Techflier

Instagram announced at its F8 developer conference today that it’ll start testing a new feature later this week that’ll hide users’ public like counts on videos and photos. The test will only be in Canada, and likes will be hidden in the Feed, permalinked pages, and on profiles. Instagram says it wants followers to “focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get.” Only the person who owns the account will be able to see how many likes their content received. We thought a feature like this might be in the works. Code hunter Jane Wong published screenshots of this test earlier this month, and at the time, Instagram said it hadn’t tested the feature. Now, we can see it was prepping for the test to run after F8. A... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts http://bit.ly/2ISEH2a via IFTTT

Facebook announced an overhaul of its main mobile app today that puts more emphasis on two of its most critical features: events and groups. The company says it’s placing groups front and center as a cornerstone of how it wants users to think of the main Facebook app, while events is getting a fresh coat of paint as one of the most-used parts of the app that keeps users coming back day in and day out. “There are tens of millions of active groups on Facebook. When people find the right one, it often becomes the most meaningful part of how they use Facebook. And today, more than 400 million people on Facebook belong to a group that they find meaningful,” the company said in a blog post. “With this in mind, we’re rolling out a fresh new... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts http://bit.ly/2LaS5Rb via IFTTT

Facebook Messenger’s mobile app for iOS is about to shrink. The company said today that it is working on a new version of Messenger that will be fewer than 30MB (or about 20 percent the size of the current app). The new version of Messenger, which is expected to arrive later this year on iOS, was rewritten from the ground up, the company said. It should launch in two seconds or under, the company said. There are currently no plans to bring it to Android where Messenger Lite has been available since 2015. The move represents Facebook’s latest step to return Messenger to its lightweight roots. After years of expanding into bots, payments, games, and areas, the app had become cluttered and slower to navigate than rivals like iMessage and... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts http://bit.ly/2ISEITM via IFTTT

Facebook’s plans to pivot into private messaging now have a desktop software component. The company said today that it would bring Messenger, its popular messaging client, to Mac and Windows later this year. Facebook made the announcement at its F8 developer conference in San Jose, California. There are far more mobile phones in the world than desktop computers, and the pace of development for computers has slowed accordingly. But for office workers who spend most of their days using a Mac or PC, messaging is a core function, and a dedicated messaging app could keep them inside Facebook’s ecosystem for hours a day. “People want to seamlessly message from any device, and sometimes they just want a little more space to share and connect... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts http://bit.ly/2J7pkST via IFTTT

Instagram is announcing a couple of new features today that are designed to make the app more appealing to influencers, creators, and online business owners. It’s part of a broader shift within the company to position its photo-sharing app, which is now used by more than 1 billion people every month, as a kind of Facebook replacement. Younger users have for years been leaving the main app for greener, more hip pastures, and Facebook seems to recognize that Instagram is now at a scale and level of cultural ubiquity that it can begin carrying the torch — at least partially. The first new feature, announced today at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, is a redesigned camera with what Instagram is calling Create Mode. The new mode will make... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts http://bit.ly/2VI44dm via IFTTT

Facebook Dating still isn’t available in the United States. But in the five countries where it launched already — and the 14 more that are joining the service today — there’s a new way to see which friends might be romantically interested in you. “Secret Crush,” as the feature is called, lets you express interest in up to nine friends. If that friend has opted into Facebook Dating and likes you back, they get a notification saying someone likes them. If they pick you as one of their secret crushes, you both get notified. You won’t be able to add anyone who hasn’t created a Dating profile, the company said. That could entice more reluctant Facebook users to give Dating a shot — who isn’t curious to see whether a friend secretly likes... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts http://bit.ly/2J5Vxu0 via IFTTT

Aperture was a great application for editing photos back in the day, but it hasn’t been supported by Apple for years. You can, however, still run it on the latest Macs, should you need to. But that won’t be the case for long, the company has announced. In a support page pointed out by MacRumors , Apple explains that “for technical reasons, Aperture will not run in future versions of macOS after macOS Mojave.” What exactly those technical reasons are only Apple knows, but it isn’t hard to imagine the various file structures, architectures, libraries and so on that Aperture relied on are simply no longer compatible with the changes the company has made to the OS. macOS has come quite a distance since Aperture was abandoned in 2014, and it’s actually kind of impressive that the app still runs. Apple To Cease Development Of Aperture And Transition Users To Photos For OS X You can of course keep a machine running Mojave around if you really need to use Aperture for some reason or...

