Scientist Sharon Moalem says we will soon be able to alter our children's lives with genetic manipulation — would you do it if you could?
Genetic Inheritance: How Much Do You Want To Know?
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Genetic Inheritance: How Much Do You Want To Know?
Latest Flixster update adds Chromecast support
If you haven’t heard of Flixster, its an immensely popular movie-related app that is incorporated with movie review site Rotten Tomatoes. Today’s update brings Chromecast support. You can now stream trailers or your UltraViolet movie collection through Flixster to your TV. In addition, this update adds support for HTC devices to download movies, SD card support, and a few bug fixes. The entire changelog for the update:
- Chromecast support for US users
- Movie download support for HTC phone users
- SD card download support for KitKat devices
- Fixed movie playback issue for UK users on HTC and Sony devices
Source: Play Store
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Latest Flixster update adds Chromecast support
In Pictures, Strong Voter Turnout in Afghan Elections Despite Threats
Voters in Afghanistan turned out in higher numbers than expected for Saturday's presidential election, resulting in extended voting hours.
The Taliban had vowed to disrupt the electoral process with violent attacks throughout the day, according to The New York Times. Although one-eighth of all polling stations had to remain closed due to threats, however, the promise of mass violence did not materialize. Instead, Afghans lined up in the cold rain even before voting centers opened at 7 a.m. local time.
Reports of deaths and injuries throughout the day vary, but Reuters reported that at least two voters died and 14 were wounded in Kunar province during isolated attacks at polling stations. Fourteen Taliban militants were also killed Read more...
More about Vote, Presidential Elections, Afghanistan, Taliban, and Us WorldIn Pictures, Strong Voter Turnout in Afghan Elections Despite Threats
Help This Poor Guy Get a Date on YouTube
Four out of five dentists agree that dating is the worst. It's impossible to dispute that fact because science. And no one knows it better than our own Lamarr Wilson.
In this week's episode of Socially Awkward, Lamarr shares some of his dating horror stories and invites you to chime in with advice for his love life. So go on. Do your worst.
Be sure to subscribe to Socially Awkward for a new video every week.
Last Week on Socially Awkward: Top 5 Reasons I'll Miss My iPhone
Image: Mashable Read more...
More about Dating, Love, Watercooler, Videos, and Socially AwkwardHelp This Poor Guy Get a Date on YouTube
11 Creative Portraits Without Faces
We returned to our Mashable Photo Challenge Guest Series this week with 24-year-old freelance photographer Chris Cody. Readers were asked to step out of the ordinary, and shoot faceless portraits.
Cody has a very intentional style when creating his portraits: He hides his subjects' faces behind trees and large bushes. For their part, it was interesting to see how readers approached faceless portraits; some followed Cody's lead and found large objects to hide their subjects behind, while others attempted backward portraits and faceless jumpstagrams. Read more...
More about Photography, Social Media, Mashable Photo Challenge, Mashable Photo Challenge Guest Series, and Portraits11 Creative Portraits Without Faces
News Byte: BrandAds Bumps Up Metrics for Online Video
MRC's lifting of its viewability advisory for display does little for users of pre-roll video, says company's co-founder.
News Byte: BrandAds Bumps Up Metrics for Online Video
Kabam warns players of fraud in 2 of its highly profitable games
Above: The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth
Image Credit: Kabam
Don't let cyber attacks kill your game! Join GamesBeat's Dean Takahashi for a free webinar on April 18 that will explore the DDoS risks facing the game industry. Sign up here.
Gaming powerhouse Kabam has sent a message to players of two lucrative games. Apparently, some players have been hacking and cheating to exploit the economy of the games for their own benefit.
The fraud has led to a lot of agitation among players about Kabam’s actions and whether the company has acted swiftly enough.
Above: Dragons of Atlantis tournament screen where an alleged hacker won
Image Credit: Kabam
The warning went out to players of both Dragons of Atlantis: Heirs of the Dragon and The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth saying the company had received “numerous reports from players who are rightly concerned that these players have been exploiting the system while the majority of players have been playing honestly and fairly.”
Kabam apologized to players and thanked them for their loyalty.
The troubles with hackers and cheaters could be a big problem for Kabam, a big social and mobile game publisher. The company reported $360 million in revenue in 2013 and is often mentioned as a possible initial public offering candidate.
