Insights

Communication and Technology news
Twitter is researching online abuse, but will it solve anything?
2018-05-03

Twitter has been struggling with an online abuse problem for years. With more than 330 million monthly active users, the platform is still one of the most popular apps in the world, but its growth rate in the past 3 years has paled in comparison to its growth rate in its first few years of operation. Its...

Cardano pens deal to help Ethiopia put agriculture on the blockchain
2018-05-03

Ethiopia is the latest African nation to express interest in blockchain-powered solutions. The country has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with fledgling cryptocurrency startup Cardano that will see developers use its blockchain in the local agriculture industry. Cardano lead and former Ethereum co-founder,...

NowThis wants Snap’s help in getting its platform mojo back
2018-05-03

As publishers flee from Facebook, will Snapchat help cushion the fall? You probably thought platform-specific publishing was so 2017, but maybe not! NowThis announced today a breaking news channel to be consumed on Snapchat Discover. It will be called NowBreaking, and will launch in June.Read Full Story

Monica Lewinsky just gave every intern a reason to cheer
2018-05-03

Monica Lewinsky has no time for Marco Rubio pickin on interns. In a textbook example of punching down, Marco Rubio bravely called out a Politico intern for writing an unflattering profile of his ever-evolving stance on the tax reform he helped sign into law. Not one to standby and let someone slander interns,...

How A Virtual Scavenger Hunt Could Train Robots To Find Things In Your Home
2018-05-03

A research project from Facebook and Georgia Tech is training artificial intelligence systems to parse natural language questions and find specific objects. Artificial intelligence models need to be trained on data in order to be useful. The more data you plug in, the more the automation tends to improve. A new...

Stephen Colbert’s Facebook dating video is the best ad Tinder could hope for
2018-05-03

While no one knows what the new feature will look like yet, Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show gave us a sneak peak on Wednesday night’s episode anyway At its F8 conference, Facebook announced it was getting into the dating game. The news caused Match.com’s stock to drop—and the...

Google is entering the gaming business, starting with a trivia app
2018-05-03

Bloomberg reports that Google is launching a social gaming startup called Arcade, with plans to build a quiz title as its first release. The plan is to grow the company over at Area 120, a division that fosters employees’ experimental ideas and brings them to market. At its helm is 21-year-old Michael Sayman, who...

Watch out, Alexa! Google is catching up to Amazon in the smart home wars
2018-05-03

Google now says its voice assistant can control over 5,000 smart home devices. Smart home device makers have become much more supportive of Google Assistant and the Google Home speaker over the past few months. Google now says its voice assistant can control over 5,000 smart home devices–up from 1,500 devices...

HTC will unveil its next flagship this month
2018-05-03

Taiwanese phone maker HTC is all set to reveal its next flagship handset on May 23. We’re pretty certain it’ll be the U12+. Tipster Evan Blass gave us a look at the device back in March, with dual camera systems on the front and rear. This is the HTC U12+ https://t.co/LP9OX5xHlO pic.twitter.com/fi7BGkj6l5 — Evan...

Google Pay is rolling out on the web for faster checkouts on desktop and iOS
2018-05-03

Following its launch on Android back in February, Google Pay is now rolling out on the web to let you complete shopping transactions quicker on desktop and iOS. The cross-platform service lets users check out on shopping sites, as well as send and receive money using a credit or debit card or PayPal account. Today’s...

When It Comes To AI, Facebook Says It Wants Systems That Don’t Reflect Our Biases
2018-05-03

As we train more and more AI systems, we need to make sure to mitigate against the biases that inevitably creep in. Artificial intelligence is a big part of nearly everything Facebook does–from image recognition to detecting objectionable content to helping people find jobs.Read Full Story

How The “Handmaid’s Tale” Brought New Sets To (Terrifying) Life
2018-05-03

Executive producer Warren Littlefield and production designer Elisabeth Warren explain their approach to expanding the visual dystopia in season two. Gilead does not exist. At least it didn’t until The Handmaid’s Tale production team created it from scratch.Read Full Story

Cambridge Analytica’s Major Players: Where Are They Now?
2018-05-02

Cambridge Analytica and affiliated companies are shutting down, though some of the key players are now linked to a new firm called Emerdata. Cambridge Analytica and various affiliated companies in the US and UK have announced they’re shutting down amid controversy over their role in Donald Trump’s...

