Last Friday, the app for the blogging site Tumblr quietly disappeared from the iOS App Store, with no apparent explanation. Now, after a weekend of silence, we know why — and it’s a really bad reason. When the app vanished, a page appeared in Tumblr’s help center basically giving the […]
Read MoreFacebook has been refined over the years to keep you online and interacting with the service as long as possible. That ensures you’ll see lots of Facebook ads, but it can be a drain on your time if you get stuck in a Facebook vortex. With everyone suddenly concerned about limiting screen time, Facebook has rolled […]
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After Facebook announced in August that it was working on activity trackers so that users could see how much time they’re spending on the Instagram and Facebook apps, the company confirmed that the feature is starting to roll out. Called “Your Time on Facebook,” it is starting to roll out now […]
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Passwords aren’t as effective a means as preventing account break-ins as they might seem. Three out of four people use duplicate passwords, and 21 percent of people use codes that are over 10 years old. (In 2014, among the five most popular passwords were “password,” “123456,” and “qwerty.”) Two-factor SMS authentication adds […]
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Mirroring a situation earlier this year with Telegram’s app for iOS devices, the official Tumblr app unexpectedly disappeared from Apple’s App Store — a development the service now explains is due to child pornography sharing by some of its users. Owned by Verizon, Tumblr currently hosts 447 million blogs, and it […]
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Agora, a platform that makes it easier for developers to add voice and video features to their applications, has raised $70 million in a series C round of funding led by hedge fund Coatue Management, with participation from SIG, Morningside, and Shunwei Capital. The news comes just five months after Agora […]
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The worldwide honeybee community is in a crisis. In the years leading up to 2013, over 10 million of the nearly 90 million managed beehives were lost — close to twice the normal rate. Eight years ago in Northern Ireland alone, beekeepers reported an alarming decline of greater than 50 percent. […]
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Germany-based fitness equipment and software startup eGym has raised $20 million in a series D round of funding led by Nokia-funded venture capital firm NGP Capital, with participation from Highland Europe and HPE Growth Capital. Founded out of Munich in 2011, eGym’s platform constitutes both hardware and software. The company builds fully connected […]
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One of the features of Apple’s newer iPhones is Portrait Mode. This basically allows users to take a photo with their iPhone where it then applies bokeh to the image to help foreground objects stand out from the background. Apple further enhanced it by allowing users to edit the amount […]
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Google has announced plans for a new energy-efficient datacenter in Denmark, the company’s fifth datacenter in Europe. It will be located on the outskirts of Fredericia, a small town on the eastern side of Denmark, and Google said it’s spending around €600 million ($685 million) on construction, which is expected to […]
Read MoreAppDialer Pro, a simple T9-style app launcher, has gone free, according to developer Oleksii Masnyi in a recent Medium post. The free version of the app is being discontinued, with all users being given a refund if they purchased AppDialer Pro after Aug. 31, 2018. All Pro features will now be available at no charge, […]
Read MoreArticle Contents Thanksgiving week is already here, at least for us in the US. That means that you should expect a lot of apps to be on sale this week and going into next. Today is no exception, so prepare yourself. In the coming days, I’ll be doubly sure to highlight in bold anything that […]
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Location-based check-ins reveal a lot about a person — and college students in particular, as it turns out. Researchers at Purdue University published a paper (“Exploring Student Check-In Behavior for Improved Point-of-Interest Prediction“) on the preprint server Arxiv.org early last month describing how Wi-Fi access logs could be used to […]
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Pretty much ever since Instagram started booming in popularity, users have turned to automated apps that generate likes and follows from fake users to make it seem like their posts are gaining more attention than they actually are. Now, Instagram is trying to crack down on these fishy apps using […]
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Another day, another profitable exit for a well-regarded startup. Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Atlanta, Georgia-based FSLogix, the company behind the eponymous award-winning FSLogix app provisioning platform, for an undisclosed sum. In a blog post, Brad Anderson, corporate vice president at Office 365, and Julia White, corporate vice president at Microsoft Azure, wrote […]
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Microsoft announced in September that Skype calling would come to devices with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant by the end of this year, and it’s finally made good on that promise. Amazon today confirmed to The Verge that starting this week, Alexa users will be able to make outgoing Skype voice and […]
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Tired of Alexa’s staid, monotonous tone? Well, thanks to a new artificial intelligence (AI) technique, Amazon might soon be able to roll out new speaking styles to its voice assistant at a rapid clip. In a newly published paper (“Effect of data reduction on sequence-to-sequence neural TTS“) and an accompanying blog […]
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The mobile app market is on the upswing, according to research firms like App Annie. Global downloads grew an estimated 15 percent and consumer spend 20 percent year-over-year in Q2 2018, and smartphone users spent more money on apps — $18.5 billion — than in any quarter in history. One of the most popular […]
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Facebook’s Portal. Amazon’s Echo Show. Smart displays — tablet-like touchscreen devices with built-in voice assistants — aren’t exactly on the cusp of ubiquity, but they’re following in the market footsteps of the Echo and Google Home. At least, that’s what manufacturers seem to be hoping. Facebook and Amazon chose to […]
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With some analysts predicting as many as 10 million self-driving cars will hit the road by 2030, it’s no wonder that the lidar market is projected to be worth $1.8 million in just five years. Lidar — sensors that measure the distance to target objects by illuminating them with laser light […]
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As AI assistants get smarter, consumers are trusting them to help sort through the avalanche of buying choices available. To learn how to shift marketing efforts to capture newly connected customers, how to leverage voice bots right now, and more, don’t miss this VB Live event! Register here for free. […]
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The world is a beautiful place, there are many wondrous sights around us, but yet there are some in this world who are visually impaired and are missing out. However it seems that over the years, we’re starting to see various hi-tech ways of helping those who are visually impaired […]
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