Facebook’s social graph is aging, full of long-lost acquaintances and hometown friends you don’t care much about seeing in the News Feed any more. But Facebook is now testing a pivot away from its core identity of connecting you with existing friends so it can revitalize the social graph and keep people coming back. Facebook’s “Meet New Friends” lets you browse people from shared communities such as your school, workplace or city who’ve also opted in to the feature. It’s now in testing in a few markets before it’s rolled out more widely soon. Meet New Friends could give people fresh pals to follow in their News Feed, or help recently registered users grow their network until they have access to enough content to keep them busy. And eventually, Facebook could layer on monetization features similar to dating apps where users pay to be shown more prominently to potential connections. Fidji Simo, the head of Facebook’s main app, tells me Meet New Friends was based on emerging behaviors...

On game streaming platforms today, there’s really only one way to earn status within a creator’s community: you have to become a subscriber. Microsoft’s game streaming service Mixer is today aiming to offering a third path to status through loyalty and participation. In doing so, it hopes to better differentiate itself from larger rivals like Twitch and YouTube. Channel Progression, as this new feature is called, is a system that rewards community members and a streamer’s fans for more than just their financial contributions. It also takes into account other activity within the channel and on Mixer as a whole. Members can level up by participating in the stream’s chat, by their repeat visits, by using Skills (aka other forms of expression like stickers, effects and GIFs that are used in chats), and more. That means that viewers will be able to earn rewards and raise their rank by just participating — watching, chatting, following, subscribing, and later, through other actions, as w...

Facebook built Dating to be privacy-safe, hoping to avoid the awkwardness of friends or family checking out your romance profile. But now Facebook has found a way to let you silently express your affection for a friend without them knowing unless they reciprocate. Facebook Dating is opening in 14 more countries, bringing the total to 19. It will launch in the US before the end of the year. Dating brings with it a new feature called Secret Crush that expands it beyond strangers and friends-of-friends. Choose up to 9 friends you like-like. If they’ve opted into Facebook Dating, they’ll get a notification that some friend has a crush on them. If they add you as a Secret Crush too, you’re both notified and can chat on Messenger. Facebook Dating product manager Charmaine Hung tells me that “I have 2000 Facebook friends. I’m not best friends with all 2000 people, and there’s a good chance that one of that could be a really good match with me. I trust them, I appreciate them, and I know w...

Would we feel less envious, shameful and competitive if Instagram didn’t tell us how many Likes a post received? That’s the idea behind Instagram now hiding Like counts from both a post’s viewers and its author as part of an experiment in Canada. A post’s creator can still open the Likers window to see the names of everyone who hearted their post, but they’d have to count them manually. Even though Like totals would still impact how the algorithm ranks a post in the feed, if rolled out, the change would refocus Instagram on self-expression instead of being a popularity contest. Users might be less likely to delete a photo or video because it didn’t get enough Likes, or resort to their Finsta account to post something authentic but less “perfect.” It could make us less likely to envy-spiral because we wouldn’t see friends or influencers getting more Likes than us. And people might be more willing to post what truly represents their complicated identities because they’re not battling f...

At F-8 today, Facebook is unveiling a major redesign for its desktop app — the first big update it’s made since 2014  — and a refresh of its mobile apps as it begins to bring its many functions, features and apps under a more unified umbrella . And along with that, Workplace , its enterprise version, is also getting a renovation. Aimed at increasing access to different features like Groups, Chats and Notifications, the update brings their functionality closer together, and on top of that introduces more of Facebooks’s famous algorithm, to suggest people and groups tailored to you. “We’ve redesigned the experiences so that the code bases remain the same,” Karandeep Anand, the head of Workplace, said of the new updates and how they relate to Facebook. Workplace announced in February that it now has 2 million paying users, along with “millions” more using the free or Workplace for Good versions, and now the name of the game for the company is engagement. Getting more people to use...

Facebook has bet a lot on its VR dream. The industry has become the butt of a few jokes in the past couple years as hype has deflated, but there’s been no question that the tech is interesting, the question has been whether it’s sustainably cool. Oculus made a gamble on the high-end three years ago, but the $399 standalone Quest is where they see whether that bet was worth it. In a lot of ways, this is a VR headset built in the spirit of the Nintendo Switch.* Performance is secondary to the depth of user experience and ease of use. It’s vastly easier to get this out of the box and start playing with tracked VR than any other VR headset I’ve used. It takes minutes the first time you take it out of the box and seconds in subsequent uses. You don’t need a PC, you don’t need to connect a cable to anything, you don’t need to stress. The Quest nails experience. Things I like: Great overall experience, picking the headset up and getting into VR takes a minute. ^ That. ^^ That again. ...

