Journalist/author Michael Hastings was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles today. The 33 year-old was a contributor to Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed and is the author of two eBooks: Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of Obama’s Final Campaign and The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan.

BuzzFeed broke the news. Ben Smith, Editor-in-Chief released this statement:

We are shocked and devastated by the news that Michael Hastings is gone. Michael was a great, fearless journalist with an incredible instinct for the story, and a gift for finding ways to make his readers care about anything he covered from wars to politicians. He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold. Michael was also a wonderful, generous colleague, a joy to work with and a lover of corgis — especially his Bobby Sneakers. Our thoughts are with Elise and and the rest of his family and we are going to miss him. Read more

Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led “a $15M Series A investment” into FiftyThree, the company that created the bestselling Paper iPad app.

Investor Chris Dixon explained in a blog post:

Paper has been embraced by millions of everyday creators, and has won dozens of awards (including Apple’s App of the Year). It is also one of the top grossing iPad productivity apps ever. But this is only the beginning of FiftyThree’s ambitious plans … FiftyThree didn’t need to raise money, but decided that the opportunity was so large that it made sense to accelerate their efforts with additional capital and resources. They’ll be expanding their engineering teams in New York and Seattle, and will broaden their offerings across software, services, and hardware.

Amazon has created a new way for friends to chip in and buy gifts for their friends virtually called Amazon Birthday Gift. The tool lets Facebook users create and crowd source Amazon gift cards for Facebook friends.

The tool lets one friend start a gift and any of the recipient’s Facebook friends can contribute to the gift. Friends can add to the gift in increments of  $1, $5, $10 or $25. Mutual friends can see the gift once one friend creates it. Friends can write messages along with the gift.

The gift and these messages will appear alongside the gift on the recipient’s timeline on their actual birthday. Recipients will also see a link for their gift on their timeline alongside the messages.

Publisher Quirk Books, the company behind the popular interactive eBook app Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, has partnered with Tapestry a digital storytelling app. This is the first time that the user generated storytelling app has partnered with a publisher.

As part of the partnership, Quirk Books is contributing 5 stories to Tapestry’s 2.0 relaunch including a William Shakespeare Star Wars mashup written by Ian Doescher.

Reading on the Tapestry app is not like reading on your run-of-the-mill eReader apps. The app lets users both create and read stories. Readers are encouraged to take the time to take it all in, as it is designed for readers to move the story forward but as the website explains, ”There’s no going back, so take your time—that’s the whole point.”

Reading on the device is designed specifically for the experience of touch screens. Here is more from the Tapestry blog: “Touch devices and Tapestry stories evoke emotions in a way other media cannot. It’s a medium that celebrates some of the most important aspects of storytelling: succinctness, pacing, and creativity.”

New York City is gearing up for any hurricanes that might come its way this year. The mayor’s office has begun installing free solar charging stations for smartphones around the city in a move to help make it easier for victims of a storm to charge up devices.

Reuters has more: “The Street Charge stations are New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest answer to flaws in infrastructure and operations exposed by the historic storm that ripped into the East Coast in October 2012 and left about 900,000 New York City dwellers and millions of others in the region without power.”

The city has installed 25 of these solar power stations paid for by AT&T. The stations will provide electricity to charge up phones and tablets even when the city’s power is out.

Should birdwatchers be able to use bird call apps? The question has caused a debate among birders.

Using apps like Chirp! Bird Songs USA, birdwatchers can instantly access an archive of countless bird sounds–getting very close to their subjects. National Geographic Daily News has more:

The trouble is, there’s a slippery slope leading toward harassment of rare and/or endangered birds and, in the worst case, genuine interference with their nesting success. And the slope got a lot steeper with the proliferation of smartphones and birdsong apps … a number of bad things could happen when a birder plays a song to attract a bird. Momentarily distracted, the bird could be snatched up by a predatory hawk (this has been witnessed a number of times by distraught birders).

OpenAirplane launched a new service for plane rentals – so get your wings ready! To borrow an airplane, you’ll have to take a flight test, but that means you’ll be able to rent from any of their locations: New York, LA, Chicago, San Jose, Kissimmee, or Detroit. Your flight credentials lets you reserve an airplane online or with the OpenAirplane app.

Co-Founder Rod Rakic told Mashable:

My co-founder and I are both pilots, we’ve both been renters. We know it kind of sucks that when you leave your home base, your pilot certificate and your credentials turn off, because when you don’t have rental privileges, it takes half a day and hundreds of dollars to turn those credentials back on.

Read more

Aetna is launching an app to help its customers stay fit and healthy. The app, Carepass, gives users access to a number of different healthy options including tips on how to reach your weight goal, data integration from fitness devices like Fitbit, or find local doctors using a quick diagnosis through Aetna-owned iTriage.

According to Mobihealthnews, the number of partner apps at launch was staggering:

MapMyFitness, LoseIt, RunKeeper, Fooducate, Jawbone, Fitbit, fatsecret, Withings, breathresearch (makers of MyBreath), Zipongo, BodyMedia, Active, Goodchime!, MoxieFit, Passage, FitSync, FitBug, BettrLife, Thryve, SparkPeople, HealthSpark, NetPulse, Earndit, FoodEssentials, Personal.com, Healthline, and GoodRx.

Read more

What’s the Riddle? joins the top free iPhone apps list this week at No. 1, according to research from AppData. The gaming app from Rainy Day games challenges players to solve riddles.

Below, we’ve listed the top free iPhone apps of the week. The list links to Inside Network’s research about the individual apps, including historical charts, developer information and download information.

To support Mediabistro’s Media App Summit, we spotlight the top free apps every week–helping our readers discover, enjoy and analyze successful content. Read more

Facebook may add video to Instagram on June 20th, according to a report on TechCrunch. Facebook is holding a press conference on Thursday and the  technology blog apparently received a tipoff that the social network will use the event to debut Instagram video.

Here is more from the blog:

We are still looking for more information because we understand that Facebook has not wanted the details of June 20 to leak out — so this could be an intentional blind alley. But if the Instagram video report is true, you could say the event invite itself — sent by snail mail, coffee cup stain charmingly in one corner — is a red herring of its own.

There are plenty of other video sharing apps already available such as Viddy, Socialcam and Twitter’s Vine.