Author: Serkadis

National Geographic uploaded a video of monkeys crashing the campsite of a liquor bootlegger to its YouTube channel. That’s pretty much it. Enjoy.

Nature.

Wikipedia announced that it is now letting mobile users add images to articles. If you’re browsing Wikipedia from your mobile browser, and come across an article without an image, you’ll now be able to add one.

“In one easy step, you can upload an image from your phone’s camera or image library and add it directly to an article that has no images,” says Wikipedia associate product manager Maryana Pinchuk. “You can also donate images for use on articles that already have images but may need more.”

“Images enhance the visual appeal of Wikipedia and its sister projects and help bring our content to life, but they’re also a powerful educational tool,” adds Pinchuk. “There’s no better way to describe a notable building or landmark than with a current photo. Not only will you be illustrating knowledge, you’ll also be sharing your photographs with billions of people around the globe.”

Back in October, Wikipedia gave its mobile site a new layout. Clearly, improving the mobile experience has been a focal point for the organization in recent months.

In other Wikipedia news, long-time Executive Director Sue Gardner announced she’s stepping down from her position this morning, though she doesn’t think she’ll be leaving for another six months.

When I read that three men in a dinghy had been arrested for planning to cut a submarine optical cable, I shook my head and went back to sleep. I mean, this sounded like the plot of a really bad television show, at best. I have covered optical networks (and the industry around it) for about a decade and a half, and I have never come across anything remotely similar to this claim.

According to the claim, these guys were planning to take down the SEA-ME-WE-4 cable, which had accidentally been cut by a ship anchor about a week ago and caused wide-scale Internet slowdown in parts of the Middle East and South Asia, along with slowing down the traffic on SEACOM, the African cable that rings the continent. The SEA-ME-WE-4 cable, which is owned by a consortium of international carriers including Telecom Egypt, connects Marseille, France, to Tuas, Singapore, via the Middle East.

In its news release, Telegeography, a market-research company, notes:

If the Egyptian military’s claims are accurate, the cause of the most recent damage to SEA-ME-WE-4 would represent a highly unusual event. Deliberate damage to undersea cables is extremely rare—anchors, fishing, and geological events (such as earthquakes) are by far the most common causes of cable cuts. While there are more than 100 reported submarine cable faults each year, most damage goes unnoticed by end users, as carriers can usually route traffic around outages on other systems, both submarine and terrestrial.

The arrests are bringing up more questions than answers. For instance:

• Is this a new kind of ransom scheme/spin on the piracy that plagues the waters off the African coasts, especially near Somalia?
• Was this terrorism, and if yes, what does it mean for the world’s communication infrastructure?
• Why didn’t they get a ship and drop an anchor, drag it across the cable and say, oops, we did it again.

There will be more to this story, and we will follow up accordingly.

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Although Calibre has been designed as an ebook library management tool, its abilities stretch beyond neatly organizing digital books so you can easily find any of them. The application can also convert between different ebook formats, send them to your reading device or read them on the computer.

It is free of charge and there is also a portable version if you do not… (read more)

Arista Networks announced the next phase of its software defined networking (SDN) offerings by integrating its EOS (Extensible Operating System) natively with OpenStack.

“Arista continues to lead the way in data center network innovations,” said Paul Rad, vice president, Rackspace. ”This is the first real API integration of a broad-based data center network platform and seeing it connect with OpenStack and solve real customer provisioning issues is exactly what this industry has needed to scale cloud computing.”

With the latest release of EOS Arista offers an innovative suite of SDN capabilities, and makes the network programmable. The new release includes EOS application programmatic interfaces (eAPIs) for integration with leading orchestration and provisioning tools and customer applications.

EOS features a new modular hardware driver architecture in the Quantum OVS plugin, and an open source version of Arista’s driver. Arista also contributed code to the OpenStack Quantum project that enables unified physical and virtual network device configuration. Other new features include a native OpenStack provisioning capability, OpenFlow 1.0 support for external controllers, and enhanced data plane programmability via direct flow-based OpenFlow extensions.

