As developers for tablets and smartphones we like to keep abreast of the latest mobile technology developments . This is a daily digest of mobile development and related technology news gathered from the BBC, the New York Times, New Scientist and the Globe and Mail to name a few. We scour the web for articles concerning, iPhone, iPad and android development, iOS and android operating systems as well as general articles on advances in mobile technology. We hope you find this useful and that it helps to keep you up to date with the latest technology developments.
Bobcat Catches Shark In Photo Experts Say Is Probably Real
Is it real? Could it possibly be real? Turns out the answer is… probably.
A photo of a bobcat emerging from the water with a shark in its jaws at Florida’s Sebastian Inlet State Park set social media practically on fire on Tuesday, with many believing the image to be a hoax.
Wow!!! Local 10 viewer sends in amazing pic of bobcat catching shark on a Florida beach! http://t.co/tteMG1LzgK pic.twitter.com/U2p5HqCi3p
— WPLG Local 10 News (@WPLGLocal10) April 7, 2015
Wildlife experts say they have no idea whether the specific photo is real, but point out that it’s not unrealistic, either.
“Would they go into the surf and pull out a shark? Darn right they would,” wildlife biologist Robert King, who has studied bobcats in the Everglades, told the Miami Herald. “Unless it’s been photo-shopped, I believe it.”
David Hitzig, director of Busch Wildlife Sanctuary, told CBS 12 station that Florida bobcats are known to hunt along beaches.
“There is no reason to believe it’s fake,” Liz Barraco of the Florida Wildlife Commission told WPFV.
The real surprise isn’t a bobcat snatching a shark. It’s the fact that someone managed to photograph it, because bobcats are shy and tend to avoid humans.
“My first reaction was amazement that somebody actually took that picture because bobcats are generally very, very reclusive. You don’t really see them out and about too often,” Busch Wildlife Sanctuary Animal Care Director Amy Kight told WPTV.
The image was snapped by John Bailey on Monday evening, using an iPhone. He told the Herald that at first he thought he it was a dog.
“Initially, it was pretty quick,” Bailey told Local10.com. “Spotted it, pulled it up (and) the shark floundered for a while.”
He said once the bobcat noticed him, it dropped the shark and bolted for the woods.
“I was so fascinated, I didn’t think about being in danger,” Bailey said.
So now we know a bobcat could take a shark. But how about a lion vs. a tuna?
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
VIDEO: The app that discovers edible weeds
Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley are using crowd sourcing to locate edible weeds in urban areas.
Google purges Chrome extension store
Tens of millions of users who visit Google sites use a browser loaded with malicious add-ons, research suggests.
'Humans Of New York' Beyoncé Post Spurs Most Flawless Comment Section Ever
Life can be tough when you’re Beyoncé, but you’re not that Beyoncé — since, you know, she’s Irreplaceable.
Just ask Serena Williams, Rhianna, Kaity Perry and (yes) Will Smith, who are among a group of strangers that united on the Humans of New York (HONY) Facebook page earlier this week to support a young woman named Beyoncé.
“Sometimes I hate my name because it always draws attention to me,” Beyoncé told HONY photographer Brandon Stanton, “and I’m not a very social person:”
“Sometimes I hate my name because it always draws attention to me, and I’m not a very social person. My family moved…
Posted by Humans of New York on Saturday, April 4, 2015
In the comments section beneath the Facebook post, strangers who share their name with a celebrity spontaneously began sharing their own stories, commiserating and empathizing with Beyoncé. The gang was all here:
Click over to the HONY post on Facebook for all the celebrity comments.
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
The CEO Who Took On Indiana's Anti-LGBT Law — And Won
For Marc Benioff, the fight against Indiana’s widely criticized “religious freedom” law was personal.
The Salesforce CEO was a leading voice in the national outcry against Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed last month. Critics argued that the original version of the RFRA would have permitted businesses to discriminate against LGBT people.
Benioff said his advocacy was an effort to help his employees and customers whom the law might have affected, something he describes as being key to his personal philosophy.
“I’m all for a healthy mind and a healthy body, but I’m also about having a healthy planet and a healthy country and taking care of others that don’t have as much,” Benioff, a habitual meditator, told The Huffington Post on Monday from his vacation home in Hawaii. “That’s my spirituality.”
