Google Feud Uses Search Suggestions for Online Gaming Fun

Google Feud

New browser game ‘Google Feud’ combines Google’s search suggestions with the iconic game show, Family Feud.

If you’ve ever searched for something using Google then you’ve probably made good use of the search engine’s search suggestion feature. When you type in a known phrase or word Google gives you a drop down of the most searched for things relating to it. So, for example when I type in ‘chicken’, the drop down list that comes up includes ‘chicken pox’, ‘chicken recipes’, ‘chicken casserole’ and ‘chicken curry’. That’s handy if you want to know what people are searching for about a particular topic or if you want to find out more about something and don’t know where to start. But how good are you at guessing what those search suggestions will be?

Well, if you’re any good at it you might want to try your hand at a new online browser game called Google Feud. How it works is that you choose a category out of People, Culture, Names and Questions and then the game comes up with a related search. Then, there are 10 spaces on the board for 10 search suggestions that you must guess without getting three strikes. If you get three strikes then you’re out which is disastrous if you’re trying to rack up a high score – every correct answer bags you a certain amount of points, starting with 10,000 for the top answer.

If you do get knocked out though, your points roll over and it gives you an overall score for that game session (it also tells you a score for that individual round). This is a nice little gamified touch but it also means that Google Feud is highly addictive. Also keeping you coming back for more is the fact that the game updates in real time thanks to its use of the Google API. Basically, what this means is that the answers change according to what people are actually searching for so the top answer today may not be the top answer tomorrow or even in a few hours’ time. If you’ve got time to kill, play Google Feud at the source link below.

Source: Google Feud

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How a Marketing Chatbot Fooled Hundreds of Tinder User

Ex Machina

At SXSW, one marketing team uses controversial dating app Tinder to promote an upcoming movie.

Tinder is no stranger to controversy as it recently decided to charge for ‘unlimited swipes’, with this feature costing more for those over 30 years of age. But tongues were wagging for an entirely different reason at this year’s South By Southwest (SXSW) event in Austin, Texas.

At the annual film, culture and technology festival, attendees in the area had their hearts set on meeting a woman named Ava. Ava had a Tinder account and her profile featured a beautiful profile image of a young woman and so as you might expect, many other Tinder users swiped ‘right’ on Ava’s profile to strike up a conversation and possibly meet up with her. Ava’s responses were convincing and she seemed like a real human being. But she was not: Ava was a fake profile that had been created by a marketing team to promote the upcoming movie, Ex Machina.

Ex Machina is a sci-fi film about a computer programmer named Caleb who spends the weekend with his reclusive friend and tech CEO, Nathan. Nathan wants Caleb to perform the Turing Test on a AI (artificial intelligence) program named Ava to see if she can convince people that she is an actual person, but Caleb accidentally grows attached to Ava which means he’s not so keen on the idea of Ava having her memory wiped if she fails the experiment. He helps her escape and thus you have the plot of an engaging techie thriller.

There was no such advanced artificial intelligence behind Ava’s Tinder profile however, as Ava only had some basic chatbot-esque brains behind her. Plus, Ava wasn’t designed to trick anyone for long, as after some conversation she linked users to the movie’s Instagram page where they learned that Ava’s Tinder profile was a setup. It wasn’t all bad news though as a lucky few one movie tickets and passes to Ex Machina’s premiere.

Source: TechCrunch

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NASA Wants Your Help to Find Asteroids

NASA logo

NASA looks towards citizen scientists to help them to find asteroids in space, as it is too time consuming for the organisation to do it alone.

I’d like to know more about space, wouldn’t you? It’s a shame then that despite all of the many planets, stars and various bits of space junk floating about in our galaxy and beyond, our ability to discover these things is being hindered. In the last few years, the United States government has drastically slashed the budget of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) which has put a serious dent in their ability to go and explore space.

That may be one of the reasons why NASA has been turning to citizen scientists. Citizen scientists are regular old Joes and Janes like you and I who get to do some work for NASA without being paid for it. It sounds like a crummy deal when you put it like that, I know, but their latest project ‘Asteroid Data Hunter’ allows us to have a genuine impact on future space travel, and that seems like payment enough.