“Extending Arista EOS for connection to cloud orchestration platforms provides programmability for building agile, self-service cloud architectures. This has been core to Arista EOS development from its inception,” stated Tom Black, vice president, SDN Engineering for Arista. “These software innovations demonstrate Arista’s increasing relevance and agility in addressing SDN for public cloud operators and private clouds.”

If you’re into open source, or at least open data, today is a good day. Hadoop vendor MapR has open sourced a portion of its source code on Github and Maven, while Yelp has released a sample of its data as part of a $5,000 challenge to find the most-innovative use for it.

MapR’s decision to open source parts of it code is significant, but not groundbreaking. The company is only releasing its improvements to a handful of Hadoop-related Apache projects that are included in the MapR distribution of Hadoop, but not the proprietary code that’s MapR’s real competitive advantage in the contentious Hadoop market. While it’s still not flying the all-open-source banner like Hortonworks is, the code release puts MapR more on par with competitor Cloudera, which bolsters its open source aspects with some proprietary software for managing Hadoop clusters.

MapR also took another step in the open source direction on Thursday, announcing a partnership with Canonical that integrates MapR’s M3 distribution with the Ubuntu Linux operating system. The two also have plans to ease the installation of MapR’s Hadoop software on OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure.

I wrote recently in relation to MapR’s $30 million VC investment that the company is in a tricky position when it comes to open source. The Hadoop ecosystem was built on open source and still values it immensely, but some customers are definitely willing to pay money for products that deliver the features they want, open source or not.

As for Yelp, well, it’s just following in the footsteps of many companies — Netflix and everyone doing something on Kaggle (including GigaOM) — in trying to find new ways to use its data. The data set it’s releasing is from the Phoenix, Ariz., area and include 11,537 businesses, 8,282 checkin sets, 43,873 users and 229,907 reviews. The deadline for entries is May 20, and they can be submitted in pretty much any form you can imagine.

Hopefully, for Yelp’s sake, it doesn’t step in it the way other companies — including Netflix and AOL — have when they released supposedly anonymous data sets that were later de-anonymized. Releasing data sets gives clear benefits to both the source companies and institutions or individuals accessing the data, but privacy snafus have a away sneaking up and mitigating some of the goodwill.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Jakub Krechowicz.

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As previously reported, someone in New Jersey won the Powebrall jackpot in Saturday night’s drawing. The pot was $338 million. The winner shouldn’t be the only one getting paid, however.

It turns out that winner Pedro Quezada owes $29,000 in back child support. As reported by both NPR and Reuters, New Jersey law enforcement officials have said as much. Hopefully he’ll set aside some of the remaining cash for any future payments he’s accountable for.

According to Reuters, Quezada opted for the lump sum payment for his winnings, which will get him $211 million. That should still take care of it. The report also quotes a statement from the sheriff, saying Quezada is subject to potential arrest until the warrant is satisfied.

The Powerball website has a page that shares winners’ stories. I wonder if the child support part will make it in Quezada’s story. So far, the story is not on the site, and is listed as “pending”.

Quezada’s winning numbers were: 17, 29, 31, 52, 53, Powerball: 31. In addition to the jackpot winner, Saturday’s drawing saw a Match 5 Power Play winner ($2 million) in Iowa, and $1 million Match 5 winners in Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. There were a total of 2,486,305 winners on Saturday, and $30,662,765 in non-jackpot prizes won.

The current Powerball jackpot is at $50 million with the next drawing scheduled for Saturday.

The real-time feature is probably the best thing Google has done for Google Analytics in a long time, at least for publishers like us. Now the feature is getting even better.

Google announced some improvements to its real-time reports, including the ability to analyze Events in real-time, breakdown real-time by Desktop/Tablet/Mobile traffic, create shortcuts to your favorite real-time segments, and compare real-time filtered data against overall real-time data.

“With the real-time events report, you can now not only see the top events as they occur but also filter on particular event categories (and actions),” the Google Analytics team notes in a blog post. “Additionally, you can see whether particular segments of visitors trigger different events and debug your events deployment in real time.”

“If you are trying to see what events a particular segment of visitors generate, that is easy as well,” Google adds. “Any filters you set up in any part of real-time are preserved in the Events report. For example, in the above screengrab we have set up a filter here to see what events are triggered from visitors coming via organic search.”

