Microsoft’s Andromeda device could be announced later this year. A patent filing made public today illustrates not only how it could look, but also how it could work — and how it could fit into your life.
The post Folding ‘Andromeda’ device could be Microsoft’s iPhone moment appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Russia expects as many as 2 million visitors during the 2018 World Cup, most of whom should take extra precautions against the country’s many cyber risks.
Source: Wired
Want to get into Bethesda’s Fallout 76 beta? We don’t know when the program will launch, but we provide instructions on how to get ready. The game officially launches on November 14.
The post Want to get into the ‘Fallout 76’ beta? Here’s how you do it appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
In addition to giving the Chromebook Plus V2 more speed this year, Samsung is adding a secondary camera and spill-resistant keyboard. There’s a lot to love at $499, but the screen may be the Chromebook Plus V2’s Achilles heel.
The post Samsung’s speedier Chromebook Plus V2 now comes with a second camera appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Juul Labs, the company behind the ever-popular Juul e-cig, has today announced a new policy around social media.
This comes in the midst of Juul’s effort to get FDA approval, which has been made more arduous by the fact that the FDA has cracked down on Juul after learning how popular the device is with underage users.
As part of the new policy, Juul will no longer feature models in pictures posted on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. FWIW, Juul doesn’t even have a Snapchat. Instead of using models to market the e-cig, Juul Labs will now use real former smokers who switched from combustible cigarette to Juul.
Juul has always said that its product was meant to serve as an alternative to combustible cigarettes, which are considered far more harmful to your health.
Juul has also initiated an internal team focused on flagging and reporting social media content that is inappropriate or targeted to underage users.
The company mentioned that it has worked to report and remove more than 10,000 illegal online sales since February from various online marketplaces.
We reached out to Juul to see if any changes have been made to the way that Juul targets ads on social media and elsewhere. We’ll update the post if/when we hear back.
Here’s what Juul Labs CEO Kevin Burns had to say in a prepared statement:
While JUUL already has a strict marketing code, we want to take it one step further by implementing an industry-leading policy eliminating all social media posts featuring models and instead focus our social media on sharing stories about adult smokers who have successfully switched to JUUL. We also are having success in proactively working with social media platforms to remove posts, pages and unauthorized offers to sell product targeted at underage accounts. We believe we can both serve the 38 million smokers in the U.S. and work together to combat underage use – these are not mutually exclusive missions.
In April, the FDA sent a request for information to Juul Labs as part of a new Youth Tobacco Prevention Plan, which is aimed at keeping tobacco products of any kind out of the hands of minors. The information request was meant to help the FDA understand why teens are so interested in e-cigs (particularly Juul) and whether or not Juul Labs was marketing the product intentionally to minors.
In response, Juul announced a new strategy to combat underage use, with an investment of $30 million over the next three years going towards independent research, youth and parent education and community engagement efforts.
Since August 2017, Juul has required that people be 21+ to purchase products on its own website, but online and offline third-party retailers have not been so diligent.
Source: TechCrunch
Step aside, Allbirds. Atoms come in quarter sizes you can mix-and-match. Emerging from stealth today in a TechCrunch exclusive, this shoe startup’s obsession with satisfaction allowed it to replace my Nikes. I’ve spent the last 2 months wearing Atoms every day. They’re the first sneaker classy looking enough for semi-formal occasions, but that I can comfortably walk or even hike in for hours.
Here’s how Atoms is modernizing the footwear experience:
Image via Jeff Macke
At $179, Atoms are pricier than $100 lifestyle Nikes or $79 Allbirds. But the basketball shoe giant just sells in half sizes, while Allbirds offers only whole sizes that fit few perfectly. The right quarter-size Atom for each foot makes them feel molded to your body.
“To make shoes better, you need to know why people wear shoes” Atoms co-founder Waqas Ali tells me. People buy fancy dress shoes they never wear, yet feel embarrassed by the childish designs and branding on most sneakers. “We perfected Atoms for your everyday routine — walking, standing, and commuting” he explains, “You are a person not a billboard, so there’s no logo”.
