CNNMoney Tech Tumblr — Here's your next runaway Kickstarter hardware hit

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Here’s your next runaway Kickstarter hardware hit

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Digital photo frames are passé. Get ready for Instacube photo frames. $99 for early Kickstarter backers, though the estimated delivery date isn’t until March 2013, so you won’t be able to stick one in Grandma’s stocking this holiday season. The project launched this morning and already has more than $13,000 pledged. 

It’s the latest creation of Design To Matter, a Silicon Valley design studio that works on a wide range of industrial design projects. We trust the Instacube frames will hit the market faster than one of their previous much-buzzed-about projects: The video glasses Polaroid cooked up with Lady Gaga. -Stacy

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This Chrome extension replaces all website photos with Ryan Gosling pics

The following is a guest post from Dana Lipnickas, studio manager of CNNMoney’s design team. She is awesome at finding important Gosling news.

Breaking news!

Want all of your internet pix to be gorgeous? There is a new Chrome extension for you!

Hey Girl will replace all of the photos on any website with images of Ryan Gosling. Happy Thursday to you, dear reader.

You won’t want to quit this. Love hard. Live hard. - Dana

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Yahoo admits this blog is 75% air

Well, kind of.

The tech world reeled when Yahoo announced in May that it would buy Tumblr, the weblogs platform favored by those tech-savvy young ‘uns, for a total of $1.1 billion.

Five intriguing tidbits about the deal came out in Yahoo’s quarterly financial documents, which landed last night.

Most eye-popping: Yahoo bought Tumblr for $990 million (the remainder of the billion-plus total goes to founder David Karp and other Tumblr employees), and an incredible $751 million of that value was attributed to “goodwill.”

Goodwill is an accounting term for the worth of an intangible asset blahblahblah, and in this case it means brand value. So 75% of Tumblr’s value lies in its cool factor. (More details in our main CNNMoney story here.)

It’s no secret that Yahoo could use an injection of cool. Plus, Tumblr captures users in two fields – social and mobile – that Yahoo is looking to grow.

But Tumblr might even be the luckier one in this deal, as the 10-Q docs revealed the site was running out of money. Tumblr had less than $17 million in cash on hand when Yahoo bought it.

Stripping out its goodwill value, Tumblr had only $353 million in other assets, as well as liabilities of almost $114 million.

Founder Karp – who will get $81 million in stock-based comp and cash as long as he stays at Yahoo for four years – said in the past that advertising “turns our stomachs.” But Tumblr began to soften on that point recently.

And anyway, being bought for a billion dollars usually forces one to change one’s mind on such things.

Indeed, even as Mayer assured Tumblr users that the site will maintain its independence, she also promised analysts back in May that Yahoo will “monetize” Tumblr. After all, these cat gifs were expensive! -Julianne

tumblr tech marissa mayer on fire marissa mayer yahoo goodwill and other fun in accounting concepts

Immersion: A do-it-yourself privacy invasion/metadata visualization

MIT’s Media Lab just launched a fascinating tool for exploring email metadata: Immersion. Give it your Gmail account and it will map out the network of your personal connections.

The Boston Globe has a feature explaining the project’s genesis and how it works. It’s both fascinating and creepy to see how your emails can be used to map out your personal network and the various players’ interconnections. I charted out my inbox (below) – then used the app’s “log out & delete” feature to purge Immersion’s record of it. I assume the NSA has its own backup. -Stacy

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Immersion data visualization stalk yourself
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