The breakdown by Desktop/Tablet/Mobile feature is going to be an interesting one to watch, and will give publishers a better sense of their current audience at any given second.

More on the changes here.

Earlier this week, Google also launched some new social reports for Google Analytics.

Google announced the ‘Open Patent Non-Assertion’ Pledge today, saying that it pledges not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked.

“We’ve begun by identifying 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google—open-source versions of which are now widely used,” says Senior Patent Counsel Duane Valz (pictured). “Over time, we intend to expand the set of Google’s patents covered by the pledge to other technologies.”

On the pledge site, Google maintains a list of pledged patents, which include: System and method for analyzing data records, Large-scale data processing in a distributed and parallel processing environment, System and method for efficient large-scale data processing, System and method for analyzing data records, Joining tables in a MapReduce procedure, Processing data in a MapReduce framework, System and method for analyzing data records (another one), System and method for large-scale data processing using an application-independent framework, Joining tables in a MapReduce procedure (another one), and Processing data in a MapReduce environment.

Google says it hopes the pledge will serve as a model for the industry. We’ll see.

As far as Google is concerned, the benefits of the pledge are: transparency, breadth, defensive protection and durability.

“Our pledge builds on past efforts by companies like IBM and Red Hat and the work of the Open Invention Network (of which Google is a member),” says Valz. “It also complements our efforts on cooperative licensing, where we’re working with like-minded companies to develop patent agreements that would cut down on lawsuits.”

Google notes that it will also continue to support patent reforms to improve patent quality and reduce “excessive” litigation.

The Cleveland Browns have not historically had a lot of luck at the quarterback position. It seems as though finding the right leader for their offense is a never-ending struggle. They just signed Jason Campbell, who is said to be in competition for the starting job with Brandon Weeden. Campbell, who has played with the Raiders and Redskins, seems like a longshot for the franchise QB the team is looking for as far as many fans are concerned. The Browns went 5-11 in 2012 under Weeden.

Colt McCoy is another quarterback the Browns drafted not all that long ago, and fans are wondering what’s next for him now that the team has Campbell. Rumor has it that McCoy is on the trading block, but it’s hard to say what the market is like for him He had success as a college player, but not so much in the NFL.

NFL.com reported on Wednesday that McCoy won’t be cut, for now, but a trade is possible. “It sounds like the Browns will exhaust all opportunities to get something in return for McCoy before letting him go,” wrote Gregg Rosenthal.

Here’s how the conversation is looking on Twitter:

The Stampede supercomputer is housed in nearly 200 cabinets in a new data center at the Texas Advanced Computing center in Austin. (Photo: TACC)

In its first days of operation, the new Stampede system at the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) debuted as the world’s seventh-fastest supercomputer. But there’s plenty more power in the pipeline.

For its first outing on the prestigious Top500 list, Stampede harnessed 6,400 nodes with two Intel Xeon E5 processors each, recording a speed of 2.6 petaflops. The pending addition of 6,880 Xeon Phi coprocessors, which currently in user evaluation mode, would add more than seven additional petaflops of performance to Stampede. With a theoretical peak performance of nearly 10 petaflops (10 quadrillion mathematical calculations per second) Stampede would sit comfortably in the top four supercomputers in the world.

Stampede is a massive Dell/Intel cluster, and is a centerpiece of the National Science Foundation’s investment in an integrated advanced cyberinfrastructure. The system also features NVIDIA GPUs for remote visualization, a Lustre file system, Mellanox InfiniBand networking, 270 terabytes of memory, and 14 petabytes of storage. The data center housing Stampede is 11,000 square feet and consumes an average 3 megawatts of power.

Coprocessors like Intel’s Xeon Phi supplement the performance of the primary processor, and have become a common feature in the fastest supercomputers.  Phi is the new brand for products using Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture for highly parallel workloads.

Yesterday Stampede was formally introduced to the public at a dedication ceremony at TACC. The system, which began operating on January 7, has successfully executed more than 450,000 computational jobs to date.

