A new report suggests that spammers, not nation states, may have been behind the Facebook hack. That could be even worse news.
Source: Wired
Water intrusion is the reported cause.
Source: CNET
The Daredevil clips give viewers a blind look at moments from the new season.
Source: CNET
The Ecuadorian embassy reportedly threatened to take away Assange’s cat.
Source: CNET
Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Git-based code sharing and collaboration service, GitHub, has been given an unconditional greenlight from European Union regulators.
The software giant announced its intention to bag GitHub back in June, saying it would shell out $7.5 billion in stock to do so. At the time it also pledged: “GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries.”
The European Commission approved the plan today, saying its assessment had concluded there would be no adverse impact on competition in the relevant markets, owing to the combined entity continuing to face “significant competition”.
In particular, it said it looked at whether Microsoft would have the ability and incentive to further integrate its own devops tools and cloud services with GitHub while limiting integration with third party tools and services.
The Commission decided Microsoft would have no incentive to undermine the GitHub’s openness — saying any attempt to do so would reduce its value for developers, who the Commission judged as willing and able to switch to other platforms.
Microsoft has previously said it expects the acquisition to close before the end of the year.
Source: TechCrunch
Cheapskate exclusive! Smart design, secure fit, great sound — what more could you want? Plus: stock up on scary movies with Vudu’s *killer* $4.99 deal. (Come on, you liked it.)
Source: CNET
It’s only got one lens, while the iPhone XS has two. But what else is different?
Source: CNET
The team behind mileage-tracking app MileIQ, a company Microsoft acquired a few years ago, is out with a new application. This time, the focus isn’t on tracking miles, but rather expenses. The new app, simply called “Spend,” arrived on the App Store on Thursday, offering automatic expense tracking for work reimbursement purposes or for taxes.
Spend doesn’t appear to be a part of some grand Microsoft plan to take on expense tracking industry giants, like Expensify or SAP-owned Concur, for example. At least, not at this time.
Instead, the app is a Microsoft Garage project, the App Store clarifies.
Microsoft Garage is the company’s internal incubator when employees can test out new ideas to see if they resonate with consumers and business users.
Through the program, a number of interesting projects have gotten their start over the years, like the Cortana-based dictation tool, Dictate; mobile design creation app Sprightly; short-form email app Send; the Word Flow keyboard for smartphones; a Bing-backed alternative to Google News; and dozens more.
The new Spend app, at first glance, looks well-designed and easy to use.
Like most expense trackers, it offers features like the ability to take photos of receipts, expense categorization features, and reporting.
However, what makes Spend interesting is the app’s automated tracking and matching, and its user interface for working with your receipts.
The app begins by automatically tracking all your expenses from a linked credit card or bank account. You can then swipe on the expenses to mark them as personal or business. These expenses are automatically categorized, and you can add extra tags for added organization.
You can also add notes to purchases, split expenses, and customize expense categories, in addition to tags.
And the app can generate expense reports on a weekly, monthly or custom bases, which can be exported at spreadsheets or PDFs. There’s a web dashboard for when you’re using the app at your computer, but Spend doesn’t appear on the MileIQ main website at this time. It does, however, have a support site.
How well this all works, in practice, requires further testing.
MileIQ had been the top-grossing finance app in Apple’s App Store for the last 20 months at the time of its acquisition back in 2015. Microsoft had said then the team would work on other mobile productivity solutions going forward.
The company says the new app is an early version, and they plan to revise it going forward as they make improvements.
Microsoft has been asked for more details on its plans with Spend, and we’ll update if they have more to offer.
Source: TechCrunch
Airbnb rolls out a set of new illustrations to better reflect its users—and the world.
Source: Wired
Meet Hiver, a service that lets you collaborate on generic email addresses, such as jobs@yourcompany.com, support@, sales@, etc. Hiver isn’t the only company working on shared inboxes. But compared to Front, everything happens in Gmail directly.
To be fair, Front has been doing a fantastic job when it comes to multiplayer email — and the company has been doing great. Front is a new email client that lets you work together on your inbound emails.
But many teams don’t necessarily want to use a brand new email client. Some people love the Gmail interface so much that they don’t even think about switching to something else.
Hiver is a Google Chrome extension that adds a bunch of feature to your Gmail inbox. In addition to your personal inbox, you can now access shared inboxes with other people in your team. You can then assign an email to one of your coworkers and see what everybody is working on.
If you need help in order to reply to a tedious email, you can write a note in the right column and notify your teammates using @-mentions. All your comments live in this separate column so that you don’t clutter your email thread with forwards and CCs.
Whenever someone starts replying, Hiver shows a collision alert so that customers don’t get two replies. You can also use templates for faster replies, send emails later and share drafts to get another pair of eyes.
More recently, Hiver added automation with simple if/then rules to assign conversations to the right person and categorize your emails automatically.
If you’ve used Front in the past, those features will sound familiar as you can do all of this in Front, and much more. But it turns out that some companies really wanted a “Front for Gmail”.
Hiver just raised a $4 million funding round from Kalaari Capital and Kae Capital. The company is based in India and has 50 employees already. A thousand companies are currently using Hiver, such as Hubspot, Vacasa, Pinterest and Lyft. Most of Hiver’s clients are based in the U.S.
Building a product on top of Gmail creates some limitations. For instance, you’ll have to remain a G Suite customer in order to keep using Hiver. Hiver also works better on desktop. The company has mobile apps, but they are still a bit basic so far.
Hiver uses a software-as-a-service approach. Plans start at $14 per user per month, and you need to pay more for automations, Salesforce integration and more.
Source: TechCrunch