Submitted by gitamba
Budcaddell
Shared posts
19 Feb 03:26
Artist exposes New York City gentrification using Google Streetview
by Kwame Opam
New York City plays host to a particularly overwhelming form of gentrification. It's constant and relentless, meaning buildings — even historic ones — can vanish and be replaced with luxury high rises before you ever realized they were there. Artist Justin Blinder captures that in his new art project Vacated, a series of GIFs created with images collected from Google Streetview that shows the changing landscape of the five boroughs, forcing the viewer to question the less-than-invisible forces that bring about those changes.
18 Feb 17:14
this isn't happiness™ Peteski
by turn
Sarahbelfit, Cooper Griggs and -1 others like this
15 Feb 18:27
Facebook knows when you fall in love... and when you'll break up
by Ellis Hamburger
Facebook often undertakes data studies to coincide with current events, holidays, and pop cultural moments, but the site's Valentine's Day research results are particularly interesting. First off, Facebook says that San Francisco residents have the smallest chance of getting into a relationship among people in any of the 50 largest American cities. If you're looking for love, Facebook says, your best bet is Colorado Springs, CO, a city that boasts the largest probability of "relationship formation." San Francisco also ranks as the city where single men most outnumber single women, Facebook says, and Memphis ranks as the city where single women most outnumber single men. Detroit is the city with the highest percentage of single people...
11 Feb 19:07
The weird world of 'Flappy Bird' clones
by Andrew Webster
Flappy Bird is gone. The mobile gaming sensation was pulled from both the iTunes App Store and Google Play by creator Dong Nguyen, but in its place an army of clones has arrived. A quick search for "flappy bird" in the App Store, for example, brings up names like Splashy Fish, Fly Birdie, City Bird, and Flying Flappy Unicorn Bird.
Most of these games are simply reskinned versions looking to capitalize on the surprising popularity of Flappy Bird, letting you play the same exact game, only with characters like doge or a piece of poo in place of the bird. Soon you'll even be able to play as members of the band Fall Out Boy. But many take the game's simple concept and reinvent it in intriguing new ways. Here are some of the best.
11 Feb 16:52
Square Tapped By Whole Foods In Its Second Big In-Store Payments Deal
by Leena Rao
A year and a half after debuting a massive partnership with Starbucks, payments company Square is announcing its next big, in-store retail deal: Whole Foods. When Square debuted Stand last year, the assumption was that this high-powered hardware and software play would help attract large retailers. Clearly, this is a sign that this strategy is working.
The deal essentially places Square Stands and registers in all Whole Foods in-store venues (not checkout lines). These include sandwich counters, juice and coffee bars, pizzerias, and beer and wine bars in Whole Foods. In some of these spots (i.e. sandwich counters) shoppers had to go through the regular checkout line to purchase food. In other venues (ie wine bars), there was an existing register or even standalone ordering kiosks. These will all be replaced by Square Stands, the hardware device Square has developed for we understand.
For Whole Foods, having registers at various spots in the store where people are just buying one or two items on the go, helps reduce the wait time for customers who are just picking up dinner or lunch. And Square’s checkout process is seamless and also includes extra features like the ability to add things like tips, or send email receipts. Today, seven Whole Foods Market venues already use Square Stand, including stores in Austin, New York City, Florida and the San Francisco Bay Area, and all venues across the U.S. will eventually use Square and Square Stand.
“Together with Square, we’ll deliver options to expedite checkouts, and we look forward to developing new concepts to further simplify and improve grocery shopping,” said Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods Market in a release. “Square’s forward-thinking vision and technology makes them an ideal partner to create a convenient, responsive experience for our customers.”
For Square, this is obviously a high-profile, highly visible deal. While the company’s technology is not yet powering the grocery checkout line, placement in the grocery giant’s juice and coffee bars and sandwich stands could be only the beginning. At select venues, Whole Foods Market will offer customers the option to use their mobile device to pay using Square Wallet, Square’s consumer payments application. And several Whole Foods Market locations will serve as “lab stores,” testing additional innovations around Square and payments.
“Whole Foods Market and Square share a focus on supporting local sellers and creating amazing shopping experiences,” said Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Square in a release. “With Square, Whole Foods Market will enable commerce in more parts of their stores with easy, accessible tools that showcase the best of what’s achievable in the service of retailers and customers.”