Kabam’s version of the The Hobbit was one of the top ten highest-grossing apps on Apple’s iTunes App Store in 2013.
The concern about the fraud is also acute because it affects players who buy virtual goods in the games with real money. Such players, known as “whales,” are important because only about 10 percent of players (or less) will bother to buy something in the free-to-play games.
“This is to assure you that we are dealing with this issue as a top priority,” Kabam said.
“We have an investigation under way and we are working with both Apple and Google to pursue offenders and end this behavior. This type of fraudulent activity is very serious, and we will take swift and strict action against the players involved.
“We are sending you this message so that you are aware that we are taking the appropriate measures to address these concerns and maintain the integrity of your gaming experience.”
Kabam added, “Your investment in our game allows us to constantly innovate and continue providing for the best game play for you now and in the future.”
In a statement, Kabam spokesperson Steve Swasey said, “We are dealing swiftly to protect the integrity of the game.”
I have been playing The Hobbit for more than a year and noticed that Kabam has been giving out more rewards in recent weeks to thank players for being loyal.
The Hobbit and Dragons of Atlantis are strategy games in which players can build a city, train armies, join clans, and then wage war against rival clans.
The latest problem that has stirred a player revolt has been brewing for a few weeks, starting with the discovery of a security breach. That made big spenders in the game nervous, according to players.
Multiple players told me anonymously that they noticed that some “beta players” appeared to have unlimited “rubies,” or virtual currency, to buy items in Dragons of Atlantis. The presence of such players skews the tournaments inside the game. Those tournaments are played by legitimate players who spend a lot of money in the game.
When legitimate players try to compete against such players, they lose. That motivates the legitimate players to spend more real money in the games.
“The unfortunate part is that, due to the structure of the game, many players won’t realize the hackers and beta players are already at a higher level and have spent money to get there, and we want to warn them,” said John Albaugh, a member of Killer Instinct, a high-ranking alliance of players on the Nehalem server in Dragons of Atlantis.
That led some players to accuse Kabam itself of condoning or creating the fraud. Those players complained to Apple and received refunds for their purchases, while Google refunded only the last 10 purchases and told players to ask for refunds directly from Kabam if they wanted more money back.
More than a week ago, Kabam held a Tournament of Power in Dragons of Atlantis. In that tournament, players noticed that a hacker went from just 2,000 power in the game to more than 14 million in power. That player also posted on the Line mobile messaging network on how to obtain troops in a fraudulent way. Members reported the player to Kabam, but the company took no action during the six-hour tournament. The members captured evidence of how the hacker was selling cheats, but they noted that Kabam did not remove the hacker player. The players said they saw similar evidence with “beta players,” who were reportedly given currency.
Kabam hasn’t yet specifically comment on those allegations. This is not the first time that Kabam has faced a player revolt. Back in September, Kabam made a policy change in the social game Dragons of Atlantis web game that affected some players, triggering a protest. Kabam said some players were using a third-party tool to gain unfair advantages over competing players.
Peter Molyneux, a veteran game maker and creator of Godus at 22cans, said he loves games like The Hobbit. But he also has been a heavy critic of free-to-play monetization techniques.
“I don’t see that the free-to-play loops that we have now are going to last much longer,” he said in a recent interview with GamesBeat.
“They’re going to be legislated against. A lot of consumers are going to rebel against them. Core gamers already rebel against free to play.”
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Kabam warns players of fraud in 2 of its highly profitable games
Flickr’s product chief defects to EyeEm, another photography community
Image Credit: EyeEm
EyeEm, the photography community and marketplace, keeps growing and announced this week they got Flickr’s head of product, Markus Spiering, on board.
Markus Spiering, who was named one of Silicon Valley’s top 40 under 40 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal in late 2013, was available for a short talk with VentureVillage and shared some personal views about his new position.
Originally from Berlin, he said he was excited to return to his hometown to work with EyeEm and to get involved in the startup environment again. Having been in touch with EyeEm co-founder and CEO Flo Meissner for over two years, he has always been interested in the product.
“We had inspiring talks about the market and growth. The best was to discuss ideas, innovations, and product development, though”, he states.
