Tesla Motors Inc. and Panasonic Corp. said Tuesday that they would begin producing cells for solar panels next summer at a sprawling factory opening in Buffalo, N.Y., expanding a relationship between the two technology firms.
For Fact-Checking Website Snopes, a Bigger Role Brings More Attacks
SAN DIEGO — The last line of defense against the torrent of half-truths, untruths and outright fakery that make up so much of the modern internet is in a downscale strip mall near the beach.
Snopes, the fact-checking website, does not have an office designed to impress, or even be noticed. A big sign outside still bears the name of the previous tenant, a maker of underwater headphones. Inside there’s nothing much — a bunch of improvised desks, a table tennis table, cartons of Popchips and cases of Dr Pepper. It looks like a dot-com on the way to nowhere.
Appearances deceive. This is where the muddled masses come by the virtual millions to establish just what the heck is really going on in a world turned upside down.
Did Donald J. Trump say on Twitter that he planned to arrest the “Saturday Night Live” star Alec Baldwin for sedition? Has Hillary Clinton quietly filed for divorce? Was Mr. Trump giving Kanye West a cabinet position? And was Alan Thicke, the star of “Growing Pains,” really dead?
Uru finds the best places to introduce ads in online videos
New York City-based startup Uru is working on a new way for video publishers to make money. Imagine watching a normal-looking online video — except that on some of the surfaces (say, on the cabinet behind the stars of a cooking video), you’ll see logos or other art promoting a sponsor.
Okay, that might actually sound a bit annoying, but Uru co-founder and CEO Bill Marino argued that it’s a better fit with videos — not to mention emerging media like augmented and virtual reality — than most traditional forms of advertising.
“We are headed towards these more immersive mediums,” Marino said. “AR and VR are coming pretty swiftly, so we need to rethink how brands are presented inside these mediums. It has to be a lot more seamless and harmonious with the content.”
We’re already starting to see that with custom, sponsored videos, but Marino said that it’s “just not scalable” for creators to always work directly with advertisers and shoot new videos for each one of them.
Uru also says that in a study conducted by a researcher at the Center for Behavioral Research at New York University’s Stern School of Business, the new formats resulted in 80 percent better brand recall than existing video ad formats.
The company is announcing that it has raised $700,000 in “pre-seed” funding led by Notation Capital, with participation from Betaworks, PJC, Rough Draft, Thatcher Bell, Christian Noske of BWMi, Giphy CEO Alex Chung, Chris Cunningham of C2 Ventures and Eric Franchi of Undertone.
Marino and his co-founder/CTO Brunno Attorre met at the Cornell Tech Startup Studio, where they won the Startup Award. In fact, they said they’re the first Startup Award winner to raise institutional funding.
Marino told me that Uru’s technology isn’t just looking for flat, logo-friendly surfaces — it’s also “content aware.”
“We identify the objects in [a video and] we identify higher level themes,” he said. “That’s really, really important. None of us want to see a Coors logo in a David Lynch film.”
That means Uru isn’t limited to a single ad format. For example, Marino said it can identify the moments in a video where there’s a natural break, making an opportune spot for mid-roll video ads.
The startup is still in the early stages of signing up advertisers and publishers, but it’s already held discussions with adtech company AppNexus. In a quote provided by Uru, AppNexus Senior Vice President of Technology Eric Hoffert said: “We are excited about the novel approach Uru is taking to make video advertising more seamless with content to improve user experience.”
This article originally appeared at: https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/30/uru-funding/.
Affordable motion capture system is an entire studio in a suit
Crayola Gets Edgy With Art
Crayola’s “Art With Edge” social campaign helped the creative brand experience some of its largest growth online during the three-week initiative.
Developed with Red Interactive Agency, the concept was designed to relieve stress for college students during finals and mid-terms by creating “surprise and delight moments.” After students expressed their feelings across social media, Crayola reached out to them with Crayola product packs, gift certificates and pizza.
“Most of the students we reached out to were genuinely excited and thankful for a simple gift and message of encouragement,” says Mark Beechy, ECD of Red Interactive. “The internet can be a pretty cynical place but after a few weeks of reaching out to tired, hungry and stressed students I walked away amazed at how much impact a simple gesture of kindness can have. It doesn’t take much to brighten someone’s day just a little bit.”
Crayola reported 4,000 more Twitter engagements per month during the course of the campaign, as well as an average of 40.8 engagements per tweet within the hashtag #ArtWithEdge. There was a week over week percent increase of hashtag mentions by 614% and 455% increase of potential hashtag impressions week over week.
“And the sincere thank you’s we got back made for a really enjoyable campaign to be a part of,” says Beechy. “Rarely in marketing do we get to simply help someone out. It was a nice change of pace.”
