3 Ways Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Won NBA All-Star Weekend

Now that the dust has settled and regular games are starting back up again, it's important to take note of one of NBA All-Star Weekend's biggest winners.

We're not talking about Chris Paul. We're definitely not talking about 2 Chainz. We're talking, in fact, about Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

The NBA, more than any other sports league, has long been particularly simpatico with Twitter. Its players are among the most entertaining athletes online, many fans and media practically live on Twitter and the league is especially forward-thinking in coming up with new ways to use the platform. Last March, for example, the NBA became the first sports league to sell official Twitter-handle player t-shirts. In May, it became the world's first sports league to break 5 million followers.

In that context, Costolo's epic All-Star Weekend isn't as surprising as it may seem at first glance. But still, the guy balled out. Here are the three main ways:

1. Costolo was the featured speaker at the NBA's annual All-Star Technology Summit on Friday morning, where he talked about how Twitter is changing media, social networking and content distribution.

Other participants in the summit included U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, ESPN president John Skipper and Dallas Mavericks owner and entrepreneur Mark Cuban. Not bad company.

2. Toronto Raptors guard Terrence Ross won the dunk contest by completing a stunning through-the-legs dunk while jumping over a small child. That child? Costolo's son, Michael, whose dad landed him a few fun minutes on national TV.

3. On Saturday night, none other than LeBron James posted this photo to Twitter:

Kids Code the Darndest Things: 10 Amazing Youth Innovators

Kids deserve more credit than they get. They're observant, incredibly intuitive and can sometimes figure out what the world needs faster than adults can.

With rapid advancements in technology, and coding education geared toward youth, it comes as no surprise that there are kids pushing innovation out there, and creating apps and programs at astonishingly young ages.

Here are 10 youth innovators, from ages seven to 15, particularly worth noting and working on projects ranging from games to anti-bullying apps.

1. Nick D'Aloisio

At only 15, Nick D'Aloisio created Trimit, a nifty iOS app that summarizes web content into short excerpts for various platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. It also comes in handy if you want to read abstracts of longform articles.

According to Fast Company, the app's algorithm took D'Aloisio only a month of research to develop — the kind of research often conducted in multimillion-dollar programs and PhD theses.

2. Thomas Suarez

"A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them," said Thomas Suarez at his TEDTalk in 2011, when he was only 12 years old. Suarez did just that by establishing his own company, CarrotCorp and creating several iOS apps. One app, called Earth Fortune, simply displayed different colors of the planet based on your fortune. His most successful, however, has been Bustin Jieber, a Justin Bieber-themed Whac-a-Mole game.

Suarez won a Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award in 2012.

3. Aaron Sonson, Satwant Singh and Gregory Paczkowski

Through the Apps for Good course — a UK-based program for kids to learn how to make mobile, web and Facebook apps — teenagers Aaron Sonson, Satwant Singh and Gregory Paczkowski created Stop & Search. The app allows young people to rate their experiences with police after being stopped and search, to find necessary information about their rights and to allow people to map the search (revealing patterns).

Each of the three teens from inner London had experienced being stopped and searched several times, and they say on their website that they created Stop & Search with "hopes to bring transparency and fairness to the stop and search procedure."

4. Steven Gonzalez Jr.

When 12-year-old Steven Gonzalez Jr. was diagnosed Acute Myelogenous Leukemia, a rare form of cancer, doctors said that he had a 2% chance to live. But he beat the odds and survived, though his weak immune system forced him into isolation for 100 days. He credits video games for helping him through the rough experience.

Gonzalez wanted to help other cancer patients his age, and so he created a video game, Play Against Cancer, in which players destroy cancer cells illustrated as green ghosts. He also developed The Survivor Games, a social network and online community for teen cancer patients.

5. Team 2-the-Res-Q

The Stop & Search app isn't the only innovative idea that came out of the Apps for Good program. Team 2-the-Res-Q, made up of four 14-year-old girls, developed CyberMentors — an anti-bullying Android app for young people that focuses on building self-esteem and increasing safety. The app includes a messaging feature through which users can talk to a CyberMentor directly about experiences with bullying.

The 2-the-Res-Q team worked with Fuerte International, a mobile production agency based in London, to further develop the app. It's available on Google Play, and also on a web-based social platform.
6. Daniel Chao

Last year, when Daniel Chao was in fifth grade and 10 years old, he invented an app that keeps track of reading homework. Since he and his classmates had to turn in reading calendars every month in school, his app, iRead Monthly, lets a student click a particular date and enter the number of minutes he or she reads that day. At the end of the month, students can email it to their teachers.

Chao told CBS Denver that he's proud of the app and glad that Apple accepted his app despite his young age.

7. Zora Ball

At only seven years old, Zora Ball is the youngest person to develop a mobile game app. She participated in the University of Pennsylvania's FATE Bootstrap Expo in December 2012 (usually for ages 12 to 16), working with the Bootstrap programming language. According to the Philadelphia Tribune, the first-grade programmer was able to reconfigure her app immediately after being asked, proving that she did all of the work herself.

8. Lim Ding Wen

In 2009, when Singaporean programmer Lim Ding Wen was nine years old, he wrote a virtual painting app for his younger sisters to enjoy. The app, called Doodle Kids, was approved by Apple and uses several simple gestures to mimic how kids learn to draw.

