MailChimp has long offered its users an easy way to manage and run their email marketing campaigns. Now, for the first time in its long history, the company is going beyond email marketing with the launch of a new tool that lets its users create Facebook ad campaigns right from the existing MailChimp dashboard. The company may be best known for its email platform, but as a company… Read More
Facebook today is changing how it ranks the videos that appear in the News Feed, with the goal of better surfacing those that are more relevant to you. It’s a slight tweak, but one that could boost the visibility of longer videos, in some cases.
It can be more of commitment to watch a longer video in full, of course – the content has to be interesting enough to keep your attention. Read More
With faith in government at an all-time low, it’s time for mayors, county executives and governors to do one concrete thing to make the delivery of government services better – appoint someone to lead government data efforts, often called a Chief Data Officer (CDO). Read More
The 10th Annual Crunchies is fast approaching, and production puzzle pieces are falling into place. Given our setting at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, we plan on enjoying some operatic entertainment as part of the awards show. You might remember something similar from last year’s show: That said, I’m very proud to introduce the artists that will dazzle us with… Read More
In a bold strategic shift, White House Press Secretary Sean “Alternative Facts” Spicer appears to have tweeted something true from his account this morning. Unfortunately for him, it might have been his password. This morning, Twitter noticed that Spicer tweeted and quickly deleted a string of nonsense that looks considerably more like a password than it does a pocket tweet. A… Read More
Twitter’s Moments feature, which allows users to tell stories through a collection of tweets, is no longer going be front-and-center in the Twitter application. Instead, Twitter will today replace the Moments section with a new tab called “Explore.” This area will serve as the home for finding out what’s happening on Twitter, including trends, Moments, search, and… Read More
PowerAI is IBM’s machine learning framework for companies that use servers based on its Power processors and NVIDIA’s NVLink high-speed interconnects that allow for data to pass extremely quickly between the processor and the GPU that does most of the deep learning calculations. Today, the company announced that PowerAI now supports Google’s popular Tensorflow machine… Read More
Apple’s programming language Swift has been around for a while, but iOS and macOS developers can still develop apps using Apple’s Objective-C. According to a new study from Upwork, tech companies are increasingly looking for developers who know how to develop in Swift.
Upwork is the biggest freelancer marketplace in the U.S., so the company can identify trends on the freelancer market. Read More
LG hasn’t been doing a great job keeping a tight lid on the G6. But, then, who can blame them? The company needs a hit on the heels of a hefty Q4 loss, chalking the dire financials up to “weak sales” of the G5 – and while it claims that the V20 is doing just fine, thank you very much, the dual-camera handset wasn’t nearly enough to offset that disappointment.… Read More
A new feature in Google Maps will help you find parking – or rather, it will mentally prepare you for how difficult it will be to find a parking space at your destination. Google says it’s now using “historical parking data” to calculate a parking difficulty score, which will be displayed in Google Maps’ directions card as “Limited,”… Read More
An Executive Order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump in his first few days in office could jeopardize a six-month-old data transfer framework that enables EU citizens’ personal data to flow to the U.S. with the promise of ‘essentially equivalent’ privacy protection once it gets there. Read More
Anyone who’s tried to watch a popular show like Game of Thrones online has probably had moments where everything pauses and you’re stuck watching a spinning wheel or blinking dots as the streaming service struggles to handle viewer demand. Peer5, one of the startups in the current class at incubator Y Combinator, is working to solve this problem — in fact, it’s… Read More
Stock photo site Shutterstock has been around since 2003 but now the stock photo site gotten an 21s century upgrade. The site now has a built in photo editor that lets you create clever graphics on the fly for social media, sharing, and blogging. The tool is fairly rudimentary – you can add text and images to the photos as well as filters – but it’s fun. The impetus was… Read More
In spite of my aversion to the word “ideation,” I can’t argue against software designed to help an organisation solicit ideas from its people. The best ideas can — and often do — come from anyone, regardless of job title or hierarchy. Enter Idea Drop, a London-headquartered startup that offers what it calls an “idea management” platform. Read More
This past summer, Facebook introduced a new photo-sharing sharing tool called Slideshow that’s able to turn your photos and videos into mini-movies that also include themed music and transitions. The feature had originated in Facebook’s private photo-sharing app Moments before making its way over to the main social network. The idea is to offer Facebook users an easier way to… Read More
Google today announced that it has worked with Facebook and Mozilla (the organization behind the Firefox browser), to make page reloads in Chrome for desktop and mobile significantly faster. According to Google’s data, reloading sites with the latest version of Chrome should now be about 28 percent faster.
Typically, when you reload a page (and that’s a feature even the earliest… Read More
Chances are you’re generating a lot of data about your customers, but it’s a mess to get a good overview of their profiles. Hull wants to be the central hub for all of your customer data so that you can better target them. The startup just raised $2.6 million from Alven Capital and Point Nine Capital, with Newfund Capital, Solomon Hykes, Thibaud Elziere, Matthieu Vaxelaire and… Read More
Alphabet’s health-focused subsidiary Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences before the great corporate alphabetization, has received an $800 million investment from Temasek, the majority of which is to be delivered mostly over the next few days, with a smaller portion of funding coming in the second half of 2017. Temasek is an investment company based in Singapore, with investments across… Read More
“Unofficial” product repair shops may be getting a leg up in Nebraska, Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, and Kansas. These states are working to legalize repair of devices from any manufacturer, including litigious Apple. Why is this necessary? Because Homeland Security raids repair shops on claims of counterfeit repair part importation and most devices are locked down,… Read More
Square Enix is working with Marvel on multiple games from the Marvel universe, starting with an Avengers title as the first of its projects. The game is being promoted with the hashtag #Reassemble, and appears to center around the aftermath of the events of Captain America: Civil War, which likely means it’ll either precede or coincide with the next Avengers movie, which is set for… Read More