On March 25, a day before Pence first signed Indiana’s RFRA, Benioff became the first major business leader to speak out against the law by threatening to scale back his company’s investment in the state. After the governor approved the measure, Benioff swung back even harder, posting what he called the “tweet heard ’round the world,” in which he announced plans to cancel all Salesforce programs that would require customers or employees to travel to Indiana. Indeed, it was retweeted nearly 9,800 times and favorited more than 8,300 times and became part part of the national conversation.
The following week, he stepped up his campaign again, promising relocation packages to Salesforce employees in Indiana who wanted to transfer elsewhere.
“CEOs are very much the advocates of their customers and employees, as well as of the environment and local communities,” Benioff said. “The most successful CEOs today are advocates for their stakeholders, not just their shareholders.”
After a week of backlash, Pence approved a revised version of the measure, this time explicitly banning businesses from refusing service because of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
Benioff may have been the first major CEO to express his opposition to the legislation, but he was soon joined by others. Corporate giants and organizations from Apple to NASCAR rallied behind LGBT rights groups in Indiana to fight the law.
Still, the Salesforce chief may have been uniquely positioned to champion the cause in Indiana. For starters, San Francisco-based Salesforce became the state’s largest tech employer when it acquired the marketing software firm ExactTarget in 2013.
And, Benioff has a lot of powerful friends.
The day after the law passed, he said, he emailed the people he regularly meets and dines with in San Francisco, many of whom are top tech industry executives. Among them was Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal and the chief executive of financial management site Affirm. Four days after Benioff sent the email, when he flicked on CNBC as he started his morning workout at the gym, he saw Levchin railing against Indiana’s law.
“I was completely blown away,” Benioff said, noting that Levchin went on to organize more than 70 top executives to sign a joint statement condemning the law last week. “This is really the first time that we have started something, and the reason it got started — the reason it was successful — is because it was so many different CEOs banding together.”
Benioff has long practiced the “stakeholder theory,” a philosophy advocated by World Economic Forum founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, among others. The ideology views shareholders as second to employees, customers, suppliers, communities, trade unions and others who are affected by a company’s commerce. Imbued with a strong sense of corporate responsibility and connected with its community, a firm that’s guided by these principles might, the philosophy suggests, earn greater profits over time, translating into higher returns for investors. It’s the corporate equivalent of building good karma.
In the two weeks since Benioff began his campaign, emails have poured in from workers thanking him for stepping up. He said he’s never received so much positive employee feedback in his 16-year tenure at Salesforce.
“When the economic hammer came down, that’s when things really started to change,” he said. “There’s one word that was continually used by everyone in Indiana, which was ‘historic.’ That’s something that we in San Francisco, or those of us who don’t live in Indiana, don’t have the perspective to understand, but for them this was historic.”
Benioff pledged to continue the fight by urging the Indiana legislature to add the LGBT community as a protected class under local civil rights laws in its next session.
“The conversation happened the right way,” he said. “It opens the door for another change and another change, probably in the next legislature.”
The CEO admits that not every step in this push to change the law has been graceful. He became the target of some criticism after a CNN interview last Wednesday, in which he said, “One thing that you’re seeing is that there is a third [political] party emerging in this country, which is the party of CEOs.” The comment provoked pushback from those who already fear the influx of money in politics. Benioff said he misspoke as a result of his excitement over the business community’s rapid response to the situation in Indiana.
Benioff hopes business leaders can continue to push for important legislation that affects their stakeholders, and cites patent and immigration reform as specific examples.
Asked whether Indiana just happened to provide the right place and time for business leaders to unite behind a particular political cause, or whether the momentum would continue to grow, Benioff said he was unsure.
“This was so spontaneous, it happened so quickly,” he said. “But CEOs do have a lot of power, like it or not, so they need to bring on a stakeholder philosophy.”
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
U.S. Tracked Phone Calls For Two Decades In Anti-Drug Program: Report
WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) – The U.S. government started keeping secret records of international phone calls made by Americans in 1992 in a program intended to combat drug trafficking, USA Today reported on Tuesday, citing current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials.
The program, run by the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, was halted by Attorney General Eric Holder in 2013 amid the fallout from revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about NSA data collection, the paper reported.
