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Selasa, 03 November 2015

Ario crowdfunds a mood-enhancing lamp that mimics natural lighting fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Winter can wreak havoc on a person’s internal clock. Energy tends to fade along with the sunlight, and a subset of the population experiences a form of depression that takes hold when sunny days all but vanish around November. A startup called Ario wants to help those people with a smart lamp designed to emulate optimal sunlight and, potentially, keep the winter blues at bay.

Ario has turned to Kickstarter to help it realize that goal. The company wants to raise $50,000 through the campaign, and it plans to get the first lamps to backers by the end of 2016, after it works out any kinks in the manufacturing process. It has also raised an undisclosed amount of outside funding — the lamp’s existence doesn’t hinge on the success of the Kickstarter campaign.

The lamp itself boasts an Internet connection; LEDs that change their hue in accordance to the ideal sunlight patterns, as determined by the company; and on-device controls that mean anyone can use the product without having to fumble around with a smartphone application or dedicated remote control. All of this is supposed to make it the ideal gateway to the future of lighting.

Ario chief executive Brian Hoskins says the lamp is supposed to provide a glimpse into the future of lighting that doesn’t hinge on energy savings (which is what you get from non-incandescent light bulbs) or entertainment (which is how he characterizes the Philips Hue line of products). Instead, Ario will focus on the health of people who use the lamp as their primary light source.

This means Ario has to be different from other smart lighting solutions. Those differences include directional lighting, which turns on the top or bottom of the device depending on the time of day, thus mimicking the sun’s position in the sky; automated systems which don’t require user input to function, making it easier for people to use the device without thinking; and limited coloring.

“With smart bulbs, you’re fundamentally changing how people interact with lighting, and it’s something that people will be excited about in the first two weeks and then stop using it because it can be hard or confusing,” he says. “Ario is a totally different experience, and we’ve received amazing feedback from testers saying the lamp makes it feel more like you’re living outside.”

There’s no doubt that lighting affects our health, and the idea that receiving the same exact light from a fixed point in the ceiling or in a lamp might be bad isn’t all that surprising. The question is whether or not people should buy Ario instead of other smart lighting systems trying to fill the same roles. (One of the most notable is Sunn, which is made to mimic its namesake solar orb.)

Hoskins thinks Ario’s design could make people choose it over other options. It’s supposed to fade in the background, like the light bulbs people already own, but it’s also supposed to be much healthier than those other lights. Then there are all the features I listed above. The Kickstarter campaign is a way for the company to prove enough people want this product to come to market.

Even if people don’t purchase the Ario, though, it’s worth thinking about how light affects our bodies and minds. Hell, we’ve known for decades that light is important, yet we’ve made few changes because of that knowledge. Whether it’s through Ario or through other products, it seems indoor lighting is overdue for an upgrade. It has to large an effect on us to ignore that.

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Sling TV arrives on Chromecast with free 2-month trial fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

IP-based television service Sling TV is finally making its way to Google’s Chromecast streaming device today, and it’s offering few carrots to bait those who’ve yet to sign up.

The announcement seems very much geared toward Sling TV until you hear about the perks being offered. As part of the Chromecast launch, Sling is offering new customers a two-month free trial of its basic package of over 20 channels. For (presumably) current subscribers, those that are willing to pay for three months of Sling TV upfront can also get a free Chromecast device.

The promotion is similar to one Google forged with Netflix when the Chromecast first debuted. However, this time the motivation is likely due to increased competition from the likes of Apple’s newly upgraded Apple TV and Amazon’s Fire TV. (Not to mention that Amazon also just yanked Chromecast from its online retail stores, both from Amazon and third-party sellers.)

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Livefyre’s Engagement Cloud helps companies manage user-generated content fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Livefyre is perhaps best known for powering the comments sections beneath an untold number of articles from across countless websites. But the company is about more than comments — it’s about helping companies use the content generated by basically everyone who uses the Internet to suit their own goals. Today it’s announcing a new platform so it can do that better than in the past.