That hasn’t stopped the shoes from going viral during their beta testing phase. Everyone who tries them on seems to rave about them. That’s driven 4000 people to sign up on the Atoms waitlist which you can join to be first in line. Atoms launch this summer in the U.S., with the first wave of customers getting their shoes in late June/July.
Husband and wife duo Waqas and Sidra Ali started their first shoe company in Okara, Pakistan back in 2012. They attacked the market with one of the best qualities you can find in an entrepreneur: curiosity. Instead of coming in with preconceived notions, they traveled the world to research how people actually wear shoes. “You might assume that ‘Oh in Italy, everyone wears leather shoes’, but the young people there were all wearing sneakers” Waqas recalls.
After launching a Kickstarter, the Alis came to Silicon Valley to go through the prestigious Y Combinator startup accelerator in Summer 2015. There, they drilled into more customer research and product design.
Comfort and style were the big deciding factors in most sneaker purchases, so that’s where the couple wanted to differentiate. They discovered that over 70 percent of people have at least a quarter-size different feet, and over 7 have a half-size discrepancy. So why don’t other shoe company offer quarter sizes? “They make tons of different shoes” Waqas says.
Suddenly, the two guiding principles of Atoms aligned. By designing just a single unisex model in a limited set of colors, it could make quarter sizing scalable while stripping away all the goofy extra fabrics and patterns. 35 percent of customers already take two different sizes. That breakthrough attracted $560,000 in seed funding from LinkedIn’s ex-head of growth Aatif Awan and Shrug Capital.
But Atoms is determined to avoid being labeled a Silicon Valley shoe. Rather than coders, the company wants creative types like painters and graphic designers to be its early adopters. The vision is to create a sneaker a head chef could wear all night in the kitchen without hurting, but that look elegant enough that they could stride into the chic dining room with confidence.
“Most shoes in the market that claim they’re comfortable are only comfortable when you try them on” Waqas laments. Take that other shoe startup Allbirds. They’re super soft and made of wool, and the first steps feel like you’re wearing cloud slippers. But walk 10 blocks and you’ll find the bendy bottoms don’t protect you much.
That’s why Atoms hired an 18-year veteran of the shoe business who’s worked with Adidas and Puma out of Portland and South Korea. He prototyped tons of different versions for Atoms. The result is a strong but light outsole on the bottom with indents cut out for anti-slip traction and to reduce weight. Meanwhile, the upper’s tough mesh material breathes but holds its shape, and refuses stains.
Image via Adam Bain
“Shoe companies say they use sustainable materials but you go to the factories and everything is falling apart” Sidra tells me. Organic materials sound nice but can break down too quickly. “The way we make our shoes environmentally friendly is that they last long” Waqas says with a laugh.
Two months of tough wear later, my Atoms are holding up great. The foamy mid-sole has frayed a tiny bit in the front like many shoes. And the knit materials ingrained some dust when I went camping in them that needed some brushing to get out. But they’ve succeeded in becoming my go-to shoe I can chill, work, and play in.
Now Atoms is trying to build more commerce innovation to turn buyers into lifetime wearers. It’s working on a special pattern for the insole that will rub off based on where you put your weight. The idea is that when people send their old pairs in for a discount on the next, it can analyze that insole pattern to improve the shape of future models.
One day, Atoms hopes to create a completely personalized shoe shopping experience. It hopes to actually give you slightly different insoles with more or less arch support depending on how you wore the last ones. And it’s planning early access to new color combinations and laces for repeat buyers.
It will have to rely on that nimbleness and a flawless customer experience if Atoms are going to gain a foothold in a business dominated by brands with huge ad campaigns and brick-and-mortar distribution. One thing it’s thankful to its shoe startup competitor for is that “Allbirds has shown the world is not just ruled by Nike and Adidas”.