Lim is fluent in six programming languages and has completed dozens of projects. As of August 2012, he's working on two new projects, including his first 3D game.
9. Zach Marks

When Zach Marks was 11 years old, he went behind his parents' backs to sign up for Facebook, which has a minimum age restriction of 13 years old. After his parents got upset, he decided to create a safe, kid-friendly social network on his own, called Grom Social.

As of December 2012, according to USA Today, Marks' site saw about 2,000 unique visitors a day and approximately 6,000 page views. That's pretty impressive, considering that so far, Grom Social has attracted users based mostly on word of mouth and only a small amount of marketing.

Grom Social has different verticals — including "Gaming," "Entertainment," and "Health & Fitness" — and has strong stances against bullying, drugs and smoking. Marks, now 12 years old, has gotten his whole family involved in Grom Social's development, and it seems to have a lot of promise.

10. Santiago Gonzalez

Fourteen-year-old Santiago Gonzalez has created 15 interesting iOS apps, ranging from games to educational tools. Super Slide Puzzle, for example, lets you rearrange shuffled pieces of a photograph of your choice, and you can play with others while utilizing its built-in voice chat. Space - Solar System allows users to tap on beautiful images of any planet and learn more about them.

And if creating awesome apps weren't enough, Gonzalez will be 16 years old when he graduates college, and 17 when he gets his master's degree in computer science. Oh, and he dreams in code.

Hands-On With The Week's Top Apps

Several excellent new apps launched this week.

Disney launched a new Toy Story game featuring Buzz Lightyear, and YouTube updated its iOS app, enabling you to play videos on your television using your iPhone.

A new to-do list app named Carrot launched for iOS, and the Twitter app for Windows Phone saw a significant update, adding support for Live Tiles among other new features.

Curious what all these new apps look like? Check out the video above for a hands-on look at some of our favorite apps from the past week.

Have you tried any of this week's apps? Tell us about your favorites in the comments.

Socialmatic Camera Creates Real-Life Instagram Pics

Instagram's great. But have you ever wondered what it would be like to experience it outside the digital world? Snap a photo, select a filter and then — not tweet it, but — print it out to physically share? A new company called Socialmatic is hoping to make it a reality.

We've seen this cool design before, but now Socialmatic announced a branding deal with Polaroid for an Instagram-esque camera that lets you add filters to and instantly print your photos.

The device, which is still in its concept stage, dispenses photos from a built-in Zink printer — similar to a regular Polaroid camera. It additionally includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips, a 4.3-inch touchscreen and a custom operating system that syncs to both Instagram and Facebook apps.

The official press release says product design and other details are still in development. The launch is planned for 2014.

The Inevitable Path of Google Glass in the Workplace

Google's Project Glass — the tech giant's effort to create augmented reality glasses — should be available to regular consumers by the end of this year. The prototype has a long way to go, though — even Google co-founder Sergey Brin admitted last week that it's not "a done deal yet."

In this Sunday Comic, our friends Nitrozac and Snaggy at The Joy of Tech imagine what Google Glass would look like in the workplace. Will you try to wear the glasses in the office, or will you wait for Google Contacts?

How The Internet Has Changed the World

From hactivism to the flipped classroom, the Internet has sparked an online revolution with digital tools.

Classified documents on Wikileaks helped spark the Arab Spring, and protestors organized through Facebook. Daily tweets about the Egyptian revolution increased 100% after the overthrow of the country, showcasing the power of trending.

Not only has the World Wide Web assisted in shaping our political persuasions, but also our personal interests. While there are 139,500 professional photographers in the U.S., Instagram rekindled the snap-happy side of everyone, with 90 million active users each month on the social platform.

As the number of Internet users grow, the world changes, as suggested by this infographic from NowSourcing. There were more than 2 billion web users in 2012, which is a 566.4% increase from the year 2000 (we've come a long way from Y2K).

Check out the infographic for more stats about how the Internet has made an impact.

Toddle 'Functionally Cured' of HIV

For the first time, a child born with HIV has been "functionally cured" of the infection.

The two-year-old toddler, who was treated with antiretroviral drugs early in his life, no longer has "detectable levels" of HIV, even though he has not taken medication to treat the virus for 10 months.

Deborah Persaud, associate professor of infectious diseases at the John Hopkins Children's Center, and Katherine Luzuriaga, professor of pediatrics and molecular medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, presented this groundbreaking case study at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta on Sunday.

In July 2010, the child was born prematurely in Mississippi to an HIV-infected mother who received neither antiretroviral drugs nor prenatal care, according to the study. At 30 hours of age, the infant started on liquid antiretroviral treatment, which continued until 18 months of age. While blood tests still showed evidence of HIV after three weeks, the baby's viral load had fallen to less than 50 copies of HIV per millimeter of blood following a month. This number declined even further last fall, after blood samples revealed "undetectable" HIV levels at less than 20 copies per millimeter.

"This case suggests that providing antiretroviral therapy within the very first few days of life to infants infected with HIV through their mothers via pregnancy or delivery may prevent HIV from establishing a reservoir, or hiding place, in their bodies and, therefore, achieve a cure for those children,"

With this research, doctors are better able to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV, according to Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

"It appears we may have not only a positive outcome for the particular child, but also a promising lead for additional research toward curing other children," he said.

More research is needed to determine whether the child's experience can be replicated in clinical trials that involve other HIV-exposed children, the study's experts said.