The DEA program was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime, USA Today said.
The program amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls made from the United States to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking.
Federal investigators used the call records to track drug cartels’ distribution networks in the United States, allowing agents to detect previously unknown trafficking rings and money handlers, the paper said.
The program did not intercept the content of calls but it did record the phone numbers and when they were dialed.
When the data collection began, agents sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA, the paper reported.
Agents allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists, the paper reported. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001, it said.
Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush told USA Today the DEA “is no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers.”
Instead, the DEA assembles a list of the telephone numbers it suspects may be tied to drug trafficking and sends electronic subpoenas to telephone companies seeking logs of international telephone calls linked to those numbers, the paper said. (Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Eric Walsh)
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Have You Lost Your Child to a Smartphone?
I recently reached out to a number of parents, six to be exact, about my concern for our children and what personal technology is doing to their minds, moods, behavior, relationships and just about everything else. Specifically, I pointed out what I witness: the constant need for distraction, relating to the device rather than the person they are with; chronic fear of missing out on what might be happening on the device; continual posting of selfies (often in lieu of enjoying the experience they are posting); the need to be entertained by several things at once (nothing being enough); intolerance for boredom; disinterest in their own company; the relentless search for something external to satisfy; anxiety and irritability (addictive symptoms) when deprived of personal technology; an increase in creative passivity (the loss of ability to generate something out of nothing)… and the list goes on.
In my communication with these parents, I suggested that we establish agreed-upon limits on the technology, “time out” periods that would be the same for everyone in their tight group of friends. This way, none of the children would feel they were missing out on something when they were off technology, as everyone’s else’s phones would also be dark. I also recommended that we open a dialogue and create a united front on this issue, as the grown-ups in this life situation, the ones in charge, perhaps to talk about what we can do to help our children develop the skills to be well in a world that is teaching them to be absent from where they are, absent from themselves, and to need perpetual entertainment just to be OK. What I wrote to the parents of my daughter’s friends was really a plea to take this issue seriously, to employ our greater wisdom and experience as adults and not allow our children to disappear into the virtual vacuum — to step in and protect our children’s ability to live in the present moment — the basis of all well-being.
I sent out six pleas. How many responses did I receive back? Zero.
I write a lot about personal technology and invariably, every time I do, I receive a similar comment in return. The comment, boiled down, is this: Technology is here to stay; get over it or learn to live with it. The fact that technology is here to stay is probably true, but the idea that we should get over or learn to live with it, regardless of what it is doing to us, to me, sounds like glorified passivity. The reality that not one parent responded to my note sounds like we have settled back into a kind of hopeless acceptance of where we are heading. Does the fact that technology is here to stay mean that we should allow our children and ourselves to disappear into a distracted unconsciousness?
The fact that technology is here to stay is precisely why we need to pay close attention to and make real choices about how we want to live with it and teach our children to live with it. As the human beings who are using this technology (not the other way around), we need to decide and enact how we want to incorporate technology into our lives, not just accept whatever is happening because it’s happening. Our purpose should be to take care of our own well-being, and not just assume that if we surrender, technology will protect our well-being. Learn to live with it should really read, “learn how you want to live with it.” We can’t and shouldn’t be passive, not when what’s at stake is how we live and who we are.
Copyright 2015 Nancy Colier
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
U.S. Secretly Tracked Billions Of Calls For Decades: Report
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Instagram Adds New Color-Editing Features
Long gone are the days of uploading a photo straight from your smartphone to Facebook. Instagram is always adding new ways to edit your pics.
On Tuesday the photo editing and sharing app announced it will soon integrate options for adding different colors and fading the existing colors in your photos.
The new Fade tool “brings a quiet tone to your photos by softening colors,” Instagram says in a blog post. Here’s what the tool looks like:
Want to add a tint? You can choose from red, pink, yellow, orange, purple, green, blue or cyan with the Color feature:
The update is available for Android now and will be on iPhones within a few days.
As Business Insider’s Jillian D’Onfro points out, with every addition of new editing tools, Instagram is edging out other popular photography apps — like VSCO Cam — which are often used in conjunction with Instagram. The company recently took a swipe at popular collage apps with its Layout app, released last month.
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Why Russia's Skolkovo Innovation Center is Off Strategy
This is what Silicon Valley looked like in 1950.
