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13 Nov 22:06
Mobile Is Eating The World (continued)
by Fred
This isn't the first post I've written with this headline. That was here. But both of the posts are about slide decks I saw.
I was looking at Henry Blodget's Future of Digital 2013 deck this morning and saw this slide in it:
TV is hanging in there admirably. It seems to be weathering the mobile onslaught even better than the desktop web. But the mobile monster is eating everything. The jump from 2012 to 2013 should be terrifying to anyone who has a business based anywhere but mobile. That includes me. Wow.
12 Nov 15:52
Traveling on business? Bizpora helps you meet interesting, relevant people
by Martin Bryant
If you travel a lot on business, you’ll know how difficult it can sometimes be to meet relevant, interesting people, either as a sales/partnership prospect or simply just to hang out. Now that Nokia has shut down Dopplr, Bizpora is looking to step in to help travellers network more effectively.
The service integrates with LinkedIn to fill out your profile information, and lets you announce upcoming trips so that local people can connect with you. You can also view people planning to visit your city. Originally operating as Startup Stay (a kind of ‘Airbnb for startup co-founders’) Bizpora has been through the UK’s Ignite100 accelerator and now aims to facilitate meaningful connections wherever business people are likely to meet new people
➤ Bizpora
Thumbnail image credit: theeraphol/Shutterstock
12 Nov 02:54
Drop A Pin, Tell A Story With Google's New 'Tour Builder' Tool
by ReadWrite Editors
Today Google launched a new experimental feature for crafting and sharing stories using Google Earth. Released in honor of Veteran's Day, Tour Builder—which requires both the Google Earth plug-in and a Google account—allows users to create a virtual tour using photos, descriptions and mapped points (or pinned locations).
The United Service Organizations and United States veterans have already added their own tours, though the company hopes others—such as touring musicians and educators—will find broader uses for the tool.
Image courtesy of Google.
11 Nov 18:47
Riding Bitcoin's record high, Bitcoin ATM trades $100,000 in a week
by tim@dailydot.com (Tim Sampson)
Riding the crest of the digital’s currency’s latest record-high value, the first operational Bitcoin ATM is already doing big business.
In its first week, the Bitcoin ATM, located at a coffee shop in Vancouver, traded more than $100,000 CDN worth of the cybercurrency, though it's unknown how many unique users took advantage of the new service.
Reaching the $100K mark was no doubt aided by the fact that Bitcoin is currently trading at an all time high. On Monday, a single Bitcoin traded for as much a $372 U.S., according to Mt. Gox, the world's leading Bitcoin exchange.
It's a tremendous rise for an experimental cryptocurrency that started the year trading for less than $10 and has experienced numerous crises of confidence in recent months. In the past month, the price of Bitcoin has steadily increased from $140 to its present, record value.
As the price has gone up, there have been numerous efforts to add legitimacy to the currency. Bitcoin was anonymously created four years ago as unregulated digital currency that could be spent like cash online. Because of its experimental nature, Bitcoin has been dismissed by many, but supporters are eager to prove it’s here to stay.
Hence the Bitcoin ATM.
Though Nevada-based Robocoin has been building the machines for a while, stringent government regulations—especially in the United States—have kept operators from installing them. That is, until the end of last month, when the three teenage owners of Bitcoiniacs established their first location in their hometown of Vancouver. The Bitcoiniacs spent $18,500 on the machine, with plans to set up several more throughout Canada.
Though they divulged their gross transaction amount to the public, the operators of Bitcoiniacs would not detail just how many users tried out the machine in its first week. It's clear the sum came from more than just a few users, because Canadian money laundering laws prevent anyone from depositing more than $3,000 Canadian a day into the machine. A palm scanner on the machine itself prevents users from exceeding the daily deposit limit without forfeiting their anonymity.
Mitchell Demeter, one of the ATM's owners, told the Vancouver Sun that the number of daily users so far has exceeded his expectations. The machine has also had the added effect of boosting general interest in Bitcoin.
"We knew people would be excited and interested," Demeter said. "I'm a little bit surprised by the amount of new people who are excited about it and just coming out and learning."