Powering New Scientific Research

The supercomputer has enabled research teams to predict where and when earthquakes may strike, how much sea levels could rise, and how fast brain tumors grow. It allows scientists and engineers to interactively share advanced computational resources, data and expertise to further research across scientific disciplines. Some of the early research examples Stampede has completed includes seismic hazard mapping, ice sheet modeling to study climate change, improving the imaging quality of brain tumors, and carbon dioxide capture and conversion.

“Stampede has been designed to support a large, diverse research community,” said TACC Director Jay Boisseau. “We’re as excited about Stampede’s comprehensive capabilities and its high usability as we are of its tremendous performance. Stampede will lead the way to major advances in all fields of science and engineering. It’s an honor to be at this intersection of advanced computing technologies and world-class science, and we thank NSF, Dell, and Intel for their roles in helping TACC design, deploy, and operate Stampede.”

NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering Farnam Jahanian helped dedicate Stampede, with help from U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith and representatives from Dell, Intel, UT Austin and TACC.

“Stampede is an important part of NSF’s portfolio for advanced computing infrastructure enabling cutting-edge foundational research for computational and data-intensive science and engineering,” said Jahanian. ”Society’s ability to address today’s global challenges depends on advancing cyberinfrastructure.”The base Stampede system has been accepted by NSF, and has successfully executed more than 450,000 computational jobs to date. The supercomputer has enabled research teams to predict where and when earthquakes may strike, how much sea levels could rise, and how fast brain tumors grow. It allows scientists and engineers to interactively share advanced computational resources, data and expertise to further research across scientific disciplines. “

It’s not as compact as an Aeropress, but the Nomad looks like a solid way to get an espresso shot from a small device. The tiny machine, which is currently on Kickstarter, boasts the same principles used in full-sized espresso machines. The Nomad is just a lot smaller, more efficient, and doesn’t require any power making it rather portable — hence the name.

The company is looking for $100,000 on Kickstarter. Pledge $165 to pre-order a Nomad. It’s available in black and green. I’m in for one.

As the videos show here, the shots seem smooth and proper. By using pressure from dual micro chambers, the Nomad can apparently achieve the same results as a full-size lever espresso machine.

To me the Nomad doesn’t seem all the portable but rather movable. I doubt I would throw this in a backpack like I do with my Aeropress, but it seems perfect for a roadtrip. If the small Nomad can make a fine shot of espresso, which it seemingly can, it could quickly become a must-have for small kitchens and the like.

[Darrell “Wordslinger” Etherington contributed to this post]

(ORCL) announced a complete refresh of its midrange and high-end SPARC server lines with new SPARC T5 and M5 servers running Solaris. Building on the SPARC T4 platform, the new servers complete Oracle’s SPARC family, spanning entry-level, mid-range and high-end.

The SPARC M5-32 server is designed for large, complex workloads and features massive I/O and memory capacity. It is 10 times faster than previous generations and offers superior hardware domaining and RAS capabilities. The new servers expand Oracle’s SPARC portfolio and enable near linear scalability from 1 to 32 sockets, with one common core, one operating system, and one common set of systems management and virtualization tools, making them ideal platforms for building clouds.

The new T5 servers have set 17 world records in TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council) and SPEC tests, according to Oracle. A SPARC T5-8 server equipped with eight 3.6 GHz SPARC T5 processors achieved a world record result of 8,552,523 tpmC for a single system on the TPC-C benchmark. Oracle demonstrated this world record database performance running Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition with Oracle Partitioning. (Note: IBM is challenging Oracle’s benchmarking claims).

“Oracle has refreshed its SPARC family with the world’s fastest processor and launched the world’s fastest single server for Database, Java and multi-tier applications,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle. “The new SPARC T5 and M5 systems leapfrog the competition with up to 10x the performance of the previous generation, offering an unbeatable value for midrange and high-end enterprise computing.”

Oracle also announced two new Oracle Optimized Solutions that exploit the performance, reliability and value of SPARC T5 servers, Oracle storage, Oracle Database and Oracle Middleware. These include Oracle Optimized Solution for Oracle Database, and Oracle Optimized Solution for WebLogic Server.