Farmland.
Now, it looks like this.
And this.
How did that happen?
More importantly, can it be replicated?
In my opinion, no it cannot. Because it happened in Silicon Valley organically, almost by mistake instead of with intention. Does that serendipitous occurrence mean we shouldn’t try to replicate the phenomenal growth of Silicon Valley? No, of course we should try.
But it won’t be easy.
Ever.
Many countries, states and cities are hard at work trying to duplicate this magical innovation development. Most will fail.
Let us see what Russia is up to in this regard.
Russia’s strong effort to re-create the “Silicon Valley Phenomena” is a great initiative for an oil and cash-rich nation to undertake–it is a necessary and wise investment of these always limited, windfall resources.
And any attempt to harness the prodigious intellect of Russian minds is admirable and requisite. But is Russia’s Skolkovo Innovation Center off to the right start? Are all systems go?
From Amsterdam’s innovation initiative to Hong Kong’s “Cyberport” and from Singapore’s great Economic Development Board to Malaysia’s “Multimedia Super Corridor” (MSC), I’ve been privileged to visit and understand some of the world’s top efforts at this kind of growth and creation of the right environment for technology/entrepreneurial development.
And there’s one thing that’s exceedingly clear about these kinds of well-intentioned, innovation activities: They are very difficult, very difficult indeed to pull off successfully; to recreate Silicon Valley.
Because even Silicon Valley wasn’t done with any intention at all. It just happened.
How could any country recreate something that happened by kismet? They could not.
So it’s very tricky, if not impossible to pull off these ‘rabbit-out-of-a-hat’ types of economic growth undertakings.
Some lessons learned from Silicon Valley, Amsterdam, Malaysia and Singapore:
1. Proximity to a top technical university or other center of excellence is crucial. Without this starting place, failure could be inevitable. Stanford’s proximity made Silicon Valley happen. Ditto with NUS (National University of Singapore) along with the University of Amsterdam (and its “Brainport”).
2. A central location is always better than a faraway one. Because of its absolutely central location in Western Europe and Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam was able to package up and sell their convenient location to tech giants such as Cisco Systems to locate their European headquarters there. This meant jobs for top graduate Dutch minds normally headed abroad to work and then causing a ‘brain drain’ at home.
3. Create a “money parade” for young companies to get funded, without going elsewhere to obtain those funds. Once you help them build it, if you let them go elsewhere to find funding, you’ve lost them forever. University of Amsterdam’s Twinning Center did this beautifully. So does University of Helsinki’s Biomedicum and Technomedicum in the Medical field.
4. Bring in leaders in different fields and disciplines to share their experiences, triumphs and most importantly, their bitter failures in detail with the candidates.
5. And overarchingly, create a strong, trusting relationship between the government and private enterprise sectors that works closely together in the process. Without the government’s promise to ease regulation and taxation of small, developing business, this kind of innovation is hopeless.
So, with these points in mind, how do they relate to Russia and Skolkovo?
Well, let me begin with good news. Numbers three, four and five are all pretty well handled in Skolkovo.
The bad news is that numbers one and two above are both badly out of whack in Skolkovo.
Instead of dovetailing with the already humming Moscow State University and Novosibirsk State University (Hello? Looking for some of the finest mathematical minds in the world? Hello Novo?), among many others, the powers that be for Skolkovo decided to build a gleaming, new university from the dirt up right outside Moscow. How do you suppose Russia’s other centers of learning felt about this? They didn’t like it one bit, that’s how.
More significantly, Russia missed the opportunity to connect the dots between their unbelievably innovative RAS (Russian Academy of Sciences) and this momentous commitment to innovation. With no less than 18 Nobel Prize winners (Stanford only has 21 after a big advantage over the last five decades), the RAS was the natural place to connect all that Russkie brainpower and decades of research with the Russian’ secret cities (Sarov, Dubna, Zheleznogorsk, Seversk, etc.) to create a neural network that would put Stanford and Silicon Valley to shame.
Number one, “proximity” connecting already existing intellectual property, rather than building a new center from scratch is, to me, a big mistake.