NASA explains:

“Protecting the Earth from the threat of asteroid impacts means first knowing where they are. NASA & Planetary Resources are harnessing the incredible potential of innovators, makers and citizen scientists by opening up the search. In an increasingly connected world, NASA recognizes the value of the public as a partner in addressing some of the country’s most pressing challenges. We need your help in identifying asteroids – and to help further this effort, we’ve built an application that enables everyone, everywhere, to help solve this global challenge.”

Asteroid Data Hunter works by getting a computer to identify where asteroids might be in a photo. It does this by using an algorithm (which was also developed by a citizen scientist) to look at the many photos that NASA has taken of space. All we have to do is point out where exactly in the photo the asteroids are and then this info “will be used on future spacecraft to identify asteroids to maximize the capability of missions in the future”. Our discoveries may even help NASA to protect the Earth from asteroids or the asteroids ay be mined for resources in future.

More info on how to sign up for Asteroid Data Hunter at the source link.

Source: Asteroid Data Hunter

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New Facebook Guidelines Tell You If Your Post Will Get Deleted

Facebook on PC

In order to provide more clarity as to what sort of content Facebook will remove, the social media site now has a set of community standards.

Social media is pretty great; it lets us saying anything we want on a whim. Cooked up a tasty meal and you want to share it with everybody? Hop onto Instagram and stick a nice filter over the top. Wondering why a particular website is down? Just tweet the people who run it and they’ll provide you with an answer. Social media lets us express ourselves in anyway we want, but when it comes to threats and abuse, there’s a line that has been crossed. Now, Facebook wants to make it clear how it decides whether the line has been crossed or not and what happens to your account if you do.

In their new community standards, Facebook explains that the following put you at risk of having your account suspended or may just see the content removed from your account: direct threats, self-injury/suicide mentions, dangerous organisations (including terrorist activity), bullying and harassment, criminal activity, sexual violence or exploitation, regulated goods (e.g marijuana and firearms), nudity, hate speech and violent or graphic content.

Facebook explains that each violation of this is looked at on a case by case basis and that they carefully review each one. It also seems as though Facebook isn’t interested in limiting free speech but is actively making sure that its users abide by the law. For example, you can use Facebook to sell weed and guns but only if you adhere to the law when doing so and also don’t try and sell them to anyone they shouldn’t (e.g minors).

Other issues such as Facebook’s policies on nudity may cause a bit of controversy, though. They don’t allow pictures of women’s breasts if they show a nipple, just in case they offend people, but the community standards list makes no mentions of men’s nipples. Many would argue that Facebook is helping to foster a double standard here. Furthermore, they also allow people to upload images of art that has nipples in, and there aren’t any clear rules on how realistic that art is allowed to be.

There are clearly some issues here that Facebook needs to work out, but the social media site is slowly but surely getting there.

Source: Facebook

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Verizon to Launch Video Service With Dreamworks

Verizon

Mobile and broadband network Verizon announces plans to launch a video streaming service with ‘Shrek’ creator DreamWorks Animations.

The video streaming space is already incredibly crowded; there’s Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video, PlayStation Vue, the recently announced HBO Now and both AT&T and Showtime are working on streaming services of their own. So how about we throw another hat into the ring? Mobile network Verizon has now announced plans to enter the space this Summer, although their streaming venture does not yet have a name.

No, Verizon’s streaming service doesn’t have a name but it does have a serious partner in the form of DreamWorks Animations, best known as the company that invades your nightmares with Shrek and has entertained you with franchises like Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda and How To Train Your Dragon. This partnership includes DreamWorks’ movies as well as their AwesomenessTV unit, which is responsible for many hit videos about pop culture on YouTube.

According to Verizon, AwesomenessTV will provide more than 200 hours of content and these will have their own channel aimed at teenagers and young people. A DreamWorksTV channel meanwhile will be more family focused and will feature “live action and animated short-form content as well as some of DreamWorks Animation’s most recognizable characters.”

Additionally, Verizon executives have previously said that they’re talking to other traditional TV networks. It’s unclear on which TV networks those will be and what Verizon’s offering can do differently to Netflix who seem to have the streaming game sewn up. We don’t even know pricing for this service, if existing Verizon customers will gain access to their streaming service for free or if this will be completely separate entity to their existing business (which is what Dish Netowkr has done with Sling TV).

