Author: Willoughby Avenue

Innovation districts are popping up all over the country. But will they work?

Picture a gleaming building wrapped around an expansive tree-filled courtyard. All the walls are glass so you can see what’s happening in the ground-level retail and open-plan offices on the upper floors. In lieu of cramped hallways there are wide-open walkways and a snaking ramp that ascends to a rooftop lawn. Apartments are close by and there’s a constant hum of activity and interaction throughout. This is the image of a forthcoming innovation district in Miami, Florida.

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We’ve seen a thousand fitness bands. But now, a sleek wearable anklet can keep teens awaiting trial out of the prison system.

Right now, many teens who can’t make bail in NYC are sent to Rikers Island to await their trial. It’s essentially pre-prison incarceration, complete with armed guards, at a place that’s rampant with abuse and corruption.

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Designer Mark Gonyea is back, and has distilled every episode of The Original Series into a single image.

Compared to today’s CGI-laden sci-fi shows, the original Star Trek was about as minimalist as it gets: the sets were cardboard, the aliens all rubber and grease paint, and the uniforms little better than sweatshirts. In homage to the original spirit of Star Trek, graphic designer Mark Gonyea has launched Minimal Trek, a new Kickstarter of 78 minimalist poster designs for every episode of the original series.

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After expanding into new verticals like books and games, Product Hunt is launching daily Q&A’s with makers.

Product Hunt is about to borrow a page from Reddit’s playbook as the influential product recommendation site is set to launch its own take on the “Ask Me Anything” Q&A format long embraced by Reddit and its various high-profile guests.

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American inventors have turned to crowdfunding as they prepare for a robot duel with Japanese company Suidobashi Heavy Industry.

MegaBots, Inc., a team of American engineers who last month challenged Japan’s Suidobashi Heavy Industry to a robot duel, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to build its battle bot.

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Fig will have advisers to help indie games come to market. And you can get not only backing rewards, but investment royalties.

The new crowdfunding site Fig, which launched today, is focused on helping indie game developers bring projects to fruition—but it’s offering a lot more to potential investors than just free games and T-shirts. It wants to give you the chance to invest in games directly for royalties.

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Folded pizza slices, Citi Bike woes, subway sweating—all present and accounted for, and free for you to use for non-commercial purposes.

Stock photos are the Internet’s blank canvas. Those picture-perfect moments of the job and life nobody really has (portrait of African woman holding daisies! family having a meal in the countryside!) have been overhauled to embrace a more diverse depiction of women, co-opted by Vince Vaughn to plug a movie, and transformed into posters for Oscar-nominated films.

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The companies will collaborate on TV content, movies, and Olympics coverage.

NBCUniversal has made a $200 million equity investment in BuzzFeed, the companies announced on Tuesday. “We look forward to collaborating on television content, movies, the Olympics, and joint partnerships with ad agencies and brands,” said BuzzFeed executive chairman Kenneth Lerer in a statement.

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*Almost bearable.

Presidential hopeful and Twitter hothead Donald Trump has a way of doling out his delusions of grandeur, vitriolic political sludge, and misogynistic overtones in 140 characters or less that makes for some of the most unpalatable quips the Internet has ever endured.

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Bitcoin’s developers are at odds over its future. But a clear path forward has already been charted.

On Saturday, Mike Hearn, a key developer of Bitcoin software, posted a blunt essay on Medium explaining why the cryptographic currency’s underlying open-source core software is now proceeding along two separate development paths, or forks. As with everything related to Bitcoin, the move is part software, part ideology, part political wrangling, and part finance. In this case, a low-level plumbing issue was threatening to burble up and swamp the network’s ability to function unless a change was made. Disagreements over the timing and type of change had stalled resolution.

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