The success of Bitcoiniacs' machine and Bitcoin’s stratospheric trading price is cause for joy for a lot of Bitcoin boosters, but there is still plenty of risk associated with the currency. A lack of regulation can mean a lack of security, as several panics resulting from technical glitches at Mt. Gox proved earlier this year. And the looming threat of a government crackdown could make the entire system worthless or relegate it to the dark corners of the Internet.
Photo by Marc Van Der Chijs/Flickr
11 Nov 15:10
tumblr_m4zao1tU161qe6mn3o1_500.gif (500×281)
by antbaena
Sarahbelfit, Sofía Henao and one other like this
11 Nov 15:02
A Mesmerizing GIF Of A Perfect Game Of Snake - Business Insider
by sebastianram
Vvicked, Snipergirl and 9 others like this
11 Nov 04:47
This script shows you how Facebook ranks all your friends
by Emil Protalinski
Have you ever wondered how Facebook ranks your friends for you? The company keeps a score for everyone you interact with on the social network.
This affects the order of results when you start typing a name into the search box, the people that appear in your Friends pane when someone visits your profile, whose content shows up in your News Feed, and pretty much any list that displays who you interact with on the site. To put this in layman’s terms, Facebook tracks who you interact with or stalk, and vice versa.
As a result, Facebook users are often curious to know how the service ranks their friends. Many people have created tools to list these figures, and Arjun Sreedharan‘s is one of easiest to use.
You can check your friends’ rankings in just three steps:
- Drag and drop the following link to your browser’s bookmarks bar: FB Friends Ranking
- Login to Facebook and click on the bookmark.
- You will see a list of your Facebook friends’ ranking score (scroll down past the “undefined” entries).
The first 15 entries of an example ranking score look like this (names have been blocked out to protect the innocent):
As Sreedharan explains, the smaller the friend’s score, the higher the rank:
The score gives an indication of the length of the edge between you and the friend. I guess only facebook would know what it exactly means
In other words, unless you’re a Facebook engineer, this number is meaningless by itself. It is only useful when compared to your other friends and/or people who you interact with on Facebook.
See also – Facebook is tweaking its News Feed ads algorithm to consider user feedback, including what you report or hide and How Facebook’s Entity Graph evolved from plain text to the structured data that powers Graph Search
Top Image Credit: Manjunath Kiran/Getty Images
10 Nov 20:58
Voting Reduces Diversity in Social Media Participation (Kinda)
by davidbanks
Just about every social media network that relies on voting has more men than women in their user base. Graph from pingdom,com
The merits of voting[1] have come under scrutiny as of late, thanks in part to Russell Brand’s comments on the topic in his guest edited edition of the New Statesman. (Oh and I think there might have been an interview as well.) I’m highly suspicious of voting as well, which is why my ballots are mostly blank except for the one or two things I think might be strategically useful in later direct action. I voted earlier this week in a local election because my city is still small enough that there are very real and tangible differences to electing one counsel person over another: One city council person authorizes citizen working groups to organize municipal composting while another led the charge to close an indy media center that hosted an Iraqi artist because… terrorism.[2] A lot has already been said about the efficacy of voting and why it alone cannot possibly bring about the fundamental change that politicians promise. Besides, if you’ve read your Zinn, you know that all the important stuff happens between elections anyway. What I want to touch on today however, has less to do with government elections, and more to do with the abstract concept of voting. Why is it that, if voting is implemented within a system, do we automatically assume that it is more democratic? What happens to social networks and web platforms when we install voting as the overriding system of displaying public opinion? Why shouldn’t the critique of voting in general be directly imported as a critique of the social networking sites that use voting as the primary form of interaction on the site?
Strict up or down votes are a relatively recent invention. They were first and most widely used in armies that needed to choose a new leader from amongst themselves.[3] This makes sense if you consider what voting actually means: choosing among several discrete options with the full expectation that some people —sometimes even more than half— will feel as though they did not get their way. Unless they’re the product of consensus and comprise, group decisions must be enforced through sanctions or punishments. Organizations like militaries have the strict chains of command and ready access to deadly force that are necessary for such decision-making. If you ask most radical leftists why they don’t vote its mainly for this reason. Not only are the limited options woefully inadequate, but the very idea that one side loses while the other side wins is undergirded by the promise of violence.
