Meteor Video Footage Goes Large On YouTube, Thanks To Bad Russian Drivers, Corruption And The Use Of Dash Cams To Fight Them

Today’s incident involving a falling meteor in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia has resulted in an estimated 500 injuries. And while people are scrambling to figure out exactly what has happened in this remote area of the country, 900 miles from Moscow and near the Ural mountains, some of the more remarkable footage so far has been video shot by ordinary people, specifically with dashboard cameras.

The dash cam has become a familiar presence in Russia. It’s grown in popularity as a way for drivers to help protect themselves in cases where they have car accidents, or have been pulled over by corrupt police and demanded to pay “fines” for alleged illegal driving, by recording what it is that actually happened.

As Marina Galperina writes, 

Dash-cam footage is the only real way to substantiate your claims in the court of law. Forget witnesses. Hit and runs are very common and insurance companies notoriously specialize in denying claims. Two-way insurance coverage is very expensive and almost completely unavailable for vehicles over ten years old–the drivers can only get basic liability. Get into a minor or major accident and expect the other party to lie to the police or better yet, flee after rear-ending you. Since your insurance won’t pay unless the offender is found and sued, you’ll see dash-cam videos of post hit and run pursuits for plate numbers.

It’s unclear how many of these are in use in Russia today: one estimate puts it around 1 million. Before today, people had already clocked the profusion of videos being posted to YouTube of road rage, gunfire, and terrible / random driving mishaps — all taken on dash cams. Now, they have become the accessories of citizen journalists.

Google Rated The Best Place To Intern In 2013, Followed By Qualcomm, Microsoft, Intel And Cisco

For student jobseekers, in these challenging economic conditions, internships still rank as one of the best ways to prevent yourself from joining the growing ranks of the overeducated and underemployed. In fact, A recent study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found that interning in college not only increases your chance of landing a job, but actually keeping it, too.

The report reveals that 63 percent of paid interns received “at least one job offer upon graduation” in 2012, compared to the 36 percent of grads who had no internship experience. In turn, 75 percent of employees that were hired out of internships were retained after a year, compared to 60 percent for those who didn’t. So, with students now beginning to prepare and apply for summer internship opportunities, online jobs and career community, Glassdoor, has taken a look at the companies that are rated highest among those whose opinion counts the most: Current and former interns.

The report, which the company says is based entirely on intern feedback, highlights the 20 companies that know how to treat their interns right (and are currently hiring), along with those who rank the highest in interview difficulty, and, of course more importantly, in compensation.

For the second year in a row, the highest rated internship program in the country will be found in Mountain View at the Googleplex. This seems fitting given that Google happens to be the setting for The Internship — the appropriately-named buddy movie starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson (and Google) that’s due out this summer. Vaughn and Wilson play middle-aged salesman who, after being laid off, find themselves as Google interns. Lots of Google Glass and self-driving car jokes ensue.

The fact that Google now ranks as the best place to intern for the second year in a row might help to explain its (somewhat surprising) “enthusiastic” support of the buddy comedy, along with not only its willingness to participate in the making of the film, but to even do its part in promotion. If you’ve got it, flaunt it, I guess?

But let’s not let Google hog all the limelight. Glassdoor’s rankings of the top 20 internship programs include companies from several industries, seven of which were technology companies. Google took first, improving its ranking from 4.3 (out of a possible 5 points) to 4.6. Qualcomm ranked second among tech companies with a 4.2 rating, followed by Microsoft (4.2), Intel (4.1), Cisco (4.0), IBM (3.9) and Amazon at 3.9.

And which company offers the highest intern pay? For the second year running, Microsoft’s research internship program outranked Google, paying the highest average monthly base pay out all the companies in the report at $7,050/month — up from $6,746 last year. Google’s Software Engineer Internship ranked second at $6,462/month, followed by Microsoft again with its “Software Engineer In Test Internship” at $5,951/month.

Granted this seems to be somewhat at odds with Forbes’ recent report on the top three highest paying tech internships, which saw VMWare grab the top ranking at $6,536/month, followed by Facebook in second at $6,056/month and Microsoft in third at $5,936/month. LinkedIn, Adobe, Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Yahoo and Apple round out the rest of the top ten. The report is also based on Glassdoor’s findings, so we’ll assume that this is shows the average for all of the company’s internships, rather than a particular program.

You can also check out last year’s overall rankings here.

Google and Amazon were ranked as the toughest interviews, followed my Microsoft and Intel. As to some of the questions interns reported being asked during those interviews?

• “Who is your hero and why?” — Google Intern Candidate


• “How many new cars, on average, are bought in the U.S. each year?” — Microsoft Summer Intern Candidate (Seattle, WA)


• “Design a complex car from the ground up.” — Amazon Software Development Engineer Intern Candidate (Seattle, WA)

And, for those looking for a peek inside the pros and cons of the most coveted tech internships, below you’ll find a few responses from former interns.