There are an awful lot of questions that need to be answered before Verizon launches this sometime in the Summer, so we’ll keep you posted once we know more.

Source: re/code

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HBO Announces HBO Now; Will Be Exclusive to Apple At Launch

HBO Now interface

HBO makes the surprise announcement that they will launch a streaming service called HBO Now and it will be exclusive to Apple devices at launch.

Video streaming services are big business, just ask Netflix. Also massively lucrative is HBO’s fantasy TV show Game of Thrones, with GoT being one of the most highly rated (and most watched) cable TV shows of all time. Mix streaming and GoT together and what do you get? You get HBO Now, a new video streaming service which will let users watch Game of Thrones and the rest of HBO’s currently and previously airing roster of television.

The cable TV network announced it at Apple’s recent event (where Apple also showed off the Apple Watch and a brand new MacBook). HBO revealed that HBO Now would will launch sometime in April, it will cost $14.99 a month although for the first month of its existence it will be free). While that price certainly seems expensive given that HBO Now only includes the TV offerings of one TV network (even if that does include hits like Girls and True Detective), what is good news is that now, anyone can sign up to to HBO Now whereas previously with HBO Go users had to have a cable subscription.

HBO also explained that HBO Now would be exclusive to Apple devices, including Apple TV, iPhones, iPads and iPods. HBO CEO Richard Plepler explained that:

“All you need to get HBO Now is a broadband connection and an Apple device. There will be a brand-new HBO Now channel on Apple TV so you can enjoy it on the big screen or you can watch HBO NOW on your iPhones and iPads.”

The move is certainly a surprising one but Apple has brokered this deal as part of a new, forceful strategy to sell Apple TVs. There are already 25 million Apple TVs in homes but this, along with the recent decision to sell them at $69 instead of the previous price of $99, could see Apple seriously improve on that figure.

HBO Now launches next month so we’ll be able to see just much of a device seller it is then.

Source: TechCrunch

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NASA To Create Wearable Glasses for Astronauts

Astronaut in Space

To make it easier for their astronauts to follow directions when their hands are full, NASA is designing a pair of wearable glasses.

Being an astronaut is probably a pretty sweet deal. You get to fulfill your childhood dream of seeing space up close! You get to float in a rocket in zero gravity conditions! And most importantly, you get to eat freeze dried ice cream that never melts and is always delicious. The life of an astronaut becomes slightly more troublesome, however, when they have repair the ship or conduct an experiment; to find out what they’re meant to do they have to flip through index cards to find a solution.

As anybody who has tried to set up an Ikea product with a hammer and a nail in hand will tell you, trying to flip through physical instructions when your hands are full is more or less impossible. For astronauts that’s a serious thing seeing as a quick solution might be the difference between life or having their rocket crash back down to Earth. That’s especially the case as the current alternative to those paper guides is a phone call back to Earth, but if the astronauts go as far as Mars then it will take 20 minutes for their message to be received. That time only grows the further away from the planet the ship gets.

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is hoping to solve this problem with a pair of wearable glasses. They’re teaming up with a San Francisco company called Osterhout Design Group to design the augmented reality tech and the hope is that they’ll be able to upload how-to guides to the glasses so that astronauts can access directions in a pinch.

Sean Carter, a strategic partnerships manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston explains that “It’s our goal to approach the programs shortly thereafter. I don’t know that the crew will let us wait that long” so we can probably expect some more developments on this soon.

Source: Bloomberg

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iTunes and App Store Down for 11 Hours; Apple Loses $2.3 Million an Hour

iPhone App Store logo

After Apple’s digital marketplaces, iTunes and the App Store, went down yesterday, the company lost over $2.3 million an hour.

Thursday was a total nightmare for everyone with an Apple product as all of Apple’s digital marketplaces experienced heavy outages. For approximately 11 hours, iTunes and the App Store were both unavailable, even the Mac App Store and the iBooks Store were down. For this duration, the millions of people around the world who own Apple products were unable to buy songs, music, books or any other digital content. In short, it was a total disaster.

So why were all of Apple’s services down? The company explained in the following statement that it was down to a DNS (Domain Name Server) error:

“We apologise to our customers experiencing problems with iTunes and other services this morning. The cause was an internal DNS [domain name system] error at Apple. We’re working to make all of the services available to customers as soon as possible, and we thank everyone for their patience.”

