Business

Program or Be Programmed author, CNN columnist and Frontline documentary director Douglas Rushkoff announced on his blog today that he’s taken a job with Codecademy, a company that offer free online programming courses entirely through a web-based interface. Rushkoff writes that he is joining the company as an evangelist much in the same capacity as Vint Cerf’s role at Google as a “net evangelist.” Rushkoff won’t just be evangelizing Codecademy, but the concept of “code literacy” in general. Rushkoff was an early chronicler of cyberculture. His first book, Cyberia , is a collection of journalism published in the early 90s. He went on to write other books, such as Media Virus , and direct the Frontline documentaries including Mercants of Cool and digital_nation . Rushkoff helped kickstart the code literacy movement in 2010 with the publication of Program or be Programmed . Since then, companies like Codecademy, Code Academy, Programr have emerged to spread a greater understanding of...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Over the past year and a half, social TV analytics company Bluefin Labs has gone from being a stealth startup to becoming an invaluable provider of research for TV networks, brands, and agencies who want to delve into the social conversations that are happening around TV shows. Now, as it prepares to take its next steps forward, the company has hired veteran agency executive JP Maheu as its new CEO. Bluefin Labs provides detailed analytics around social messages that TV viewers send while watching television. It scours Twitter and other social networks in realtime to determine audience sentiment and affinity data around various TV shows. It can tell networks which shows viewers are most engaged with, what shows share affinity graphs, and the like. It can also pro...