Google

Pro: “Google treats interns even better than full time employees. All of the employees all the way up to VP personally spend time with you and take your opinion.” — Google Platforms Project Manager Intern (Mountain View, CA)

Con: “Since Google has grown so much, it’s harder to get things done/it takes a really long to push code or get things out there.” — Google Software Engineering Intern (New York, NY)

Qualcomm

Pro: “Each intern is assigned one mentor and one manager so you get a lot of attention. There are team outings, quizzes and the workplace itself is full of energy. Innovative thinking is encouraged and the work load is well balanced.” — Qualcomm Interim Engineering Intern (Bangalore, India)

Con: “Space was kind of cramped during my internship. Did not get an office or cubicle, instead got a desk that was kind of just in the middle of the hallway (think receptionist’s desk).” — Qualcomm Software Engineer Intern (San Diego, CA)

Microsoft

Pro: “Microsoft has a great environment where you are encouraged to learn as much as you can about your field. Knowledgeable and passionate co-workers who always bail you out. You get to learn a lot from your peers.” — Microsoft Intern (Hyderabad, India)

Con: “Sometimes you can feel like a grain of sand on the beach. As a developer, you don’t have a say in the big picture of the company. If that’s important to you, don’t work here; find a start-up.” — Microsoft Software Development Engineer Intern (Redmond, WA)

Intel

Pro: “Intel has a very organized and constructive internship program. They set you up for success and provide many opportunities for future employment. Excellent pay as well.” — Intel BIOS Technical Intern

Con: “Being stuck in a cube all day is a bit of a drag, though to some extent I think it comes with the job of a programmer. In spite of all of the work they were doing to brighten/open things up while I was there, I don’t really feel like the office spaces are any brighter or more cheerful.” — Intel Undergraduate Technical Intern (Hillsboro, OR)

Cisco

Pro: “As an intern, I was given the same freedom and regular employees, I could work from home, arrive and leave work when it was convient for me, and I could wear normal street clothes to work.” — Cisco Software Engineering Intern in Research (Triangle Park, NC)

Con: “Because the teams and company are so large it is hard to get to know who you work with. However, this would be less of an issue if I worked full-time and not just a summer internship.” — Cisco Software Engineer Intern (San Jose, CA)

IBM

Pro: “Pay was really high compared to what I’m supposed to get for being so junior. Nice office, really cool building, and really great people. A flexible schedule, yoga lessons, and gym. The company is really large and you feel like you belong.” — IBM Software Engineer Intern (Ottawa, Ontario)

Con: “Slow work effort, it takes too much time to get anything done.” — IBM Intern (Markham, Ontario)

Amazon

Pro: “Very supportive team mates who helped constantly raise the bar by asking the right questions and putting the foot down at the right time.” — Amazon Software Development Engineer Intern (Seattle, WA)

Con: “Less perks such as free food. Could be nice for some employees who are working late.” Amazon Software Engineer Development Intern (Seattle, WA)

Oh, and just for good measure, here’s the trailer for The Internship. Will it be good or a horrible train wreck? You decide.

Excerpt image c/o CollegeCandy

Zuckerberg Now Owns 29.3 Percent Of Facebook, Representing $18 Billion

Facebook announced in an SEC filing that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg now owns 29.3 percent of Facebook shares (NASDAQ:FB), up from a 28.2 percent stake on the day of the IPO. With 632.7 million shares currently trading at $28.50, it represents a bit more than $18 billion.

Remaining the largest shareholder is one of Zuckerberg’s most impressive achievements, not only for his personal wealth, but for his voting power as well.

Back in May when Facebook started trading, its founder used to own 443 million shares and 60 million unexercised options. As the company’s shares started trading at $38 a share, it represented $16.9 billion, making him one of the youngest multi-billionaires. Again, this is only for his stock-based wealth.

Even though the stock had a roller coaster year and the company recently released more shares, Zuckerberg increased his wealth in shares thanks to stock-based compensation. Shares were trading above $30 a share for most of the month of January. Now at $28.50, it seems like Facebook shares have finally found a stable price around the $30 mark.

Facebook’s IPO price was $38 a share when the company started trading in May. But in August, the stock fell to its lowest price at the time — $19.69 — as the initial lockup expiration of 271 million shares kicked in. Other lockup expirations brought a few days of downturn.

Yet, investors looking for short-term profit based on potential share price drops and short selling have slowly moved away from Facebook shares since October, leaving committed investors on board. These days, price changes reflect more closely product updates and earnings.

Back in September, Zuckerberg declared that he wouldn’t sell his shares for the next 12 months in order to dampen lockup expirations and drive confidence. That’s why his virtual wealth will continue to increase and decrease alongside Facebook shares in the coming months.

Meteor Crash Reportedly Injured Over 100 People In Russia

Fragments of a meteor reportedly crashed landed in Russia, causing an explosion that injured over 100 people. Amateur video of the meteor streaking across the sky (below) have gone viral and the Interior minister has confirmed that 102 people had called for medical assistance, “mostly for treatment of injuries from glass broken by the explosions,” according to the AP.

The fragments hit the town of town of Satka, in the Chelyabinsk region, which is about 830 miles east of Moscow.