“SAS Business Analytics enables faster, more accurate data-driven decisions. Implementing SAS Business Analytics on SPARC servers with Oracle Solaris solves critical business issues in transformational ways. SPARC and Oracle Solaris have long been a proven platform for SAS applications,” said Craig Rubendall, Senior Director of Research and Development at SAS. “We’ve seen in-house that the technically advanced features and design of the SPARC M5 servers along with processor and throughput enhancements provide a very well-suited platform for enterprise class SAS application deployments.”

AT&T customers pining for the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 can begin the pre-order process on April 16. The carrier announced the news on Thursday, saying the price would be $249.99 with two-year contract. No official availability date was provided, but the statement made by AT&T implies it could be the first in the U.S. to have the Galaxy S 4:

“Continuing our legacy as the first carrier to launch Samsung’s Galaxy series, we are excited to announce AT&T customers will be able to begin pre-ordering the Galaxy S4 beginning April 16 for $249.99 with a two-year commitment. We are proud to offer this iconic device and continue to offer our customers the best smartphone line-up, with a variety of devices for every lifestyle and budget. For more information and to pre-order, please visit http://www.att.com/galaxys4.”

Interestingly, T-Mobile loosely shared details for the Galaxy S 4 on its network earlier this week. T-Mobile CEO John Legere noted that the Galaxy S 4 would arrive around May 1 for the up-front price of $99 and 24 monthly, interest-free payments. Customers can also pay full price for the phone and then just pay $50 to $70 for monthly service through one of the Simple Choice plans.

It’s likely that T-Mobile’s Galaxy S 4 will cost less than what AT&T is charging: Assuming the phone payments are $20 per month — the same as the iPhone 5 — the Galaxy S 4 would cost $579 on T-Mobile. Will consumers see that price difference and take advantage of it? That’s the big question that remains unanswered as T-Mobile transitions completely away from phone contracts with subsidized phone prices.

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Ustream announced today that it will provide exclusive live video streaming for Bonnaroo and the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival. This is the result of a partnership with Superfly Presents, Bulldog DM and Springboard Productions.

While we’ve certainly seen Bonnaroo streamed live in the past, like on Vevo and YouTube, Ustream says this deal marks the first time viewers everywhere will have access to the lineup of performances for both festivals through its interactive, socially integrated platform.

“This year, fans will be granted never-seen-before, live access to two of the most important festivals in the U.S. — even in the palms of their hands via mobile devices,” said Chris Blocker, SVP of sales and business development for Ustream. “The mix of premium and fly-on-the-wall content powerfully illustrates how bands can become fans and fans can join bands in a seamless social entertainment experience such as this.”

“The world famous Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival and Outside Lands in San Francisco’s beautiful Golden Gate Park are two of the premier destination music festivals in the U.S. and attract diverse and heavily engaged audiences each year,” said Alex Machurov, director of new business & partnerships at Superfly Presents. “We are excited to partner with Ustream and believe their technology will significantly enhance the user experience in Manchester and San Francisco. Now millions more music fans around the world can enjoy its interactive, personalized platform.”

Bonnaroo takes place in Manchester, Tenn. On June 13-16. Outside Lands takes place in San Francisco August 9-11.

Check out the Bonnaroo line-up here. Outside Lands doesn’t have its lineup posted as of the time of this writing.

Publishers in Portugal want Google to pay for the right to include links and snippets of articles in Google News. The story is always the same from country to country. In recent months, we’ve seen Google playing ball with publishers, and it seems other countries are seeking solutions similar to those Google has proposed elsewhere.

Reuters is reporting:

Alberico Fernandes, head of the Portuguese Confederation of Social Communication Media, told Reuters that the global Internet services group’s Iberian and Portuguese units rejected the demand at a first meeting last week but agreed to continue negotiations.

He said Google “showed readiness to collaborate with media groups to help us modernize and make our content more profitable”, something it had agreed to do in France earlier.

Earlier this year, Google announced an initiative to “help stimulate innovation and increase revenues” for French publishers. Google agreed to create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google said it would also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.

The announcement followed a similar one Google made in December, when it reached an agreement with publishers in Belgium after six years of litigation, which saw publishers sue Google claiming that it violated their copyrights by displaying snippets in Google News and linking to cached copies of their pages in Google search.