Finally, the decision to join the EyeEm team was influenced by three key factors:
“EyeEm’s vision, truly impressive technology, and the quality of people are the reasons that convinced me that this would be the right next step for me.”
He continued, “Personally, I see that EyeEm has the potential to be one of the global players. And what is more exciting than being part of building a world-class product?”
The knowledge and learnings he already gained in his past and in this market are definitely a plus he can use in EyeEm’s continuing expansion into the U.S. market.
“We feel honored and are understandably excited to have Markus on our team“, says Florian Meissner, co-founder and CEO of EyeEm.
EyeEm is on a pretty fast track right now: Later this year, the company will launch EyeEm Market, a portal where clients can purchase images taken by EyeEm’s worldwide community of over 10 million photographers.
EyeEm also recently partnered with Getty Images, the world’s leading creator and distributor of visual content and other digital media, to make EyeEm images available for licensing across Getty Images platforms.
If you want to see the world through Markus Spiering’s eyes, you can of course follow him on EyeEm.
This story originally appeared on VentureVillage.
Flickr’s product chief defects to EyeEm, another photography community
In Rwanda, A Tour of Disaster
A mansion. A crash site. And the spark that ignited the Rwandan genocide.
In Rwanda, A Tour of Disaster
Rhapsody and Napster both get updated to bring Chromecast support
Fire up your Chromecast if you subscribe to either Rhapsody or Napster! Both services, which now has Napster under Rhapsody’s umbrella, have updated their respective applications to support Google’s Chromecast. After heading to the Play Store and updating either app, a Cast icon will be found at the top. Press this as you would with any other Cast-capable app and you should be able to start jamming to your favorite tunes right away.
Hit the break for download links.
Play Store Download Link (Rhapsody)
Play Store Download Link (Napster)
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Rhapsody and Napster both get updated to bring Chromecast support
Artist Spins Classic Art With Emoji and Modern Culture
In today’s world, the art of expression is often used with emoji.
One touch of your finger informs others that you’re annoyed, happy, or sad without having to type — or even worse: speak — a word
Kiev artist, Nastya Ptichek, brought the new world into the old with her art project titled emoji-nation, which incorporates computer technologies with classical paintings
Ptichek recently told Wired that she, “realized that standard iOS emojis strongly resemble some well-known paintings of famous artists,” like this emoji represention of the Van Gogh’s The Scream. Read more…
More about Twitter, Lists, Art, Emoji, and Watercooler
Artist Spins Classic Art With Emoji and Modern Culture
Man With World's Strongest Memory Crusades Against Alzheimer's
What does it take to have the best memory in the United States? Only four and a half years of training, for five hours each day, according to three-time national memory champ Nelson Dellis.
Dellis just won the 2014 USA Memory Championship on March 29 in New York City, where he bested his own national record by recalling 310 digits in five minutes. He also set a new record in the process by memorizing 193 names and faces in 15 minutes
And yet Dellis doesn’t claim to have a photographic memory, or any other unusual brain powers besides extreme perseverance. In fact, he says anyone can do what he does. Read more…
More about Health, Fitness, Features, Memory, and Social Good
Man With World's Strongest Memory Crusades Against Alzheimer's
10 DIY Projects to Refresh Your Apartment for Spring
Spring is finally beginning to bloom. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and you’re ready to open your windows and chase away the gray of Winter.
The season isn’t just for giving your apartment a good scrub, it’s also an opportunity to brighten everything with pops of color. Of course, living in a rental can have its drawbacks. How do you express your love for Spring without losing your deposit?
Luckily, there are plenty of DIY projects that will keep your walls in tact. Now you can greet the season and make you — and your landlord — happy Read more…
More about Lists, Design, Diy, Apartments, and Interior Design
10 DIY Projects to Refresh Your Apartment for Spring
HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ is the ‘Office Space’ we need for today’s tech world (review)
Above: HBO's Silicon Valley cast from left to right: Kumail Nanjiani as Dinesh; T.J. Miller as Ehrlich; Thomas Middleditch as Richard; Zach Woods as Jared; and Martin Starr as Gilfoyle
Image Credit: HBO
No one is more perfectly suited to lampoon the startup scene than Mike Judge.
