David Lidsky's Blog, page 2972
June 8, 2015
Apple Introduces "News": An Old Idea With Big Potential
WWDC 2015 Update: Apple just unveiled News, a Flipboard-Style news aggregation app that will ship with iOS 9.
Apple is now a Flipboard competitor. When iOS 9 ships in the fall, it will include a new app called News, a newspaper, magazine, and blog aggregator that will feel very familiar to anyone who's ever used Flipboard, Pulse, or one of the many other apps of this nature. The new app was unveiled by Apple's vice president of Product Marketing, Susan Prescott, this afternoon at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference.
Report: Facebook Probably Will Not Launch Internet Satellites After All
Facebook's $1 billion satellite project has reportedly been scrapped.
Facebook's secretive, ambitious plans to build satellites that would bring Internet service to the world's poorest countries has reportedly been cancelled. Amir Efrati of The Information reports Facebook is canceling its plan to launch a satellite, which could have cost as much as $1 billion. No sources are named for the story, but The Information says the news came from a person with direct knowledge of the project and another individual briefed about it.
The New Siri: Smarter, More "Proactive"
Siri's about to get a huge overhaul for iOS 9.
Siri's getting a "proactive" overhaul for iOS 9 that will make the intelligent assistant a whole lot more intelligent—and simultaneously combat growing market share from rival Google Now while engraining Siri into your car. At Apple's WWDC conference in California today (which Fast Company is liveblogging), Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi announced sweeping changes to Siri geared around predicting user behavior and making voice response even quicker.
Amazon Entering PC Gaming Fray, Hiring Game Developers
Looking for a job?
Amazon is actively gearing up to enter the PC gaming world, according to a recruitment post the company has put up on the gaming website Gamasutra. Amazon is seeking to hire game engineers, designers, visual effects artists, and other developers to work on the company's first PC game. The post on Gamasutra says the new roles will join a team that already includes the creators of hugely popular games such as Portal, World of Warcraft, and BioShock.
June 5, 2015
Highlights From Our Live Q&A With Gen. Stanley McChrystal, David Silverman, And Chris Fussell
On leadership, chaos, and empowering far-flung teams.
Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian recently sat down with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell, authors of the book Team of Teams: New Rules Of Engagement For A Complex World, to discuss how organizations can become more effective by eliminating traditional hierarchies and empowering employees at all levels to make decisions.
Microsoft's Follow-Up To Viral Age-Guessing Tool: A Twin Detector
"Twins or Not?" tells you how similar two photos look.
A Microsoft website called "How Old Do I Look?" went viral last month, mostly because its attempts to guess peoples' ages from photographs was sometimes so wildly off base that people immediately began sharing their hilarious results (as well as results from uploaded pics of celebrities, animated characters, and inanimate objects). Now, a Microsoft developer has released another tool, based on the same machine-learning algorithms, that rates how similar or different any two people look.
At The DARPA Challenge, May The Best Robot Win
The finals of the DARPA Robotics Challenge got under way this morning, with 24 teams competing for the $2 million top prize.
"Ladies and gentlemen, start your robots!"
Google Surprisingly Contrite In New Interview About Europe Anti-Trust Case
In an interview with Politico, Google's Europe chief admitted, "We don't always get it right."
Google, which has been the subject of an anti-trust investigation in Europe since April, is now taking a surprisingly contrite stance. In an interview with Politico, Google's European chief executive, Matt Brittin, said, "We don't always get it right. We understand that people here [in Europe] are not the same in their attitudes to everything as people in America."
Meet The Last "Class" Of Thiel Fellows, The Genius Kids Who Skip College And Build Startups
The fellowship is maturing, and now more students will be given $100,000 to drop out of college anytime they please.
Every year since 2011, the libertarian billionaire and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has awarded $100,000 each to 20 talented teenagers who skip college and work on businesses instead. The fellowship promotes Thiel's belief that the higher education system is broken and a waste of time and money for most students.
Mapping Where Foreign Aid Comes From And Where It Goes
How does $168 billion in development money flow around the world? A useful new tool tracks the data.
You'd think that most foreign aid would be reserved for the world's poorest countries, but that's not actually true. For example, according to the advocacy group ONE, the U.S. only gives one-third of its foreign aid to the least developed countries in the world.
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