There’s a logical explanation for @KanyeWest: Parallel universes
2018-05-02

Was Stephen Hawking’s final theory about Kanye West’s recent Twitter resurgance? No. It wasn’t. But it might contain the only logical explanation. First, a disclaimer: I’ve been a fan of Kanye West’s music since the moment I heard Jay-Z’s song “The Takeover,” which West produced, on the classic 2001...

Facebook and Instagram now let third-party apps share to your Stories
2018-05-02

It’s no secret that Instagram copied Snapchat’s Stories to massive success. Now Instagram is making the format even more prominent by allowing third parties to share directly to your Story. Facebook announced at its F8 conference that developers can enable the ability to share screenshots of their apps to your...

Bankrupt Cambridge Analytica blames “negative media coverage” for shutdown
2018-05-02

The company was discovered to have used Facebook data that was improperly harvested from more than 87 million users The data firm at the center of Facebook’s massive privacy scandal is calling it quits.Read Full Story

Some developers now have Facebook’s Santa Cruz standalone VR headset
2018-05-02

Facebook CTO Michael Schroepfer said on stage at the F8 developers conference today that the earliest group of outside developers have gotten their hands on Santa Cruz, the company’s high-end standalone VR headset. Yesterday, Facebook started selling the Oculus Go, its medium-quality standalone. And it’s...

Dogged by Facebook scandal, Cambridge Analytica closes its doors
2018-05-02

After becoming the center of a scandal that led to a federal inquiry, Cambridge Analytica and its UK counterpart SCL Elections are closing and filing for bankruptcy. Employees received word today the company was closing, effective immediately. Cambridge Analytica and its UK counterpart called employees and released a...

At F8, Facebook missed a chance to reassure us about its future
2018-05-02

“It’s not enough to build powerful tools. We have to make sure they’re used for good. And we will.” That was Mark Zuckerberg teeing off the day-one keynote yesterday at Facebook’s F8 conference, echoing a sentiment he’s expressed repeatedly (on Facebook, before Congress) in...

Facebook’s Go-Playing AI is a free download
2018-05-02

Much as IBM’s Watson once demonstrated the power of AI by becoming a Jeopardy champion, DeepMind’s AlphaGo has been beating the world’s best Go players, a long-time aspiration of AI reaearchers which once seemed unobtainable. Here at the F8 conference, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer lavished praise...

Jimmy O. Yang Is Disrupting Asian Stereotypes On “Silicon Valley”
2018-05-02

The comedian just published “How to American,” the book he wishes he could have read as a 13-year old immigrant new to America. Winning the role of Jian-Yang, Silicon Valley’s quietly calculating entrepreneur from China, completely changed actor and comedian Jimmy O. Yang’s future. But the...

Facebook Used Billions Of Instagram Photos To Set A New Record In Image Recognition Accuracy
2018-05-02

The work, known as weakly supervised pre-training, got an accuracy score of 85.4% when applied to a common benchmarking tool–fully 2% better than the previous state of the art. Facebook is leveraging billions of Instagram photos and thousands of user-added hashtags to improve the state of the art of image...

Here’s How Facebook Uses AI To Detect Many Kinds Of Bad Content
2018-05-02

The company uses AI to identify objectionable content in seven areas: nudity, graphic violence, terrorism, hate speech, spam, fake accounts, and suicide prevention. When Mark Zuckerberg testified in Washington, D.C., last month, he repeatedly told members of Congress that Facebook planned on using artificial...

The first-ever VR Google Doodle is a charming tribute to Georges Méliès
2018-05-02

Over the years, Google’s doodles–those frequent charming musings at the top of its homepage–have evolved from static to dynamic, and have included games, animations, and more. Now, add virtual reality to the mix. Today, Google launched its first-ever VR doodle, a terrific celebration...

Do you need a professional solution for Email Marketing? We recommend AWeber Pro!

More details