Insights

Vero is a three-year-old app that's suddenly become a popular alternative to established social media platforms. It has a platform that promises to show you what your friends and network are posting, in chronological order — and with no ads. It does sound alluring. Tons of users signed up for the...

Some tweets have always been worth saving for future reference. But Twitter has never offered a formal way to do that, forcing everybody to come up with their own workaround. (Lots of us use the Like button, thereby probably leading some people to think we like tweets that we actually hate.) That era ends today...

“I don’t know if I understand it more than halfway myself,” says Tom Scocca. Last year began what could only be described as a time of reckoning for the media industry. It certainly seems to be continuing this year. With the digital ad space being constantly squeezed by the ever-growing market...

Samsung’s Galaxy S9 was announced with one primary goal: amp up the camera. Armed with an F1.5/F2.4 lens – the first variable phone aperture we’ve seen in modern times – Samsung aims to reclaim the camera throne from the likes of Google and Apple. I’ve had the device for a little over two days and have spent...

Patrisse Cullors has had a major influence on the Black Lives Matter movement ever since it began in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting. Here she explains what many people get wrong when it comes to how they think about Black History Month and where the focus should be.  Read more...More about Mashable...

On Twitter, a like is a like — unless it's not.  Over the years the "like" button has come to embody several distinct uses on the social media platform: a way to designate appreciation for a tweet, show agreement, or, confusingly, to essentially bookmark the tweet in question for later reading....

Fooling robots into seeing things that aren’t there, or completely mis-categorizing an image, is all fun and games until someone gets decapitated because a car’s autopilot feature thought a white truck was a cloud. In order avoid such tragedies, it’s incredibly important that researchers in the field of...

Over the last few days, the social network Vero has grown like a wildfire. It flew to the top of the App Store charts–and it is still number two today. As Fast Company‘s Melissa Locker wrote earlier this week, the mobile app has actually been around for a few years, and it promises to give …...

Don’t Call Me Oscar is an unbelievably cute tribute to Oscar-nominated films, with a bunch of small children replacing the adults in the room. What: Moments from Oscar-nominated movies, but with small children in place of the actual performers.Read Full Story

A model who needed to breastfeed her son during a photoshoot resulted in a wonderfully human ad from the mass retailer. What: An ad featuring a mother breastfeeding her child.Read Full Story

Twitter today announced it’s rolling out a new Bookmark option for tweets, as well as a new way of sharing them with friends. First spotted last October, the Bookmark option lets you save tweets in a private list. This way, you can save tweets, links, and threads for later perusal — particularly useful if you’re...

Few things are more frustrating than not being able to find your phone right as you’re heading out. An app called ‘Clap to Find My Phone‘ wants to save you from that frustration. Take a wild guess how it works. The app is currently Android only, and it seems unlikely to be any use on iOS, where you’d likely...

Bitcoin conspiracy theorists have long speculated that banks and financial institutions are out to slay the cryptocurrency market, but it seems the narrative is gradually starting to change: leading Dutch bank Rabobank is apparently toying around with the idea of launching its own cryptocurrency wallet....

In a sign that the tide may finally be turning when it comes to public opinion on guns, Dick’s Sporting Goods has announced they will stop selling assault-style rifles, reports The Hill. But Dick’s isn’t stopping there. The company also announced it will also no longer sell guns to anyone under...

Typos are often interpreted as a sign of poor attention to detail. But in a digital world where most text is editable, does that still make sense? A few months ago, I posted a question on LinkedIn: “If someone who is not a professional writer has a couple of typos in their resume, why does that speak to...

Facebook is opening up the ability to post jobs on its platform to 40 countries today. Roughly 26% of consumers found or searched for a job on Facebook, according to a 2017 Morning Consult Intelligence survey commissioned by Facebook. The social network first rolled out job postings and job applications last...

In what is sure to make E.T. happy, the moon will get its first mobile phone network next year, reports Reuters. No, this is not a joke. Vodafone Germany, Nokia, and Audi are teaming up for a private space mission next year that will see a mobile phone network rolled out on the moon that … Continue reading...

The rumors from  last March were true: Amazon has rolled out its Prime Music service in India today, with apps available for the web, Android, and iOS. The service is part of Amazon’s Prime subscription, which grants access to fast and often free shipping, as well as Prime Video, for Rs. 999 ($15) a year. That’s...

After being announced last year, Google took to the stage at MWC 2018 to announce a beta release of Flutter, its free and open-source framework for building iOS and Android apps with a unified codebase. The SDK lets devs code their apps in the Dart programming language, and packages them along with a rendering...

Amazon has acquired Ring, a Santa Monica, California-based maker of connected video doorbells and security cameras, for $1 billion. That will see the ecommerce giant push further into the home security business: it previously acquired Blink, which makes similar products. Plus, it already offers a Cloud Cam that’s...

Dutch menswear company Suitsupply’s latest campaign features men who appear to be attracted to each other and many on social media cannot handle it. Advertising drives people nuts. Sometimes it’s for a sensible reason, like when Dodge Ram used a Martin Luther King Jr. speech to sell trucks during the...

Google has played by the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” rules since 2014, when the European Court of Justice introduced a law that allowed European citizens to request that search engines erase information about them from search results. In its latest annual Transparency...

A team of international researchers recently taught AI to justify its reasoning and point to evidence when it makes a decision. The ‘black box’ is becoming transparent, and that’s a big deal. Figuring out why a neural network makes the decisions it does is one of the biggest concerns in the field of artificial...

In the last few days a fledgling social media app shot to the top of the free app charts. Vero is a bit of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all rolled into one and it’d undoubtedly be over the moon dethroning any or all of those apps. Spoiler alert: it won’t. Vero has been on the market for three years. Recently,...