As part of the agreement in Belgium, Google said it would advertise its services on publishers’ media, and publishers would optimize their use of AdWords. Google would also work with Belgian French-language publishers to “help increase publishers’ revenue,” collaborating on ways to make money with Paywalls and subscriptions, and with AdSense and the Ad Exchange. Google would also work with Belgian publishers to implement Google+ social tools and launch YouTube channels.

At the time, Google said it would like to come to similar terms with publishers around the world. Perhaps Portugal is next.

Bing has added a new way for users to sort their search results by time period. You can sort by “Past 24 hours” to see the top links that have surfaced during the last day, for example. You can also search by “Past week” and “Past Month”.

“At Bing, our goal is to give you the most comprehensive and trustworthy set of search results so you can get more done,” says Bing Principal Development Manager, Dr. Walter Sun. “Behind the scenes, we spend a lot of time and computational horsepower to ensure that you are getting fresh and topical search results as they happen.”

“Now whenever you search, you will see a filter at the top of the results page which lets you narrow down your search based on time period,” he says.

Google has a similar feature, and gives you more options: Any time, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month, past year, and custom range.

The feature, however, is hidden under “more search tools,” and probably isn’t used incredibly often. I do like Bing’s approach to putting it right in the forefront. Search engines, especially Google often place a little too much emphasis on freshness in search results for my taste, so it’s nice to be able to give a time period.

Google has added a new feature to the Google Play Movies & TV app that lets you pause what you’re watching and figure out information about it without having to go search to find out what you’re looking for.

Google Play product manager Ben Serridge writes on the Android blog:

“What’s his name again? Wasn’t he the guy in that movie with the battle of the bands?” Now, while you’re watching a movie on Google Play, you can find out that it’s Jack Black (of course!), who was born in Hermosa Beach and is 43 years old. And with one click you can search the web and learn the fun fact that his parents are both rocket scientists.

We’ve added info cards to the Google Play Movies & TV app so you can easily learn more about the actors, related films and even what song is playing in many of your favorite movies. When you’re watching a film on your tablet, simply press pause and cards will pop up with information about actors on screen. You can tap on an actor’s face to learn more about him, like his age, place of birth, his character in the movie, and his recent work, or scroll through the info cards to learn more about the movie or soundtrack. When you resume the movie, the cards will disappear.

According to The Verge, the info Google displays in these info cards comes from the Knowledge Graph.

A feature like this could be invaluable for someone like me who regularly accesses the IMDb app during pretty much everything he or she watches. Wired suggests, however, that nobody will use this feature, and that nobody uses Google Play to watch movies and TV. Of course, Amazon also launched similar functionality this week on Kindle Fire devices and Wii U, which actually does tap into IMDb. Google’s only works for “100s” of movies, though they’re working to expand it to more.

Google’s new feature is only available on tablets running Android 4.0 and higher at this point.

Austin-based Moniker Guitars is running a Kickstarter campaign to create a line of semi-hollow-body guitars for discerning git-fiddlists. The company will offer their first guitars for a $700 pledge, not bad for a hand-made guitar from rockabilly city.

The company is looking for $50,000 to start and they’ve just passed the $6,000 mark.

The company already customizes solid-body guitars and hopes that the fund will help them build a line of semi-hollow-body models.

“Through our online guitar configurator you can choose your guitar’s shape, paint colors and parts, as well as add custom text and graphics; all at the price of an off-the-shelf guitar,” write founders Kevin Tully and Dave Barry. Moniker began in Austin in 2012.

“The money we hope to raise will go towards the tools and equipment needed to efficiently manufacture these guitars at our shop in Austin,TX. An efficient manufacturing process means we’ll be able to create high quality, yet affordably priced, semi-hollow guitars. We also need help funding the materials needed to produce these guitars on a larger scale. These materials include wood, primer, sandpaper paint, clearcoat, guitar parts, etc.”

The luthiers do most of their work in Austin and for a pledge of $350 they’ll strip and repaint your current guitar with a new color. You can also get a White Stripes-esque red and white model for $900. $2,400 gets you a lesson in guitar-smithing with the guys at Moniker.

As it gets easier to make things overseas it’s refreshing to see these guys attempting to build a local company. Customization is a hard job and it makes sense to keep the gear, supplies, and workers close to the consumer.