Early in the campaign, college students started to strongly associate both Crayola and #ArtWithEdge coloring books as a de-stresser for finals week, they say. And Crayola’s Twitter feed began seeing students reaching out and calling Crayola “the plug” for saving them during finals week.
“College kids like coloring,” says Beechy. “Who knew? It’s an easy way to just relax and slow down for a few minutes. And a good reminder for all of us just how refreshing that can be. Also, students aren’t super jaded about everything.”
Breaking the Black Box: What Facebook Knows About You
We live in an era of increasing automation. Machines help us not only with manual labor but also with intellectual tasks, such as curating the news we read and calculating the best driving directions. But as machines make more decisions for us, it is increasingly important to understand the algorithms that produce their judgments.
We’ve spent the year investigating algorithms, from how they’ve been used to predict future criminals to Amazon’s use of them to advantage itself over competitors.
All too often, these algorithms are a black box: It’s impossible for outsiders to know what’s going inside them.
Facebook has a particularly comprehensive set of dossiers on its more than 2 billion members. Every time a Facebook member likes a post, tags a photo, updates their favorite movies in their profile, posts a comment about a politician, or changes their relationship status, Facebook logs it. When they browse the Web, Facebook collects information about pages they visit that contain Facebook sharing buttons. When they use Instagram or WhatsApp on their phone, which are both owned by Facebook, they contribute more data to Facebook’s dossier.
And in case that wasn’t enough, Facebook also buys data about its users’ mortgages, car ownership and shopping habits from some of the biggest commercial data brokers.
Facebook uses all this data to offer marketers a chance to target ads to increasingly specific groups of people. Indeed, we found Facebook offers advertisers more than 1,300 categories for ad targeting — everything from people whose property size is less than .26 acres to households with exactly seven credit cards.
We built a tool that works with the Chrome Web browser that lets you see what Facebook says it knows about you — you can rate the data for accuracy and you can send it to us, if you like. We will, of course, protect your privacy. We won’t collect any identifying details about you. And we won’t share your personal data with anyone.
Download the Facebook tool for Google Chrome
Watch the video series at: https://www.propublica.org/article/breaking-the-black-box-what-facebook-knows-about-you.
The Robotic Grocery Store of the Future Is Here
We think we’re at the forefront of how people will buy groceries going forward
Robotic Grocery Shopping
When a customer orders groceries via Ocado’s website, large plastic crates are swiftly filled. The containers are packed by hand, but little legwork is required: 30 kilometers of conveyor belts at the Dorden warehouse carry empty boxes straight to people who work as pickers. They grab items from shelves that are replenished by robots, or from boxes brought out of storage via cranes and conveyors. Ocado’s algorithms monitor demand for products and use the information to map out an optimal storage scheme, so that popular items are always within easy reach.
Once an order is packed, it’s hauled off in a large truck and taken to a distribution center to be loaded into a van. Each van then embarks on a delivery route that can be carefully optimized according to factors such as customer time preferences, traffic, and even weather.
But Ocado wants to be faster. “Fractions of a second in our business count,” says Paul Clarke, Ocado’s chief technology officer. “It’s all about how we can shave the next little bit off our process.”
Woman Murders, Impersonates Romantic Rival On Social Media
Uber expects to give 15 million rides for New Year Celebrations
That’s three times more than last year.
If you’ve ever tried to hail an Uber on New Year’s Eve, you know it’s either impossible to get a ride or it will cost you. This year should be a little different, mostly because Uber now shows you what the total cost of the ride will be up front. In other words, there won’t be any surprised New Year’s Eve revelers waking up to receipts for short rides that cost upwards of $100.
It’s typically the busiest night of the year for the ride-hail company, and Uber predicts that this year, it will hit more than 15 million rides across the 450 cities it operates in. That’s three times as many as last year.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a really important night for the company — and it’s a hard one to get right. The demand is unlike what Uber sees even on the busiest weekend nights, which means the company spends most of the evening and New Year’s Day fielding an onslaught of user complaints about the resulting surge pricing.
In past years, even Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been on deck and spent his night either on Facebook or Twitter either triaging user complaints or updating his followers on the demand in certain markets.
It turns out the patterns of demand are fairly consistent across the markets the company is in — at least as of 2013. So the company is also suggesting a few ways to get around on New Year’s Eve without paying too much: In addition to sharing your rides and checking the up-front fares, Uber is also reminding users to plan around the most expensive time frame, between midnight and 3 am.
This article originally appeared at: http://www.recode.net/2016/12/29/14116244/uber-new-years-eve-15-million-rides-surge-pricing.