Last year alone, Whole Foods did $13 billion in revenue. Even if Square is powering payments for a small fraction of that pie, that’s still a win for the company, which hasn’t announced a big retail partnership of this size since Starbucks. Another thing to consider about this deal is that Whole Foods could see the ease of use of Square and want to expand this to checkout registers, which would be an enormous coup for Square. If the company is eying an IPO, more deals like this should spark investor interest.
Photo Credit/Flickr
04 Feb 15:38
Netflix takes on $400 million in new debt to fund original content and European expansion
by Ben Popper
In the battle between Netflix and HBO, things are continuing to heat up. In its most recent quarter Netflix pulled way ahead of HBO in terms of its number of US subscribers, and saw shows like House of Cards pick up the kind of awards HBO is used to winning. But Netflix still trails far behind HBO's more than 100 million global subscribers and doesn't produce nearly the volume of original content.
Today Netflix formally announced it was planning to raise $400 million in debt to fund European expansion and the creation of new original shows. It's not the first tech company in recent months to take advantage of very favorable interest rates. Apple had $145 billion in the bank when it decided to take on fresh debt to finance a stock...
03 Feb 19:58
Thomson Reuters Taps Into Twitter For Big Data Sentiment Analysis
by Ingrid Lunden
Twitter bases the majority of its revenue on advertising in and around its main content river, but a new service from Thomson Reuters points to how it also continues to build up its position as a big-data provider to different vertical sectors. Thomson Reuters is now incorporating sentiment analysis gained from Twitter for its Eikon market analysis and trading platform. The commercial terms of the deal are not being disclosed but to be clear it is not a deal directly with Twitter: a spokesperson confirms that it will be “combining a number of third-party and proprietary Twitter feeds for this service.”
You can think of this as an expansion of the kind of Twitter mining first tried out by Bloomberg last year, in which the company (a rival to Thomson Reuters) incorporated Tweets related to specific companies in a wider data stream.
Here, the Thomson Reuters implementation goes one step further by then creating visualizations and charts based on this kind of data — one of these is illustrated above. Looking at the graphics, traders and other Eikon users then will be able to look further into the data to track specific Tweets, people and companies on Twitter.
“We aren’t revealing exactly which services we use but we are combining a weighted list of what we consider to be industry influencers with all StockTwits (people Tweeting using cashtags related to global stock markets) and also a cross-twitter feed that provides us with a significant sample of all Tweets across the world to give us the volumes needed to make patterns meaningful,” the spokesperson tells me. While Thomson Reuters doesn’t disclose what third parties may be involved in its rollout, the types of companies that are sitting in between Twitter and customer-facing enterprises like Thomson Reuters include the likes of Datasift, which mines and helps structure data from social networks like Twitter through the use of metatags.
For now, the sentiment analysis uses only Twitter, but Thomson Reuters is working on adding more content sources, including blogs, in the future.
Thomson Reuters believes it is the first mainstream financial platform to provide twitter sentiment in this way “on a broad scale.” Eikon has some 120,000 people using the service on desktop, “and that grows exponentially every week.” That’s a turn of events from a few years ago, when Thomson Reuters was still sweating out the billion-dollar investment it had made into the development of Eikon as a way to better compete against Bloomberg.
With the SEC last year formally acknowledging that companies can communicate news legitimately via Twitter (as long as investors are alerted of it), Twitter has become an increasingly central part of the conversation around how different businesses and industries are progressing.
But for those of us who have already been using Twitter as a news source, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for the financial industry to come around to figuring out how to do this more formally. Thomson Reuters itself acknowledges that some “50% of quantitative firms are now using machine readable news feeds,” citing research from the Aite Group. But as with other examples in the big data space, in many cases a lot of that data is not easily usable for non-technical people — traders being the specific people in question here.
“Behavioral finance is an area of increasing interest in financial markets. However it has been difficult for human traders to keep pace due to the sheer volume and detail of data and the need to interpret it and spot trends immediately,” said Philip Brittan, chief technology officer and global head of platform for Financial and Risk, Thomson Reuters, in a statement. “With the addition of this sentiment data to Eikon we are combining our unique content and insight with innovative visualization and analytics tools. This is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we plan to do to turn qualitative, unstructured text into quantitative and actionable insight for our customers.”
Other vertical deals announced that mine Twitter data for bigger-pictures of consumer usage and trends include a deal with 300 Entertainment for music insights; and deal with Dataminr and CNN to mine Twitter for breaking news, aimed at newsrooms worldwide (not just those of CNN itself).