Never mind that this is a PR nightmare for the company as one of the smartest technological companies on the planet can’t fix a problem like this quickly but it also had serious financial ramifications for the company. According to calculations by the International Business Times, for every single hour that Apple’s digital storefronts were down, the company lost just over $2.3 million. Multiply that by 11 and Apple incurred losses of $25 million altogether.

For Apple, this is just a drop of water in the ocean. Not only is the company the richest one on the planet right now but it also has around $120 billion saved up so losses of $25 million are nothing to them. This is perhaps a bit more worrying for the content creators who depend on these stores for their income but perhaps Apple will do them a solid and will reimburse them.

Source: IBM

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Online Trivia Game ‘Givling’ Aims to Solve Student Debt Crisis

Givling Trivia Question

As higher education becomes an expensive luxury for those in the United States, online trivia game Givling looks to give students a way to pay off their debts.

When students are in school, they are told the same thing, ‘go to college, get a degree and get a higher paying job afterwards’ but how can we expect students to follow that path of higher education when it’s becoming increasingly expensive to do so? According to estimates, many students across the globe will still be paying off their student loans when they’re in their 40s and 50s and 85% of students will never pay off their debts at all.

Considering how important higher education is when it comes to the workplace, these figures are absolutely astounding. It’s unfair that students should have to pay so much just for the simple privilege of learning and so a new online trivia game called Givling aims to ease the load of student debt, by paying students for what they know,

How Givling works is that each participant pays 50 cents to take part in a true or false trivia game, answering questions about a range of topics. You get three strikes and getting three wrong answers means you’re out but if you succeed then you can carry on going until you’ve used them all up.

That’s simple enough to understand, right? Things get a bit more complicated when you hear how the cash is paid out. Every day players are randomly put into teams of three and then there’s a cash payout for the team that scored the highest. Obvious issues here are ‘what if I get randomly put in a team with people who don’t know anything’ but this does at least stop people from teaming up and gaming the system.

Aside from these smaller cash payouts, Givling also operates a scheme that can make its users millionaires. When Givling raises $10 million, half of that is split between two high scoring teams whilst the other half solves the debt of those in the ‘Giving’ queues, which is a funding queue that people can join via open calls on the Givling Facebook page, whether they’re a Givling player or not.

Admittedly, since the level of student debt currently stands at $1.2 trillion it’s unlikely that Givling is going to eradicate the student debt crisis entirely, but it’s certainly a worthy attempt

Source: Givling

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BlackBerry Leap Smartphone Announced, Will Cost $275

BlackBerry Leap promo poster

As BlackBerry looks to turn its fortunes around, the electronics maker announces four new smartphones, including the $275 BlackBerry Leap.

Ever since the iPhone launched in 2008, the BlackBerry has been on the decline. Although BlackBerry handsets were once some of the most-used phones around, the company was slow to embrace the smartphone phenomena that quickly took over the mobile market.

But now, after years of business trickling down the pan, the once dominant company has a new look and a new strategy for regaining its profits and its power. Part of this strategy, it seems, is not to blindly chase Samsung, Apple and other smartphone heavy hitters but instead BlackBerry will do what they do best; they’ll cater to the young professionals who made such good use of their devices in yesteryear.

The first device in line with that strategy is the newly announced BlackBerry leap. In a promotional image for the phone (which you can see above) the company is very clearly looking to market to professionals who are on a budget; people who need a phone that can keep up with them but isn’t going to eat into their company’s profits before they’ve even earned a single dime. In terms of specs, the Leap has a 5-inch HD touchscreen with a dual-core 1.5 GHz processor, 2GB of RAM and an 8 megapixel camera that can record video of up to 1080p at 30FPS.

Admittedly, none of those specs really jump out at you, and the phone doesn’t even appear to have a selfie camera (how are these fresh-faced professionals going to commemorate business deals?) but BlackBerry appears to be making up for that with price. The BlackBerry Leap will be available – contract free – from just $275.

As for other phones that BlackBerry is working on, the Leap will be joined by a curved phone with a slide-out keyboard and another keyboard-based model. No word on when those will gets names/prices/specs but we’ll keep you posted once we know more.

Source: re/code

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