Well, this is officially the craziest thing I’ve heard all month. We’ll update readers as more information comes in.

Heroku Admits To Performance Degradation Over The Past 3 Years After Criticism From Rap Genius

Heroku, the popular cloud application platform, may not be quite as fast today as it was three years ago. Yesterday, Rap Genius‘ James Somers , posted a widely read blog post, arguing that Heroku had quietly changed the way it distributes tasks from Ruby on Rails apps across the Amazon EC2 machines it makes available to its users at some point in the last few years without alerting developers of this change. Instead of intelligently routing requests to the next available server, as Heroku did in its early days, Somers argued that it now distributes requests randomly, resulting in increased queuing times. Today, Heroku’s general manager Oren Teich admitted that this is indeed the case.

“We failed to explain how our product works,” Teich wrote this evening. “We failed to help our customers scale. We failed our community at large. I want to personally apologize, and commit to resolving this issue.” According to him, Heroku users have indeed “experienced a degradation in performance over the past 3 years as we have scaled.” Heroku’s goal, he wrote, is to be the best platform for all developers. “In this case, we did not succeed. But we will make it right.”

Tomorrow, Teich promises, the company will post an in-depth technical review and the company will also soon provide developers with a clearer picture of what their apps’ queue of web requests really looks like. He also promises that Heroku will update its documentation and give developers tools to understand how to improve the performance of their apps.

The degraded performance is especially visible for sites like Rap Genius, which use a large amount of so-called Heroku “dynos,” which are essentially customized on-demand Amazon EC2 instances (there are web and worker dynos, but the problem here only seems to affect the web dynos). In its current documentation, Heroku implies that it uses “intelligent scaling” to route web requests to the next available machine. As Somers discovered, however, the distribution is actually random, which means that many requests can end up in a queue even though there are dynos available that are currently idle.

Heroku charges $35 per month for each of these and the quickly growing Rap Genius currently pays about $20,000 per month to run most of its critical its infrastructure on the platform. For a very in-depth look at how Rap Genius uses Heroku and how Somers figured out that Heroku, take some time out of your busy schedule and read his post here.

Squarespace Adds Commerce System For A High-Class Blogging/Sales Experience

Squarespace knows from fancy. They make dead-simple websites for people who require a high level of design and elegance and, unlike, say, our website, a lot of SquareSpace sites are surprisingly beautiful. Now those same designers who use the site for their private blogs can sell their wares right from their sites.

The service, called Squarespace Commerce, connects to Stripe for payment handling and allows you to embed products into blog posts and wrap content around them. The commerce portion works with every SquareSpace template.

You can sign up for Commerce for $24 a month on a yearly basis. The service also supports mailing-list sign up, CSV order exports, and unlimited SKUs.

The founder, Anthony Casalena, makes a strong case for the product here but think of this as the ecommerce solution for the put-a-bird-on-it set.

I had a little bit of time to sit down with the platform and came away impressed. There is definitely a value in having a simple digital or physical storefront and with the rise of home DIY and makers, it’s a great way to get product wrapped up in some solid content. I’ve always loved Squarespaces spare style and the latest version is definitely a step in the right direction for the service. Commerce, I suppose, is the fancy cream icing on the cake.

Big Plans For CrunchBase

CrunchBase has grown like a tree planted in a quiet corner of the yard and left to its own devices. Today, our free and editable industry database gets 1.5 million unique visitors a month and has had 90,000 users create 105,000 companies and 140,000 individual profiles. At age six, it’s proven to be one of the most successful of the products that TechCrunch has launched over the years

Now it’s time to think about the future. We are committing a significant amount of money to expanding the product and the team behind it. You’ll be hearing a lot more in the coming months, but here’s what we can share now.

The team of long-time staffers and experienced additions – Matt Kaufman, Gené McPherson, Vineet Thanedar, Anthony Nguyen, and Kurt Freytag – now has a blog.

And on that blog, they’ve begun showcasing top developers from among the thousands using the CrunchBase API. Big data analytics startup SiSense has kicked things off today with a post about how it’s pulled in data to provide an investment dashboard and data visualizations. Investors and entrepreneurs using the product can learn important market information like the average time between startup funding rounds year over year.

The CB team is going to be regularly featuring guest posts from any developer who has done something smart and useful with the data, provided that:

• Your application is publicly accessible


• Your application attributes CrunchBase according to the CrunchBase API TOS


• Your application directs users to CrunchBase to update missing or out-dated information

As an added bonus, TechCrunch writers who are interested in analyzing data to break stories are going to be taking a hard look at these tools and potentially incorporating them into how we work. We’ll also be interested in writing about them.

You can apply for the Developer Spotlight Program by sending them an email.

The team itself is growing, too. If you join, you’ll get to work in our historic SOMA office alongside our editorial, product and business teams, right down the street from Caltrain, The Creamery, Giants Stadium, and thousands of tech companies large and small. You will be on the pulse of the Valley, developing a beloved product that plays a key role in keeping our industry up to date. Check out the hiring details here.