The creator of classic comedies like Office Space, Idiocracy, and, yes, Beavis and Butt-Head, Judge also spent several months working for a Palo Alto, Calif., technology company in 1987 (before he, presumably, ran away screaming). Judge gets tech, he gets geeks, and most important, he gets the strange culture that’s so specific to the technology world.
All of that is evident from the very first scene in HBO’s Silicon Valley, which premieres Sunday night. Kid Rock is playing at a company’s launch party, and nobody cares. An overly excited entrepreneur loudly proclaims his love for esoteric and unsexy enterprise technology onstage. And Google chairman Eric Schmidt is there for some reason.
The series centers on Richard (Thomas Middleditch), an awkward, lowly programmer working at Hooli, a Google-esque tech company where employees ride Segways and hold bike meetings. Like many engineers, he also has a side project: an app that helps musicians and record labels figure out when someone is stealing their work. It’s the sort of niche and unmarketable startup idea we get pitched every day here at VentureBeat — but with one big difference.
It seems that amid developing his app, Richard also stumbled upon an ultraefficient method of file compression. (Judge consulted a Stanford compression expert on the technology, so the reveal doesn’t feel entirely like make-believe.) Like so many in the tech world, Richard is initially oblivious to the value of his own work. It takes a couple of tech-bro jerks to see the potential in his compression scheme.
The potential of Richard’s technology sparks an immediate bidding war among two tech titans: his boss, Peter Gregory, who wants to buy his company outright for $10 million (let’s call it the Zuckerberg approach); and Gavin Belson, who offers a $200,000 seed investment.
The way Richard confronts that choice likely isn’t far off from what many entrepreneurs go through today. Do you go for the quick paycheck? Or do you take the small investment and continue to build your own thing?
Above: Thomas Middleditch, Nathan Clarkson, and Kumail Nanjiani
Image Credit: HBO
Part of the show’s genius, like Judge’s Idiocracy, is that it hits a bit too close to home. If you’re even tangentially connected to the tech world, you’ll know the type of people represented onscreen. Bigwig CEO Belson, played by Matt Ross, is hell-bent on abolishing higher education, which brings to mind investor Peter Thiel’s own anti-college campaign. And Richard is the sort of geek that prefers Steve Wozniak to Steve Jobs — because, of course, Jobs didn’t code.
The tech culture references are spot-on and genuinely hilarious, but they’ll also make you feel a bit dirty afterward when you realize the show is probably making fun of you. (Perhaps that’s why I’m hearing about so many in the tech scene who seem to be actively avoiding the show.)
This doesn’t mean that Silicon Valley is only made for geeks. It has plenty of easily accessible humor, ranging from the very low-brow to ingenious wordplay. It also helps that the show has a strong supporting cast, including Martin Starr of Freaks and Geeks fame as a Satanist with “theist tendencies” and Kumail Nanjiani, who had a string of great segments on Portlandia and other shows.
While Office Space was a condemnation of ’90s-era office culture, where workers were trapped in tiny cubicles and worked on projects of indiscernible value, Silicon Valley casts a light on the modern cult of the entrepreneur. Richard starts off as a cog in Hooli’s vast corporate machine, but he ends up becoming “the man” as CEO of his own startup.
One scene in Silicon Valley‘s second episode is a direct reversal of Office Space‘s infamous “What do you do?” scene. Instead of having his job threatened by menacing consultants, Richard is forced to ask all of his friends what exactly they do for his company. And for his closest friend, that leads to heartbreak.
Silicon Valley is genuinely hilarious, but it’s also got plenty of heart to it. The show is more interested in how people exist within the sometimes absurd tech world, rather than just showing off its excess (which is mostly used for laughs). How do friendships withstand a sudden influx of money and power? And what kind of a leader would you be if you had the chance to run your own company? This isn’t just Entourage in Palo Alto.
The show also reflects one of the real Silicon Valley’s pervasive issues: a stark gender imbalance. I saw only had two major female characters in the two episodes I watched — one an assistant to Belson, and the other a stripper (who uses Square to get paid for her services). This is something that may be fixed later in the season, but it’s a shame Judge didn’t see it as an immediate problem to address early on.
Ultimately, Silicon Valley is exactly what the tech world needs right now. It holds up a mirror that shows both the best and worst of the tech, and in doing so it forces us to confront issues that may be hard to see when you’re embedded in the Silicon Valley bubble.