“Brands now have to produce more content than they ever have in history,” says Livefyre chief executive Jordan Kretchmer. “If they want to engage their audience, if they want to build community around their sites and mobile apps and stores, they have to create content to do that.” But hiring a bunch of people to make that content can be expensive; user-generated content is a lot cheaper.

That’s where Livefyre comes in. Kretchmer breaks Livefyre down into four areas: discovering content from the social Web; organizing that content into manageable pieces; publishing that content to a website or social network; and then keeping an eye on how well that content performs after its publication. These used to be separate tools, but now they’re all lumped in with each other.

“This has been the big product effort for the last nine months,” Kretchmer says. “As we grew as a company and started delivering on more value and pieces of functionality to more customers, we of course had to bring more pieces into our platform.” This became unwieldy, so the company has built a dashboard to tie everything together in a service anyone should be able to use.

That dashboard presents data collected from many different sources. It then sorts through all that content, presents it to a worker given the soul-crushing job of reposting #brand related stuff to their company’s online properties, and allows them to publish it on their Facebook page or website or wherever. Why pay for some original content when so many people are giving it away for free?

There is, of course, the simple matter of getting the rights to that content. Livefyre has rights management baked in; all a brand has to do to use someone’s tweet, photo, or miscellaneous ramblings is ask for permission. If the person who made that piece of content agrees, the brand is able to do whatever they want with it, and it’s permanently stored on Livefyre’s cloud.

Kretchmer says this was the number-one most requested feature from Livefyre’s customers. He assures me that content for which brands haven’t secured the rights will be deleted from the company’s cloud if a user deletes it from whatever service to which they shared it to begin with; if the rights to that content are handed over, however, they’ll remain available in perpetuity.

All of which means that every Facebook post, Instagram photo, and Tweet can be used to promote whatever a company wants to get in front of its customers. The good news: They’ll have to ask permission first, provided those companies are using Livefyre. It ain’t much of a silver lining, but at least it’s something.

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Twitter swaps the ‘favorite’ for the ‘like’ fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Twitter has done away with the “favorite” button in a move that signals yet more changes for the social network.

Twitter has steadily become more like Facebook over the last few years. It’s redesigned its profiles, emphasized photos, and removed the character limit from its direct messages. All of these changes make its service more welcoming to people who have only ever used Facebook as their primary social network.

With today’s update, whenever someone wants to indicate their approval of a decent tweet or Vine, they’ll be asked to “like” it instead of being given the option of clicking the “Favorite” button. The intent is the same — it’s just that the name for pressing that button, which is now a heart instead of a star, has received an update. (Basically, instead of seeing a star to favorite, you’ll now see a heart.)

Periscope users won’t notice a change. The live-streaming service has featured since its debut multi-colored hearts people send whenever they like what they see. Twitter believes that bringing these hearts to its other services (the main Twitter service and Vine) will make them easier for newcomers to understand.

“You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite,” Twitter’s Akarshan Kumar says in a blog post. “The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.”

Kumar’s reasoning might be a little dramatic, but being a global service requires Twitter to find a symbol that everyone can understand. And it doesn’t make sense for one Twitter app to feature hearts while the others have stars. But there might be another reason for this change: Being more like Facebook.

Changing the “favorite” to the “like” is another small way Facebook users could feel more welcome on Twitter. The language was confusing — a person really should only be able to have one “favorite” tweet at a time — and different from Facebook’s “like” merely for the sake of distancing Twitter from that service.

Will it mean much in the long run? Not really. People will complain about the change at first, then they’ll use it the same way they used the “favorite” button, and then a whole bunch of Twitter users will never know that button existed. But even this small of a change could make Twitter a little more approachable.

“We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use,” Kumar says in his post, “and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers.” Now that itty-bitty barrier to entry has been bulldozed over.