On number two, “central location,” Russia also missed the boat. Moscow is located in the far western part of the eleven time-zone wide country. This is anything but centrally located. The rest of Russia, say everything east of Moscow has long felt like the red-headed step child of Moscow and St. Petersburg, when in fact, most all of the gas and oil and a good bit of the Russian technological and science thinking talent resides east of the capital. Siberia would’ve been a much more central location for Skolkovo.
The severe western location aspect of Skolkovo also does not connect in any meaningful way, the vast RAS and secret city resources mentioned above. This is a shame because Russia is again starting from the ground up, when they don’t have to, and could marshal these key nodes in from the cold to build their center of excellence.
The Russian government has in a number of ways followed advice I gave them in my Moscow Times columns on Russian innovation development in 2005, here and here. But to make such fundamental mistakes on perhaps the easiest of principles more than ten years later is sad.
Russians sometimes won’t listen to Americans unless they know us a bit better. It is because of this, that I don’t feel insulted. I just keep going with my exhortations.
So pay no attention to me, Prime Minister Medvedev. I’m sure you’re doing all that you can. If you should however, encounter any difficulties in the areas I discuss above, please do get in touch. I’d be happy to help in any way I can.
(Thanks to Russia Insider for their assistance in writing this article)
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
A Century Later, Beloved Brontosaurus May Reclaim Its Name
Brontosaurus is back, baby!
Generations of schoolchildren have learned that a massive, long-necked dinosaur called Brontosaurus once roamed Earth. But in fact, scientists dropped that name more than a century ago — referring to it as Apatosaurus instead.
Now, after a thorough analysis of dozens of long-necked specimens, a team of British and Portuguese paleontologists says it’s time to revive the old name.
“It’s the classic example of how science works,” study co-author Dr. Octavio Mateus, a paleontology professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal, said in a written statement. “Especially when hypotheses are based on fragmentary fossils, it is possible for new finds to overthrow years of research.”
(Story continues below infographic — click to enlarge.)
The backstory. Starting in the 1870s, rival paleontologists Othniel C. Marsh and Edward D. Cope were scouring the American West, competing to find new dinosaurs in what became known as the “Bone Wars.”
During Marsh’s digs, his team found two incomplete skeletons of massive, long-necked sauropods. Based on one of the skeletons, Marsh announced the discovery of a new dinosaur called Apatosaurus ajax, the “deceptive lizard” in 1877. Then, two years later, he described the second skeleton as belonging to another new species called Brontosaurus excelsus, the “noble thunder lizard.”
But after paleontologists collected a specimen with features similar to both Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus, they said the two dinosaurs were too similar to belong to separate genera. And so in 1903, Brontosaurus was re-classified as Apatosaurus excelsus.
A second look. For the new analysis, the researchers spent five years examining the scans and fossils of 81 sauropod specimens. Then they conducted statistical analyses to discover how much the dinosaurs differed, based on 477 specific features, Scientific American reported.
“Our research would not have been possible at this level of detail 15 or more years ago,” Dr. Emanuel Tschopp, a paleontologist who led the research while completing his PhD at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, said in the statement.
Paleontologists Emanuel Tschopp and Octávio Mateus measuring a sauropod dinosaur femur.
What did they find? Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were less similar than would be expected from two species belonging to the same genus.
“It was a number of small differences that were important, but probably the most obvious features that would help distinguish the two is that the Apatosaurus has an extremely wide neck, where Brontosaurus’ is more high than wide,” study co-author Dr. Roger Benson, a paleobiologist at Oxford University, told Wired.
Brontosaurus as researchers see it today.
Not so fast? Though some experts are excited at the prospect of bringing Brontosaurus back, others say further research should be conducted before the name gets reinstated.
“It’s going to be a long time before we get there, probably, but this paper is a big start in terms of getting the debate going,” John Whitlock, an associate professor at Mount Aloysius College who wasn’t involved in the research, told the Washington Post. “At the end, though, we’re going to be in a much better place in terms of truly understanding the evolution of the lineages we study, and that’s exciting.”
A paper describing the new research was published online on April 7 in the online journal PeerJ Computer Science.
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
The Virtual Loser
I am not a real loser, but I feel like one.
By all accounts, I am very fortunate and by American standards I am a poster child for a successful immigrant who played by the rules, worked hard and became a good and productive citizen of this great country of ours.