Is is disturbing then to think that voting —at least in the West— is widely perceived as not just a governmental process, but as a synecdoche for democracy. Sometimes other actions are rhetorically transmuted into “voting” so as to imbue some larger social structures with democratic features. We are said to “vote with our dollars” as consumers under capitalism, and we “vote with out feet” when we abandon a declining neighborhood. Watch a People’s Choice Award acceptance speech and you’ll hear a lot about what “the people really want” in their musicians and entertainment. Given the underlying structural violence that keeps capitalism in place, perhaps phrases like “voting with your wallet” are actually more accurate than most people realize.
Social media sites that heavily employ voting as part of the user experience often go heavy on the democratic rhetoric as well. Reddit’s vote-based system of arranging stories elevates it from “news aggregator” to democracy’s digital white savior. Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of Reddit, has been described as the “Mayor of the Internet” and goes on speaking tours about how sites like his are evidence of the Internet’s capacity for self-governance. The users themselves are also quick to call Reddit a democracy. If a news story (or, lets be real, a cat video) ends up on the Front Page, we are supposed to take that as a message of collective, public opinion. This is an enticingly simple model and some news sites like PolicyMic have taken to implementing similar voting systems to organize comments and stories on their own site.
Curiously, sites like Tumblr or Pintrest, which are arguably no less “democratic” but far less reliant on numerically ranking content, are not so quickly and readily described as such. These sites are also —and as I will explain in a moment— uncoincidently used by more marginal populations. While the average Reddit user is a 20-something American male, just about every other social media network has a majority of women and popular sites like Twitter and Instagram have many people of color from urban counties. Its difficult to say whether its causative or simply a correlative trend but the relationship is clear nevertheless: sites that rely heavily on simple voting (Reddit, Stack Overflow, Hacker news ) have much higher percentages of male users.
A few months ago I asked whether it was possible to build an anti-racist Reddit. I suggested that,
Perhaps the design solutions necessary to sufficiently discourage racism on Reddit would make it unrecognizable. A web platform that relies so heavily on quantifiable upvotes, comments, and karma might very well encourage undesirable behavior. Things that are shocking or provocative garner a lot of attention, which almost always translates into karmic rewards. It might be worth comparing the quantification-heavy design of Reddit with the virtually number-less Tumblr interface.
The flip side of that observation is that undesirable behavior can be reinforced through majoritarian voting only when the undesirable behavior is held by a majority of people. Then again, its hard to tell if white young males are attracted to a site that is set up to reward their view of the world, or if Reddit is populated by young white males because it comports so well with what they think see as the optimal method of aggregating public opinion. Its easy to see voting as inherently democratic when you never encountered a voting system that is set up to disenfranchise you. Perhaps it is time to apply the critique of voting to our social media networks. Voting leads to more homogenized user bases and rather than encouraging different points of view, demands that one win above all others. I will treat Reddit like I treat my local ballot: use voting as a tactic to support allies and future efforts at direct action.
David is on Twitter, Tumblr, and yes- even Reddit.
[1] I recognize that there are many different kinds of voting, some of which are far better than others. Preferential, instant-runoff, and ranked voting all have their relative merits but for the sake of this post I’m referring to the kind of voting that dominates in the United States and Great Britain.
[2] For state and national elections, I’m an avowed party-line voter for the Rent is Too Damn High party. The fact that that is a joke, should disturb you greatly.
[3] See page 185 of David Graeber’s The Democracy Project (2013)
08 Nov 03:40
If you want a new feature in your favorite Valve game, try Reddit
by fernando@dailydot.com (Fernando Alfonso III)
It's happened to every gamer at some point: You have a brilliant idea to fix your favorite game. But most of us are forced to wait for someone actually working on the game to have the same brilliant idea, then wait for months until it finally gets updated. That’s unless the game-maker is Valve.
The feature idea was posted Monday night on Reddit’s r/GlobalOffensive, a forum for the fourth installment of the popular online first-person shooter Counter Strike, Global Offensive. The request was pretty simple: whenever a player stops moving, show their remaining number of weapons, grenades, and remaining money as icons above their avatar. Eight hours after redditor R-arcHoniC made the suggestion, Valve developer Matt Wood saw it and weighed in.
By Thursday morning, the new features had been added to the game.
This wasn't the first time they the first time they made a change based on a community suggestion. Over the past month Wood has hopped into a handful of other r/GlobalOffensive threads to address weapons bugs and radar issues. “I think it's great how involved they are, the game has improved so much since it came out of beta last August and is one of the best competitive FPS [first person shooter] games played today,” redditor Tripleshadow wrote.
