Zillabyte radically simplifies the process of setting up a web crawler. More and more data-minded developers and marketers are looking to create custom data sets from the open web and these kinds of components combined with ZBs infrastructure will make it much faster and easier to roll your own big data. One to watch.
Aha! is a tool for product managers to plan a roadmap, so keywords were related to "product management", "visual roadmap", etc. I am not sure how keywords match a game like Solitaire but my guess is that the game somehow contains a dictionary that they pass to google when ads are being chosen. Or perhaps the description of the game is keyword stuffed?
I have a theory. Last week there was a big story about how Facebook was “dead and buried” because teens didn’t want to be on a service that their parents had moved into. Now, when it comes to security, the parents care a lot more than the kids. Could Snapchat be playing fast and loose with the security of their user data as a way of scaring away the grownups?
This would be a clever ploy but for one damning fact. A large share of Snapchat’s users are minor children. Could anyone, from the CEO of Snapchat to the perpetrators of SnapchatDB really think that risking the broadcasting of the phone numbers of 12-year-old girls and boys is a risk worth taking?
I HAVE a theory that a (not so)clever writer for Forbes is plugging his story by planting misguided theories everywhere UPON which I plan to plant my theories on his planted theories on snapchat CEO "rumor" theories.
I have a theory that Mark Zuckerburg, fearing the demise of facebook, had his ninja assassins infiltrate SnapChat and compromised their security, hoping to drive teenagers back into the arms of facebook.
A Polar poll shows 23% of respondents complain of "too many fails." (http://www.polarb.com/131862) and certainly that has been my experience. I wonder whether more people are not overtly complaining about it because users feel that they are "doing it wrong," not that the software might have been too fiddly for release.
Sure, that's one possibility, but I'm not sure I'd take that poll's sample as being even remotely representative. At this point it's people on both sides pointing to weak evidence to support conclusisions they've already drawn.
To be clear, I have no dog in this fight, but I don't think that any information I have seen so far has a hope of being accurate.
The only dog I have in this fight is my iPhone 5S! My big question is whether the problem is hardware or software. The necessity to press the fingers just so and the UI validation giving, in effect, a false positive makes it seem like software. For Apple's sake I hope so. Software updates are a lot easier and cheaper than hardware recalls.
I've found this to be the case, often because Apple has branded itself so well with the "It just works" campaign, so when something doesn't work, many people assume they are what is broken, rather than the device.
Right. That's the point I was trying to make. Even if this little poll has a margin of error of 10% that still would leave more than 10% of people with a problem, but not talking about it yet.
Twitter is becoming more like Tumblr in its pursuit of in-line media. Vine is only the most recent example.
The developer angle, from the story:
"The combination of the building out of the platform and Twitter's pushing away of third-party developers has the company somewhat at a crossroads. In order to serve each type of user best, Twitter has to give users more ways to filter their timelines (i.e., all tweets by people I follow with video, or all tweets with video and a given hashtag.) But experimenting with these kinds of "client" features is what the dis-invited third-party developers do best. Perhaps there is a middle ground where developers can write "plug-ins" to allow users to transform their experience within Twitter, the most popular of which Twitter would buy and fold into the main product."
Very cool looking, but it does not return the best prices for the searches. I compared to hipmunk (which doesn't always have the best prices itself) and found significantly lower fares. Keep at it, guys!
See my reaction to Condon's story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/01/21/faceboo... As he suggests, “The only way to prevent re-posted content is to unlike everything.” And as Facebook continues to abuse the Like function, or to allow (or at least be unable to prevent) third-parties from abusing it, many users may find themselves doing just that, or ditching Facebook altogether.
I like the logical chess game that Dotcom is playing here. Even if everybody knows that some of the storage will be used for copyrighted material, it can't be proven that ANY of it is. There are many legitimate reasons why people want secure, encrypted and private storage, so innocent until proven guilty (which can't be proven!)
Well, copyright owners can still send DMCA takedown requests on links that include the decryption key. But Mega can't automatically take down copies of the data (since any copies will be encrypted by a different key), and more importantly they can't offer big copyright houses custom tools (like MegaUpload did, and Youtube does) that find and flag material for them automatically.
I wonder how much of a house of cards would be necessary to distance MEGA from such indexing sites and yet still profit from it. Dotcom did say he is interested in new business models. How new could it be?
There is a larger point here about technology in general. The things that are supposed to make us happier are not, in fact, making us happier. To the technologist, more pixels and faster frame rates are an undisputed good. As Kevin Wines from THX tells me, “When film was the only medium for cinema, using lower frame rates was based on economics. With film, directors and producers would have had to use more film, making it cost prohibitive to use high frame rates, but now that we use digital data, there’s no fiscal reason not to use high frame rates.” No reason, of course, other than that the impact on viewers may be different than what the technologists were expecting. To people in the user-centered practices, every product, and every feature of every product, is a proposition, a question we ask users. Like the ophthalmologist giving an eye exam, “better now, or now?”