Yet for reasons beyond my comprehension, I no longer have any sense of accomplishment. If anything, I feel that whatever I have achieved is not good enough. There is more to do. There is more to accomplish. Look at the Kardashians!
We have a culture that values and rewards public performance, not introspection. Everyone is performing and not many of us are thinking unless, of course, you are Senator Tom Cotton who seems to be thinking for both Americans and Iranians.
It appears that we no longer have tolerance or patience for deep thoughts and meaningful conversations. We always have to be doing as opposed to being. The notion of self-cultivation is out of fashion, replaced by the neverending goal of cultivating more followers and “likes.”
We live in a culture where everyone is a celebrity and purportedly famous, advertising their mundane and not so mundane daily activities to the world through Facebook and Twitter.
I, on the other hand, intentionally and decidedly do not have any presence whatsoever on the social media. Besides using emails for what I consider legitimate communication purposes, my interaction with the Internet is limited to reading the news (faithfully, I might add) and doing research; my relationship with social media is, let’s say, non-existent as I am rather ambivalent about high-tech gadgetries.
I have a blackberry. No eyes rolling, please. I like its keyboard as it allows me to type long reports or emails, thank you very much. Anything else my Q10 Blackberry offers is irrelevant.
And I certainly do not want an iPhone as I refuse to have a device that knows more about me than I know about it.
I recently got a phone call from my cellphone provider offering to upgrade me to an iPhone for free since I have been such a faithful customer. When I told the salesperson that I liked my Blackberry and did not want to change it, he ventured, with an excited voice, to educate me about all the things my iPhone could do for me and all the apps that could make my life easier and more fun! When I told him that I was disinclined to trade my privacy with the convenience of these apps, and that beyond the issue I actually like my blackberry… Silence. Then he said “Ummm, okay.” It was the strangest okay I have heard in a long time. The kind of oookaayyy you might hear from someone who just heard you say that you invented the Internet!
In this culture where everyone seems to be on Facebook, I am not (virtually) out and about.
I am always amused by people’s reaction when they ask if I am on Facebook or whether I have an iPhone and I answer both questions with an emphatic NO. Nowadays people think there is something wrong with you if you are “not connected.” My favorite next comment is the “how come?” with a “what’s wrong with you” undertone.
How come? How about I do not want to be connected, damn it!
I like people, but I also cherish being alone in the quietness of my apartment. I like solitude. I like to read, think, reflect on what I have read and discuss it with friends whom I know physically rather than virtually, over long dinners where we enjoy a bottle of wine and the absence of gadgets. This is exactly what’s wrong with me. I like actual human interactions that are private, real and serial. Not so 21st century?
No matter what I like, my real achievements seem increasingly hollow as I do not feel accomplished enough; whatever “enough” means… The reality is that I feel out of place in a culture that promotes excitement and extreme feelings; a culture that is full of “very.”
Listening to people in the media, politics or even my neighborhood, I am always intrigued by the repetition of the word “very” in everything; very angry, very happy, very sad, very exciting, very late, very loving, very stupid, etc. I can’t help but think what’s wrong with me? Why I am not feeling “very” anything.
In the standards of the virtual world, I am clearly a loser as I have not “established” myself, staked my virtual territory and amassed a respectable “enough” following. I have come to realize that my discomfort stems from a profound question: Are my accomplishments in the real world not good enough unless they are advertised to and “liked” by the virtual world?
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Facebook TV Arrives — Taking on Bcast / YouTube
Video on Facebook is changing — in a big way. No longer does video mean video ads. It’s a full screen mobile experience as well.
As mobile grows dramatically, Facebook is able to bring a video experience to the mobile app at a scale that is dramatic.
People are spending time on mobile.
At the recent Facebook developer conference F8, Mark Zuckerberg announced a change that will heat up the direct battle between FB and YouTube. It used to be if you wanted upload and embed video on your site for free, there was only one place to do that: YouTube. But as of today, users can embed Facebook-hosted videos on their blogs or sites.
Facebook is already a big player in video — with Business Insider reporting that is already seeing 3 billion videos streams on the site per day. This is before embedding allows FB videos to move around the web. Until recently, Facebook’s videos were mostly YouTube embeds, but that’s likely to change rapidly, as the new feature takes hold.