Click to enlarge
Sadly, the Valve team won't reveal everything to their fans on Reddit. One thing Wood wouldn’t address is the state of Half-Life 3 (HL3), a highly anticipated title gamers have lusted over for nine years.
“They should send a copy of HL3 into deep space and destroy every other copy in existence,” mulvahlok said. “It'll drive space exploration to the point of star-trek level within a month or so.”
Photo via Steam
08 Nov 02:58
The Internet Archive seeks donations after fire destroys $600,000 of equipment
by Rich McCormick
A fire at the Internet Archive's San Francisco scanning center has destroyed an estimated $600,000 of digitization and scanning equipment. Fortunately no-one was injured in the blaze, but the property damage has ruined "some physical materials" that were yet to be digitized, and restricted the non-profit organization's ability to record the history of the web.
Of the physical materials the fire destroyed, about half had already been digitized. The Internet Archive says it's now working with library partners to assess what can be replaced. None of the Internet Archive's digitized data was lost in the fire as backups are held in multiple locations.
08 Nov 02:57
Facebook teams with Microsoft to offer cash for bugs
by Tom Warren
Microsoft and Facebook want to find security problems with some of the key technologies that power the web. The pair have teamed up to create an internet bug bounty project, dubbed HackerOne, that rewards security researchers for finding issues with PHP, OpenSSL, Apache, and even the underlying internet communication protocols. Rewards range from minimums of $300 to $5,000 depending on the specific vulnerability and the associated severity. Volunteers from Facebook, Microsoft, and even Google will form a panel to judge the entries, and there’s a list of disclosure rules to ensure bugs are reported and disclosed correctly.
While Microsoft, Facebook, and Google all compete online, the collaboration is designed to target high profile...
08 Nov 02:29
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by clapyrhands
unk, David Pelaez and one other like this
07 Nov 19:10
ExFEARiential is hilarious
by Mark
The folk at john st in Toronto have tapped into the experiential campaigns that we have all seen and loved and taken it to an all new level. The babynapping one is the best I think. Very amusing stuff. In their own words: Give your customers an experience they’ll never, ever forget. Muggings. Riots. Babynappings. We’ll do anything to get your brand noticed.
Directed by Jono Hunter @ OPC//FamilyStyle
06 Nov 21:11
This Robot Lets Your Dog Take Selfies and Text You Them
by Tom Emrich
Pet people are crazy. I know this because I am one of them.
It’s a good kind of crazy. The kind that means you will do just about anything to make your little fur-baby happy; less of the kind that convinces you to dress your cat up in tights to make her look like she has human length legs.
And Canada is fully of pet crazies – about half of Canadian households own some kind of pet. Canadian pet owners make up a whopping $6.5 billion-a-year business opportunity for an industry that includes anything from clothes, houses, couches and food. Soon to be added to this list is Fido’s very first robot.
PetBot is a pet communication slash treat dispensing device that lets you to see, talk and feed your pet from your smartphone. It is perfect for you to keep an eye on your pet to make sure they are safe. It can also ease the pain and guilt we all have when we have to leave home alone while we slave away at work to make money necessary to buy them things.
The wireless robotic cube has a remote-controlled live webcam which can be moved up and down either online or via an app allowing you to interact with your dog. You can either speak to your pet live via PetBot or set it up so that it plays a pre-recorded sound clip before dispensing a treat.
My favorite feature is the image recognition software which detects and selectively sends you photos of your pet when they get close to PetBot. For me, getting a selfie of your dog as a text is the ultimate sign of the future.
The Toronto-based team behind PetBot is currently raising $20,000 on Kickstarter to get their first batch of PetBots out the door just in time for Christmas. The campaign is already a quarter of the way to meeting their goal in just one week since they launched.
Earlier this year, a similar device, Petzila, raised over double the amount they were funding on Indiegogo. The $30,000 campaign finished at just over $79,000 early in September. Like PetBot, the Petzila also provides communication and treat dispensing. Their units are also expected to ship in December of this year but the backer price was significantly less starting at $99. Albeit the functionality did not seem to be on par with PetBot.