So you jumped on the bandwagon, and now you're desperately trying to figure out how to get off.  Welcome to the world of Vero, the Instagram-challenger currently taking social media by storm. The app has seen a surge in downloads over the past week, with people excited about chronological timelines and a...

Countries might be slow to implement smart climate policies, but cities around the world are pushing the envelope. This map shows their growth. As nations drag their feet on even modest climate change commitments, cities continue to take up the slack, particularly in taking up clean energy. More than 40 cities...

You can’t always do your job search after-hours. Here’s how to be inconspicuous when you have to do it at work. If you clicked on this article, there’s a high probability that you’re considering finding a new job. Maybe you’re actively applying. Maybe you’re just...

Pinterest just tapped Francoise Brougher to be its first chief operating officer. She recently resigned from Square, where she spent the last four years as one of founder Jack Dorsey’s top executives, and prior to that led Google’s Business Operations group since 2005. At Pinterest,...

Perhaps you saw a post this morning on your Facebook feed touting face recognition for “more features.” According to the social network, this ability to analyze users’ faces–which before only helped users tag photos–is becoming even more widespread. For background: Facebook has long...

The first president to have a Twitter account thinks social media needs to change. In what was supposed to be an off-the-record speech at MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on Friday, Barack Obama shared his concerns about how social media has un-united these states of ours. Libertarian...

Four years ago, kids’ shoe startup Plae entered the market in a big way. The shoes–designed by founder Ryan Ringholz, former lead designer at Puma–were quickly embraced by kids in the celebrity set. (The Afflecks and Kutchers are fans.) When Ringholz had kids, he wanted to use his experience to...

In the past few years, advances in hardware and software have helped push augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) from test labs into the hands of millions of consumers. Headsets such as Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Microsoft HoloLens and the newer versions of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems have...

As Silicon Valley blames the “pipeline problem” for its lack of diversity, there’s untapped talent at HBCUs. Meet a few people working to change the ratio. How many times have you seen a report where today’s top tech companies admit to struggling to recruit top diverse talent? Only 2% of...

Bitcoin maximalists have long counted on the Lightning Network and its off-chain transaction solution to fix the network’s increasing scaling issues and exorbitant transfer costs – but it seems this dream might not be as close to reality as the blockchain community wishes. Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd has...

The top priority for developing talent is to train for soft skills,  according to LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report which surveyed more than 4,000 professionals. The report found that while automation is requiring workers to maintain technical fluency across roles, the rise...

Sure, it’s not a $4.4 billion investment like WeWork got from SoftBank, but the $80 million Industrious just nabbed shows the coworking space sector still has room for growth. Industrious raised the $80 million in a round led by Riverwood Capital and Fifth Wall Ventures, reports Axios. What will the company do...

The U.S. media giant has offered to buy Britain’s most well-known private broadcaster, reports CNBC. The proposal is sure to be a thorn in the side of Rupert Murdoch, whose 21st Century Fox already owns 39% of Sky and had previously proposed to buy the remaining 61% he does not own. Complicating the matter...

The iPhone maker will be opening two “AC Wellness” health clinics for its employees and their dependents in Santa Clara County this spring, reports CNBC. Santa Clara County is where Apple’s original and new spaceship campuses are located. A job posting on LinkedIn describes the new Apple health...

Ever wondered where Apple stores all your iCloud backups? Between photos, files, contacts, and other data for millions of customers, that’s a whole lot of storage space that the company would have to make room for and manage. Now, it’s confirmed that iCloud actually lives on Google Cloud servers. CNBC noted that...

YouTube’s live streaming service is getting a handful of new features to take on Amazon-owned rival Twitch. Streamers can now add automatic live closed captions, and can tag their videos with a location, which in turn lets viewers see other live streams happening in the same area. The site’s Super Chats...

Blackberry is jumping on the tiny bezels bandwagon with an upcoming device called ‘Ghost.’ Thankfully, that’s a pretty good bandwagon to jump onto. As reported by leaker Evan Blass, the device is supposed to be a premium handset that will sell in India. It’s not clear whether it will sell elsewhere. BlackBerry...

SoulCycle already expanded beyond the bike with SoulAnnex–the cycle-less studio devoted to cardio and yoga–and now the cult brand takes on HIIT. The newly announced SoulActivate is an on-the-bike class that heavily incorporates high-intensity interval training “designed to accelerate and...

DeepMind wants to solve the problem of patient deterioration in hospitals. The Google sister-company fed its AI the historical medical records of about 700,000 US veterans in hopes it will learn to predict changes in patient condition that, unchecked, lead to death. The partnership between DeepMind and the Veterans...

YouTube today announced it’s introducing new features to its Live streams to bring its communities closer together. Among the changes is chat replay, which allows anyone watching saved livestreams to see the chat — an indispensable feature when rewatching streams as you might otherwise wonder who or what the...

YouTube’s live streaming service is getting two new features that launched a couple of years ago on Amazon-owned rival Twitch: Streamers can add automatic live closed captions in lieu of professionally produced ones, and viewers can now see the text chats that went with a live stream while watching them on...

While Facebook and Instagram and sure, why not, Snapchat are thriving, the social media landscape is littered with the husks of once-thriving social networks like MySpace, Friendster, Google Plus, and Ello. Now wading into the fray is “Vero – True Social” or Vero. The site has actually been...

We all now know how it played out. Peter Thiel helped bankroll  Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, which ultimately bankrupted the website. But before the billionaire Facebook board member decided on that litigious strategy, even more devious plots were brainstormed. Thiel went to war with Nick Denton...

This is the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but in the world of social media and fake news.  Have you met every single friend you have on Facebook in real life? We all know the basic rules about keeping photos and posts private and carefully vetting friend requests.  But things can get complicated. And...