Yesterday, we told you about Boulder’s Off the Quad, whose Trendsttr algorithm is designed to find the most socially influential college students by measuring things like how many of their Facebook conversations go viral. But even if such shares can be monetized, are they destroying the students themselves — or…
Our Best of Denver issue (which hits newsstands on March 31) is sure to be a big, bulky thing, as it is every year. Unless you possess a European men’s carry-all, it can be tough to tote around. Which is why we came up with the Best Of… iPhone app…
Congratulations, Denver: You have officially been swallowed up whole by the Matrix. Men’s Health recently came out with its list of the country’s most socially networked cities, and Denver, of all places, came in third. Do we get a prize for this? Like a new FarmVille animal or something?…
Alex Bogusky was the boy-king of advertising. Then, after moving much of his superstar firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky to Boulder, he retired from the ad world last July, causing shock waves. Now, installed in his Boulder-based FearLess Cottage, he’s launched COMMON, a community-focused incubator and brand that, as he…
The Dead Drop movement/art project is tech-savvy variation on freedom of expression. All around the country, bare-bone USB keys are being affixed to walls, railings and trees so people everywhere can use them for offline, anonymous file sharing with their fellow techies — poems, photos, recipes, you name it. Now,…
As described in the August cover story “The Nutty Professor,” Boulder professor Peter McGraw is hard at work trying to crack the humor code. He and his team at the Humor Research Lab (HuRL) have subjected test subjects to Hot Tub Time Machine clips, dirty jokes and raunchy ads to…
These days, as the government slashes NASA’s budget and entrepreneurs start making inroads towards the heavens, the space race is increasingly becoming a private-sector enterprise. The development could bode well for the Front Range. Indeed, the Denver-Boulder area may just be perfectly positioned to become the Silicon Valley of the…
Colorado Attorney General John Suthers is embracing Facebook nearly a year after the state essentially unfriended the massive social network. The agreement between the AG’s office and Mark Zuckerberg’s operation means that state agencies, including Suthers’s, can belatedly join the 21st century by launching Facebook pages of their own. Here’s…
LaLa Vazquez appears to be one of the driving forces behind hubby Carmelo Anthony’s desire for a trade to the New York Knicks — one reason why the Nuggets are reportedly lobbying her as well as Melo to stay. Problem is, she seems obsessed with bright lights, the big city…
Most locals know Coolerado, the Denver AC company, solely from noticing the factory name as they drive east on I-70. But according to Slate, Coolerado is more than a quirky name. It’s also a groundbreaking tech operation that symbolizes the opportunities and challenges of the new global economy…
Drummer Crawford Philleo is the Foursquare mayor of the bathroom at Gabor’s on Thirteenth Avenue because he was mad that another user, Colfax J, took over the mayorship of Gabor’s itself. Funny. But not as funny as some of the other places with Foursquare mayors…
Remember when, after one too many tequila shots, you confessed your undying love all over your ex’s Facebook wall? Or how you posted a YouTube vid of a certain projectile-vomiting incident right after it happened? Or how your drunken tweets ended up on Text From Last Night — three times…
University of Colorado-Denver PhD student Christopher Sibona recently used science — science! — to figure out why people “unfriend” each other on Facebook. One big reason? Frequent, unimportant posts — which got us here at Westword thinking about the all-time worst Facebook status updates…
This week’s feature story, “Wired for Sound,” tells the tale of Next Big Sound, a Boulder tech company that’s found a new way to look for rock and roll’s future and is poised to become the next big thing in Boulder’s red-hot startup scene. But could Next Big Sound fail…
Thanks to recording programs like GarageBand and social-music sites such as MySpace, Twitter and Last.fm, it’s never been easier for wannabe superstars to record and distribute music. But how to find rock and roll’s future among all this discordant noise? As described in this week’s feature, “Wired for Sound,” a…
Hallelujah! The parting of the Red Sea, one of the great miracles of ancient times, has occurred again — only this time it happened on computer simulators designed by Boulder researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado at Boulder. The result, say the scientists…
Last night and this morning, thousands of people across the nation roughed it outside Apple stores to be among the first, well, thousands of people to poke the touchpad of the new iPhone 4. What’s so great about this new doo-hickey? It has a camera, it’s skinnier and it lasts…
Plenty of cities romance corporations looking for a new home. But few go to the extremes of Longmont, which so wants Google Fiber to set up housekeeping there that it’s created a photo from space expressing its desire, plus a video contest and more. Check out examples of Longmont’s Google…
JonBenét Ramsey can’t raise objections about the person tweeting in her name, having been murdered in 1996 — which is presumably why fake confessor John Mark Karr’s been trying to create a JonBenét lookalike cult. But the faux-JonBenét can bitch — and he/she is doing so about not being named…
These days, the top purveyor of bogus death notices is Twitter, with the likes of Kanye West and Britney Spears among those falsely identified as cadavers. But a report of “Convoy” singer C.W. McCall’s premature demise came courtesy of an old-school source: the Denver Post…
For 46 years, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has had a supercomputing center at its Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder. This week, NCAR broke ground on a new facility. The center uses supercomputers — which can process 76 trillion operations per second, says NCAR head of Media Relations David…
Westword — thirty-plus years your weekly, ink-stained guide to Denver — now lives in your iPhone. For free. The Westword iPhone app went live last night and is stocked with much of the same content you get here at westword.com. More specifically, you’ll find:…
