, the application is already the largest ever by a large number.…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

Just last week we wrote about the MySpace acquisition of iLike and this week it appears that some form of agreement between Facebook and Spotify is in the works according to Techcrunch. The rumor is based on a status update by Mark Zuckerberg in which he simply stated “Spotify is so good.” While Mark may be a victim to the classic “shiny object syndrome” found in much of Silicon Valley, he probably wouldn’t have written the update had something not been in the works.

Whether or not discussions or near the final stages, Spotify is most definitely an interesting product…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

There’s been a bunch of coverage of the iLike acquisition deal over the past 24 hours including those that call this a massive blow Facebook. The primary “losers” in this supposed $20 million MySpace acquisition is iLike, who has been struggling to find a breakthrough business model. There’s also an underlying story about how the Partovi brothers and Mark Zuckerberg grew apart since the early launch of the platform.

Kara Swisher sums it up beautifully:

The Partovis–who once were close with execs at Facebook (see my party video below), particularly founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg–placed great faith in its growth…

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]

[Robert Crumb], the celebrated artist who created the commonly recognized keep on truckin, Fritz the cat, and mr natural can be seen here doing a ghetto hack. His record was warped, so he had to melt it in the oven to flatten it out. While [R. Crumb] may not be the epitome of celebrity and wealth, he got us wondering, what celebrities do ghetto hacks? More importantly, what ghetto hacks do you continue to do, even though you could afford to just simply replace the item? In case you missed the ghetto hacks thread, here it is.
.

[ Read the rest of the story in the original article... ]