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Activision Blizzard to acquire King Digital for $5.9B fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Activision Blizzard has agreed to acquire King Digital, the company behind the popular “Candy Crush” line of mobile games, for approximately $5.9 billion. That’s $18 per share: 20 percent more than its October 30 closing share price. Is the company really that desperate to break into the mobile gaming market?

That’s what it looks like. In the press release announcing the deal, Activision Blizzard trumpets the potential for the acquisition to give it control over the most popular franchises on mobile devices, game consoles, and PCs. (Those being “Candy Crush,” “Call of Duty,” and “World of Warcraft,” respectively.)

Activision Blizzard chief executive Bobby Kotick also praised King’s leaders for “consistently creating incredibly fun, deeply engaging free-to-play games that capture the imaginations of players across ages and demographics.” The hope is to marry those strengths with the stability a much larger company can offer.

The acquisition could also remove the pressure for King to create a followup that can match “Candy Crush” in popularity and profits. While the game is still popular, it’s starting to lose players, and King’s profit fell 28 percent in the second fiscal quarter at least partly because its other games aren’t as lucrative.

This buyout could prevent King from becoming the next Zynga or Rovio. Both of those companies found success on the back of one title (“Farmville” and “Angry Birds”) and both faced varying degrees of adversity when those games fell out of favor. King could’ve been next if “Candy Crush” continued to fall.

Now it can avoid that catastrophe. The question hasn’t become whether or not King will fail; it’s now whether the company will be an albatross hung around Activision Blizzard’s neck, or whether it will be a lifting breeze that allows its new owners to reach new heights in the mobile and social gaming markets.

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Senin, 02 November 2015

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Snapchat’s effort to make its policies more readable backfires fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Snapchat has attempted to ease the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that spread like wildfire after it updated its terms of service and privacy policy last week.

The company said in a blog post today that it continues to delete users’ photos from its servers after they are viewed or have expired. This means it “could not — and do not — share [private images] with advertisers or business partners,” according to the company. Content shared via Snapchat is just as ephemeral as it was before the updates.

Snapchat explained in the post that it changed the policies to be more readable, to allow for in-app purchases like the counterintuitive Replays, and to make users aware about the information they have given the service. These were all routine updates tech companies make to their policies semi-regularly.

The reaction to these updates was also routine. Just look at when Instagram updated its policies to make it clear that it planned to use photos shared to its service in advertisements. People started to lose their minds, but as the Verge’s Nilay Patel explained, the problem didn’t lie with the policies themselves. It lied with Instagram’s inability to explain them and a lack of trust in Facebook.

Snapchat could have learned from the Instagram debacle. Instead of posting something on its blog when people started to freak out, it could’ve published the same exact blog post when it first made the changes. That might’ve helped people understand exactly what the company intended with its new policies.

There might be another problem: Making the policies readable to humans sounds good in theory, but in practice things could be just a little bit messier.

Nobody can be expected to read through all the terms of service and privacy policies for everything they use. That would require far more time than anyone wants to spend when they’re setting up their iPhone, for example, or signing up for the newest social tool for teens who want to indicate their down-ness.

So we click the “agree” button without knowing what’s happening, content to keep ourselves from drowning in a flood of legalese. Even if we did read many of these policies, it would be hard to tell exactly what companies are allowed to do, mostly because the vast majority of us aren’t familiar with applicable laws.

This is an obvious problem. Making policies and agreements easier to read is admirable. But when people realize exactly what they’re agreeing to, especially if those terms aren’t broken down like they are in Snapchat’s blog post, they’re likely to respond with the fear Snapchat’s users showed after these updates.

It would be easier for tech companies to keep the legalese and prevent their users from ever understand what they’ve agreed to until scandal breaks out. The companies are damned if their policies are inscrutable to normal people, and damned if they make them more readable but people misinterpret them.

Snapchat has learned this the hard way. Some of the blame lies with the company — as I said, it could’ve saved itself a headache by publishing yesterday’s blog post earlier — but a lot of it lies with us for not knowing what we’ve agreed to in the past. Welcome to the wonders of modern technology.

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