Socialbakers has data showing that in December, for the first time, Facebook page owners posted more native Facebook video than YouTube video.
So why would users make the move from YouTube to Facebook? A few reasons. First, YouTube has never been able to provide any meaningful monetization to the so-called “long tail” users, the small users who make up the bulk of YouTube’s traffic, but don’t fit neatly into the emerging ad agency appetite for YouTube stars now presented in the Google Select product.
But, the other reason is community. YouTube has historically not been able to manage the often unpleasant and often nasty discussions that have attacked legions of misogynistic trolls. They’ve shifted to require “real name” identity through Google+, but that hasn’t worked particularly well. On the other hand, Facebook’s community has always been based on a rather strict requirement of a real identity, and as a result communities have formed on the site that are now open to video.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed video specifically, telling Wired:
Video is growing very quickly on Facebook. A lot of people compare that to YouTube. I think that kind of makes sense. YouTube isn’t the only video service, but I think it’s the biggest and it probably makes more sense to compare Facebook video to YouTube rather than Netflix because that’s a completely different kind of content.
When we are thinking about stuff like embeds we are not thinking about how we are competing with YouTube. We are thinking about how are we going to make it more useful for people to share stuff on Facebook.
Fidji Simo, Facebook’s Product Manager — shared Facebook video stats saying the platform gets three billion video views a day. Interestingly 65 percent of those are on mobile, and 53 percent is share news feed links.
Maher Saba, Facebook’s Video Engineering Director — explained the new video API. The API lets publishers control when videos go live on Facebook and watch people engaging with the videos. What about monetization? No word on that -at least not yet. “We’re really exploring early options to allow content creators to have business models on the platform,” Simo said, being purposely vague.
And Facebook is going further, updating its commenting plungin in a meaningful way. Until this week, using Facebook comments on a publisher site gave publishers the ability to host FB comments on their site. But now sites can mirror the FB conversations on the publishers site. This means that posts on FB will feed the publisher sites, and sites on the publisher pages will feed to Facebook. “The value here is we can unify the conversation in multiple places,” said Simon Cross, a product manager on Facebook’s platform team told Marketingland. “We think that’s going to increase engagement on your website because there will be more comments there.”
So, why does it matter? Well Facebook is reaching a remarkable segment of the U.S. population — a segment that before only Broadcast Television was able to claim. Said Facebook in an internal powerpoint that leaked on to the net: “In the U.S., you can reach 179M people every month. Many of these people are on Facebook every single day. In fact, you can reach 128M people every day in the U.S. and 101M people every day on mobile.”
And just in case you don’t think that Facebook is going directly after both the TV audience and TV dollars — here’s a direct quote from the Facebook powerpoint:
On TV, advertisers don’t always know who people are, and over-deliver to certain people and can’t reach other people. So advertisers end up hitting the same people over and over again with a large portion of the audience being underexposed.
With Facebook, you can precisely reach the audience you want, and know that your impressions are being delivered to the right people.
Going further — Facebook makes it clear in the deck that YouTube is in their cross-hairs — giving FB sales reps this language to present to ad buyers: “When you use video on Facebook, these are chosen views — the consumers clicks to play or scrolls through to watch the video as compared to an ad on YouTube interrupting the user experience and feeling forced.”
And then, just to make sure they’re not perceived as going after Google directly — the deck prompts sellers: “avoid saying anything negative about YouTube — leave the impression of the user experience up to them.”
Between the tech changes, the new APIs and the clear focus on improving advertising targeting to demographics — one thing is clear: Facebook is determined to be a big player in the video space. Big and focused on where YouTube and Network TV are most vulnerable.
It’s a big, bold, powerful stance. One worth paying attention to.
This post appeared on Forbes.
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
'Email In Real Life' Is Proof Positive That Emailing Is Pretty Weird
Have you ever really thought about what you sound like in an email? It’s not very semicolon-right parenthesis. [ ]
What if you had to physically “reply all” in the real world? Or spoke like you do when you think your email requires some CAPSLOCK action? Comedy duo Tripp and Tyler show us what the office would be like if our email behavior spilled out into our daily real-life interactions.