PetBot has been extensively tested and created with dogs in mind. But in anticipation of cat owner inquiries, BetaKit confirmed with PetBot that their device can indeed be used with cats. That being said, the company did indicate that testing with cats is limited and the feedback is mixed and that they are currently in the process of getting our product out to more cat testers.
PetBot’s Kickstarter video, that will be sure to tug on your heartstrings with the adorable pup and romantic comedy/coffee house soundtrack, can be watched below.
06 Nov 03:00
Stephen Colbert's new Twitter parody account heaps robotic praise on Fox News
by audra@dailydot.com (Audra Schroeder)
Stephen Colbert’s relationship with Fox News is straight out of a romantic comedy: Will they or won’t they?
The host most recently praised the network (that is, took it to task) for its updated newsroom full of absurd screens and Shepard Smith’s apparent addiction to Candy Crush. But last night, after referencing author David Folkenflik’s new takedown of the news channel, he took praise to another level.
Specifically, the level of a Twitter bot. With the help of his producer, Rob Dubbin, Colbert recently launched the account @RealHumanPraise, which grabs lines from positive movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and adds in names of Fox reporters. Every two minutes. And it’s already surpassed 18,000 tweets.
All your favorite hosts are there:
Nearly every aspect of the Sean Hannity myth we know today is embodied in this exciting, socially aware adventure. #PraiseFOX
— Real Human Praise (@RealHumanPraise) November 5, 2013
Huckabee doesn't try to look like or resemble Trace Gallagher, but he does wind up embodying him. #PraiseFOX
— Real Human Praise (@RealHumanPraise) November 5, 2013
A minor but enjoyable Neil Cavuto and George Will collaboration. #PraiseFOX
— Real Human Praise (@RealHumanPraise) November 5, 2013
The question is: How long will this praise bot last before Twitter pulls the plug? Possibly signaling fatigue, the bot’s already starting to get a little dark in content:
One of those grand horror stations that induces discomfort by showing practically nothing. #PraiseFOX
— Real Human Praise (@RealHumanPraise) November 5, 2013
Earlier today, the Fox News site displayed some interesting headlines, after an alleged internal error caused “dummy” copy to appear, which made it some of the most compelling reading the site’s had in years.
H/T Defamer | Screengrab via Colbertnation.com
05 Nov 20:57
Digg Video launches, aggregating a mix of funny and serious clips
by Adrianne Jeffries
Digg just launched Digg Video, a new vertical that features a mix of entertaining and informative clips updated throughout the day by the site's editors.
Digg.com/video mirrors the look of Digg.com, featuring one lead video atop three columns of additional clips. The browser and mobile web version launch today, with the iOS app launching shortly and Android version coming later this month.
The new vertical is no surprise considering the rising popularity of video on the web. "Videos perform significantly better than other stories on the Digg homepage," says Andrew McLaughlin, CEO of the team that relaunched the content aggregator in 2012. "That suggests a high level of user interest in videos; we want to feed that interest without...
05 Nov 20:44
Fox News website defaced, 'internal production problem' to blame
by Jacob Kastrenakes
Fox News' website briefly appeared to be defaced this afternoon in what the network is calling an "internal production problem." For several minutes, the site's foremost story was changed to the headline "WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," with the blurb beneath it reading, "STUFF YO." Another headline read, "HERE IS SOME STUFF FO YO," but the website — aside from what were seemingly a few display glitches — was otherwise untouched. Even the headlines regarding zombies and Apple's "Maverick Sea Lion" were actually old stories that had been resurfaced. Fox's site has since returned to normal operations.
05 Nov 16:18
Multitrack Love pulls songs apart for you to put back together
by Rich McCormick
Multitrack Love is a small browser app that holds an array of classic pop and rock songs split off into their constituent parts. Click on the gray box, choose a song, wait for it to load, and you can strip out specific tracks from its audio. Hearing songs you've heard thousands of times before broken down feels like peeking behind the curtain, as demonstrated by recent The Beatles vocals-only tracks. Multitrack Love proves an acapella Enter Sandman is a surprisingly cheery experience, Roxanne without instruments is punctuated by strange twanging noises, and Beat It still sounds great with just MJ and that guitar solo. A tip: head first to Weezer's Say It Ain't So and turn off everything bar the backing vocals for a memorable falsetto...