Luckily Atoms has strong differentiation in a world of interchangeable sneakers. “I thought quarter-sizing was a joke or gimmick until I tried the 10.25s” one customer said. “How will I go back to a 10.5 when 10.25 fits so well?” Personally, there hasn’t been another tech or startup product in the past 10 years beyond Apple’s AirPods that has cemented itself so deeply into my daily life.
“There’s no way to hack shoes” Waqas concludes. “You just have to make a good shoes.”
Source: TechCrunch
Everyone from Elon Musk to AdBlock Plus wants to tell you which news sources are worth trusting. Now news aggregator Nuzzel is joining in.
Specifically, it’s launching NuzzelRank, which founder and CEO Jonathan Abrams described as “our new authority ranking of thousands of top news sources, using signals from top business influencers.” He said it replaces a more “simplistic” ranking system that it was using for its news monitoring and research product Nuzzel Media Intelligence.
You may also see NuzzelRank outside the company’s Media Intelligence reports. For one thing, there’s a new page with rankings of Nuzzel’s top sources. For another, Abrams said publishers will be able to add badges with their NuzzelRank scores to their websites, and he also plans to make this data available through an API.
At this point, you’re probably wondering how Nuzzel does this ranking. You’re definitely wondering that if you looked at the top sources ranking and saw that TechCrunch is comes in at number four overall. That’s right: We score below The New York Times and The Washington Post, but above The New Yorker and Wired — which is both flattering and a little nuts.
Abrams said there are three main ways that Nuzzel calculates the score. First, there’s data within Nuzzel itself, including the reading behavior of its users. Second, it’s looking at “external signals about the engagement and authority of news sources.”
Third, it’s working with a whole bunch o outside organizations that have developed different approaches to scoring news sources and sorting out which ones are and aren’t trustworthy — so Nuzzel is joining the Trust Project and the Credibility Coalition, and it’s also partnering with NewsGuard and Deepnews.ai.
In the announcement, Abrams emphasized that the company isn’t relying on human editors or making these judgments on its own: “Nuzzel has always focused on building scalable solutions that use software to aggregate existing valuable signals to provide useful results, rather than human approaches that are not scalable and subject to bias.”
Source: TechCrunch
It’s the biggest thing in video games right now. But not the only thing.
Source: CNET
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is coming out this year, but Nintendo didn’t say anything about the Nintendo Switch Online service you’ll need to play it.
Source: CNET
It’s been a year and a half since Google announced App Maker, its online tool for quickly building and deploying business apps on the web. The company has mostly remained quiet about App Maker ever since and kept it in a private preview mode, but today, it announced that the service is now generally available and open to all developers who want to give it a try.
Access to App Maker comes with any G Suite Business and Enterprise subscription, as well as the G Suite for Education edition. The overall idea here is to help virtually anybody in an organization — including those with little to no coding experience — to build their own line-of-business apps based on data that’s already stored in G Suite, Google’s Cloud SQL database or any other database that supports JDBC or that offers a REST API (that that’s obviously a bit more of an advanced operation).
To do this, App Maker provides users with a low-code application development environment that lets you build applications through a straightforward drag and drop environment. Though it takes a bit of work to set up the database connectivity, once that’s done, the actual design part looks to be pretty easy — and thanks to a set of responsive templates, those final applications should work, no matter whether you are on a phone or desktop.
While many applications will likely rely on a database, it’s worth noting that developers can access Gmail, Google Calendar, Sheets and other data sources as well. In total, App Maker offers access to 40 Google Services. Unlike other low-code services like Mendix, K2 or even Microsoft’s PowerApps tools, Google’s App Maker seems to focus mostly on Google’s own services and doesn’t offer built-in connectivity with third-party services like Salesforce, for example. Chances are, of course, that now that App Maker is out of preview, Google will start adding more functionality to the service.
Source: TechCrunch