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Rand Paul's Campaign Website Accepts Bitcoin Donations
(Adds quote from Paul spokesman, paragraph 5)
By Amanda Becker
WASHINGTON, April 7 (Reuters) – Supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul have the option of making donations to his campaign using the digital currency bitcoin.
Paul was in his home state of Kentucky on Tuesday to launch his 2016 White House bid. His campaign website, Stand With Rand, went live to coincide with the launch.
The website’s donation page reminds individuals that they are allowed to contribute up to $2,700 per election cycle and gives them the option of using a credit card, the online service PayPal or bitcoin.
The move to allow bitcoin donations reflects the Kentucky senator’s tendency to embrace new technology, his courting of Silicon Valley donors and outreach to younger voters, which would be a core constituency of a successful Paul campaign.
“Our campaign will be the most technologically savvy campaign. We’ll engage across all platforms, from Snapchat to bitcoin,” Paul spokesman Sergio Gor said in an email.
Paul, a libertarian, supports a flat income tax, cutting government spending to balance the budget, lessening the authority of the Federal Reserve and preserving personal liberties.
His campaign slogan is: “Defeat the Washington Machine.”
Bitcoin users favor the digital currency due to low transaction costs and instantaneous transfer. The U.S. Treasury categorizes bitcoin as a decentralized, virtual currency. Britain announced last month that it would begin regulating digital currencies such as bitcoin for the first time.
(Additional reporting by Eric Walsh)
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Hulu's New GIF Service, Explained In Hulu GIFs
On Monday, Hulu unveiled a new website called The Perfect GIF, which it hopes will get people all like:
You can search through over 1,400 animated GIFs, filtering them by TV show, “actions” or “reactions.” A spokesperson for Hulu told The Huffington Post that each GIF is carefully selected by social media and design teams.
“We have a very thorough approval process for each GIF,” the spokesperson said via email. “It goes through multiple internal teams to ensure the moments are authentic to the show as well as fan favorites.”
You could dig up something from “Saturday Night Live,” or look specifically for people “#driving” or, as in the GIF below, looking “#gross”:
You can also use the site’s search tool to look up other keywords.
The Perfect GIF is hosted on Tumblr, where most of the users are teenagers, according to a GlobalWebIndex report. So the eight GIFs tagged “#school,” including this one, might get a good workout:
Each GIF is branded with show and network logos, plus “#hulu,” so they feel a bit like advertisements.
That said, Tumblr users are pretty friendly toward branded content. Marissa Mayer, president and CEO of Yahoo!, which owns Tumblr, says the average sponsored post on the platform is “reblogged” 10,000 times. So maybe Hulu’s GIF project will pay off.
You won’t be able to forget that this is a corporate page when you’re browsing, though. You’re pointed to a pretty intimidating “Terms of Use” page at every turn.
And that might kill your buzz a little.
This story has been updated to include comment from Hulu.
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Take A Ride On The Back Of A Giant River Turtle
As far as adaptation goes, many turtle species have been unable to keep up with our rapidly changing planet. The giant South American river turtle is no exception, as habitat destruction has stripped the giant reptiles of historic breeding grounds.
Researchers with National Geographic released this incredible point-of-view video shot from the back of one of the animals, also called Arrau turtles, as she interacts with her young.
Populations of river turtles have suffered due to habitat loss and poaching. One researcher in the video says there are fewer than 600 animals left in a group that once numbered upwards of 10,000. The species is now listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Beaches are protected by armed guard before the nesting season, during the nesting season and afterwards until the females have migrated with their young,” Richard Vogt, the curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Institute of Amazonian Research, says in the clip.
Take a look above.
– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Bendy battery promises safety, speed
Engineers unveil a flexible aluminium battery which they say could offer a cheap, fast-charging and safe alternative to current designs.
Hands On: OmniFocus 2.1.1 (iOS)
We put this on our To Do list three months ago: “Write combined Hands On about both OmniFocus and OmniOutliner’s new iPhone versions”. The company said they were coming, they were quite clear about what would be new about them, we were quite sure it was an important update but also that it wasn’t worth a complete re-review of them. We’ve covered both apps before, we’ve liked both of them a lot, they haven’t changed. Except, in use the one big new feature in OmniFocus is bigger than we thought — and much more has changed too.
<img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/224851276413/u/0/f/625547/c/34342/s/452dda9c/