Over the last year, Twitter has been suspending accounts for promoting terrorism. The social network had already made it public that 125,000 accounts were suspended between mid-2015 and early 2016. Today we learned that Twitter has added an additional 235,000 suspensions, bringing their two-year total to 360,000 accounts. By Twitter’s own admission, quickly identifying accounts… Read More
Dish Network’s Sling TV has so far offered a different way for cord cutters to subscribe to the “best of TV” via its online streaming TV service. However, that hasn’t included access to local channels that you receive over-the-air. But that may be changing, according to an Amazon listing which touts a new hardware device called AirTV. The device works with an antenna… Read More
John Maeda is leaving VC firm KPCB where he was a design partner to join Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and a bunch of other things. Maeda will have a long, elaborate title at Automattic — he’s the company’s new Global Head, Computational Design and Inclusion. Before KPCB, Maeda was a research faculty member at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s. “I wanted to… Read More
A couple of times a week for about 3-5 hours, Sam Triplett sits in his abode in China, opens a live-streaming app called Huajiao and talks about anything and everything, prompted mostly by commenters who are watching. Ricey Chen does the same thing using the same app, but she does it for about 20 hours per week. Triplett makes between $100 and $150 per stream and Chen makes about $7,500 per week. Read More
Every day, billions of pieces of content are shared on Facebook. To keep up with the data, Facebook has been using a variety of tools to classify text. Traditional methods of classification, like deep neural networks are accurate, but have serious training requirements. In an effort to classify both accurately and easily, Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab… Read More
IT monitoring specialist ScienceLogic today announced that it has acquired AppFirst, a service to give IT admins deeper visibility in what apps and services run across a company’s servers, virtual machines and cloud instances. The companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction. Minnesota-based AppFirst was founded in 2009 and raised a total of $15.2 million,… Read More
We’ve extended the deadline once, but it won’t be happening again. Tomorrow is your last chance to score early bird tickets to Disrupt SF 2016 for the super-low price of $1,995 each, a full $1,000 cheaper than they’ll be on Saturday. Sure, if you still wanted to procrastinate just a little longer, you could wait until tomorrow, but why risk missing out on a deal this good? Get… Read More
Microsoft today announced that it is open sourcing PowerShell and bringing it to Linux and OS X. PowerShell is Microsoft’s command line shell for Windows power users, as well as an extensible scripting language for automating system tasks. It’s not unlike Bash on Linux (and now Windows, too), but with deeper hooks into Windows. Microsoft is changing, though, and as its CEO… Read More
After struggling to find a sustainable business model and sizable user base, The New York Times today announced it will shut down its news summary application NYT Now. The publisher claims that the innovations developed in the app have now been incorporated into the Times’ other digital platforms, including its flagship NYTimes app. Specifically, the main app has the same curated… Read More
The name “MiniStudio” should give you a pretty clear idea of what you’re in for with Tascam’s new offerings. The two devices are essentially little boards designed to recreate a radio studio on a small scale at home for podcasting purposes. Both boards are Windows and Mac compatible, connecting to a computer (and powering) via USB, and using the Apple Camera Kit,… Read More
Redbooth, makers of project management and collaboration software, announced a new Apple TV app today that brings their service directly to Apple TV. We mostly think of Apple TV as a consumer device, designed to give us access to entertainment and games or to project the contents of one of our Apple devices onto a bigger screen. That changed to some extent last year when Apple announced… Read More
Spotify’s first original videos, a music cartoon series called “Deconstructed,” may have been something of a dud, but don’t count out Spotify’s entire lineup of originals just yet: the company has now debuted its new series called “Landmark,” which starts off by chronicling the band Metallica’s rise to fame. “Landmark – Metallica:… Read More
NASA is giving us some more insight into its plans to get humans to Mars, under the blanket mission called ‘Journey to Mars,’ and during the press conference, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Bill Hill revealed that the current hope is to hand off control of the International Space Station to a commercial owner by sometime around the mid… Read More
Google has detailed a slew of updates over at its Developers Blog aimed at making Street View rendering less crummy, courtesy of some tweaks to the Maps JavaScript API. Among the resulting improvements are smoother transitions from place to place, thanks to more frames and better loading animations, as the system has switched from repeating old images, which resulted in a stuttering effect to… Read More
Human’s team will join Mapbox and work on Mapbox’s mobile SDK and real-time maps. I’ve covered Human quite a few times over the years. It’s a well-designed fitness app that was ahead of the current trends in fitness tracking. Human turned the simple habit of moving around the city into human-readable data for yourself and your friends. Over time, Human started using… Read More
In Atlassian‘s view, video is the next battlefield in the enterprise chat wars (a war it is mostly fighting with Slack, it seems). Its HipChat group messaging app launched one-on-one video chats back in 2014, but today, it is pushing this further by launching group video chats, as well.
To enable this, Atlassian built a new video platform based on its acquisition of BlueJimp and that… Read More
Facebook may try to compete with Steam, or at least win back revenue lost when casual gaming shifted to mobile. Today Facebook formally announced it’s working with game engine Unity to build a dedicated, downloadable desktop gaming platform, plus it’s broadening the Facebook.com experience for gamers.
Both will allow publishers the offer their iOS and Android games on desktop in… Read More
Turns out, most people aren’t all that into their day jobs. According to a study performed by Wakefield Research, around 75 percent of 2,000 respondents said they are unfulfilled by their current job. Part of that comes from the fact that work is work, but the entrepreneurial attitude seems to be spreading, with 44 percent of people showing more interest in starting a side business than… Read More
The internet is all about sharing information, but for the more than 285 million people around the world who are visually impaired, browsing the ‘net can be a less than fruitful experience. Braigo Labs is today launching a service to help blind and visually impaired people make sense of text on images. Read More
From single-player, 16-bit 2D arcade games to free-to-play online multi-player games, the gaming industry has come a long way in the last decade. We can only watch with awe as newer games surprise us with their stunning graphics and engaging game play. However, more and more game developers have jumped into the fray and started catering to the online multi-player games genre. Read More