The geeks are in charge now, but the business game is still the same.
HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ is the ‘Office Space’ we need for today’s tech world (review)
Stephen Wolfram’s grand plans to monetize his supreme new programming language
Above: Stephen Wolfram.
Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat
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SAN FRANCISCO — I asked Stephen Wolfram how he could make his ambitious new Wolfram Language into a commercial success and a developer favorite.
He responded by typing out some sample code.
“Let’s make a really stupid API function whose sole function in life is we give it the name of a cat, and … it will give us an image of that type of cat,” he said.
In an instant, Wolfram cooked up that function. Then he typed “Burmese” into a search box and got a photo of a Burmese cat. He asked the service to spit out code for the API in the Java programming language, not his powerful Wolfram Language. “We’re rapidly expanding the set of languages for which you can do that,” Wolfram said.
It was a technical answer, not a marketing answer. And it hints at Wolfram’s utter conviction in the power and all-encompassing nature of the Wolfram Language, a highly efficient mega-language that can handle statistics, geometrical calculations, image processing, data visualizations, and more.
But even with his inclination to show what the language can do before talking about the business, he and his company, Wolfram Research, have, in fact, devised a multipronged go-to-market strategy, which matches the language in terms of innovation and reach.
“It’s pretty complicated, because this space is pretty complicated,” said Wolfram, one of the first MacArthur fellows and father of the widely used math and statistics software Mathematica.
The first products making use of the Wolfram Language will become available for people to try later this month, Wolfram said during a visit to San Francisco this week for the DEMO Enterprise conference, at which he gave an on-stage demonstration of the language.
While Wolfram has come up with some of the very models underlying the new language, he has also helped his colleagues design a system for selling software based on the language.
Cloud credits
For instance, he thought up a new unit called cloud credits. They’ll represent the amount of CPU time that developers’ requests take up on the forthcoming Programming Cloud for building and launching applications.
“Many things can happen in one cloud credit — but people will not buy one cloud credit,” Wolfram said. “[They'll buy] 100,000, 1 million cloud credits at a time.”
Off-hand, Wolfram couldn’t remember the exact costs for cloud credits. They aren’t listed online yet. But they will be.
And indeed, Wolfram Research has detailed plans for getting people to pay for services that use the Wolfram Language, which builds on Mathematica and the WolframAlpha search engine.
Schools, publishers, data scientists
A high-performance computing option, for scaling out computations across lots and lots of servers, will be available, along with a software package for data science that will carry a seat-based pricing structure.
Groups that teach programming will be able to offer a paid desktop version of Wolfram Language software. Schools and school districts might be interested in that product. The Wolfram Discovery Platform will enable iterative product development inside research-and-development departments at big companies. And textbook publishers will be able to pay Wolfram Research to offer books with interactive demonstrations.
Wolfram Research will also provide a service for analyzing data from connected devices.
“The device company is paying for it, and [each] device has a certain price per device per year that we’ll charge for that device company to be able to produce dashboards, analytics, and so on for their users,” Wolfram said.
In other words, the company will have lots of ways to pitch Wolfram Language stuff and thereby bring in revenue.
Bigger and bigger data
Across the board, the company can charge based on how much data people want to access, Wolfram said.
Wolfram Research is doing work to expand the amount of data that its language can take into consideration for calculations. It can support a few hundred megabytes or a single gigabyte in memory. It can handle whole files. It’s now making efforts to accept local databases, and distributed databases with data sitting in lots of places are the biggest challenge.
“The notion is being able to deal with all of these levels,” Wolfram said.
As much as Wolfram has been front and center recently to promote the Wolfram Language’s technical capabilities, he’s fairly confident the software has a chance of gaining traction.
“I’ve got pricing that, I think, is very kind of sober in terms of what’s out there in the market,” he said.
But what if the products for the Wolfram Language don’t take off?
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Our company goes on the way its gone on for the past 25 years. We’ve had a profitable company for the last 25 years. We’ve spent a lot on the R&D for this while still being profitable. It’ll be a shame, I think — but then I’ll wonder whether I screwed up all these go-to-market kind of things.”
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Stephen Wolfram’s grand plans to monetize his supreme new programming language
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