U.S. border officials are asserting “broad, unconstitutional authority” to conduct warrantless searches of travelers’ phones, tablets and laptops, according to a new court filing. The findings, obtained from depositions and discovery filed in court by the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday, claim U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are overreaching their powers to search traveler devices at the border without seeking a court-approved warrant. Esha Bhandari, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said the agencies were “using the pretext of the border to make an end run around” the constitution. “The border is not a lawless place, ICE and CBP are not exempt from the constitution, and the information on our electronic devices is not devoid of Fourth Amendment protections,” said Bhandari, citing the protection of free speech and warrantless searches. “We’re asking the court to stop these unlawf...

More than three years after Facebook released one of the biggest gambles in its existence, a virtual reality headset it paid billions to launch as its own, the company has grown more embattled but its moonshot VR flagship has grown safer. Facebook’s sequel to the Oculus Rift is not the Rift 2, it is the Rift S. Just as the iPhone naming scheme denotes the tock to a tick rather than a full revolution; the latest product is a hardware update, albeit a pretty minor one, more of a 1.2 than a 2.0. Oculus co-founder is leaving Facebook after cancellation of ‘Rift 2’ headset It wasn’t always going to be this way — the company’s founding CEO had other plans. But the Rift S represented a way for Facebook to push the accessibility of its most high-end headset and likely the profit margins of the cheaper-feeling headset, which does cost $399 versus the original Rift’s $349 price tag, a number that danced and dwindled its way down from a Rift + Touch launch price of $798 at the end of 2...

Facebook’s new VR headsets, the Oculus Rift S and Quest, are both now live for pre-orders today at $399 and will ship May 21. Oculus released the original Rift just over three years ago. Fast forward to the present and the Facebook VR product line has gotten more robust. The $199 Oculus Go offers a cheap arena to watch media content, Rift S offers a PC experience that can showcase complex gaming experiences while the Quest aims to be a good fit for novices looking for a portable VR experience. Facebook hopes the Quest will bring in a new class of users into VR while the Rift S allows it to expand its concurrent reach on PC. You can read reviews of both systems below: Review: Facebook’s Oculus Rift S is barely an upgrade Review: Oculus Quest could be the Nintendo Switch of VR from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2GLFVJ8 via IFTTT

The fate of the company's various consumer robotics products is unclear. The post Robotics Startup Anki Is Shutting Down appeared first on ExtremeTech . from ExtremeTechExtremeTech http://bit.ly/2J4V4rH via IFTTT

Chiplets are a new method of building microprocessors, but the gains and improvements should be understood in the context of the difficulties they are intended to address. The post Chiplets Are Both Solution to and Symptom of a Larger Problem appeared first on ExtremeTech . from ExtremeTechExtremeTech http://bit.ly/2UP6TEW via IFTTT

YouTube will live stream 13 Major League Baseball games in the second half of this season, the company announced today. The schedule of which games those will be hasn't yet been announced, but the news is another example of pro sports looking to platforms beyond traditional TV and their own dedicated streaming apps to bring in new audiences. YouTube will have exclusive rights to those games in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. They’ll be viewable from the MLB’s main YouTube page and via an upcoming channel that’s being added to YouTube TV for subscribers of that $50-per-month service. That said, it’s not as if YouTube is about to give MLB.TV any competition: 13 games are just a drop in the bucket when you factor in the entire 162-game... Continue reading… from The Verge - All Posts http://bit.ly/2V3pS3r via IFTTT

To win chat, Facebook Messenger must be as accessible as SMS, yet more entertaining than Snapchat. Today, Messenger pushes on both fronts with a series of announcements at Facebook’s F8 conference, including that it will launch Mac and PC desktop apps, a faster and smaller mobile app, simultaneous video co-watching and a revamped Friends tab, where friends can use an emoji to tell you what they’re up to or down for. Facebook is also beefing up its tools for the 40 million active businesses and 300,000 businesses on Messenger, up from 200,000 businesses a year ago. Merchants will be able to let users book appointments at salons and masseuses, collect information with new lead generation chatbot templates and provide customer service to verified customers through authenticated m.me links. Facebook hopes this will boost the app beyond the 20 billion messages sent between people and businesses each month, which is up 10X from December 2017. “We believe you can build practically any uti...

Cable television provider Altice USA has confirmed plans to pay $200 million for the millennial-focused, digitally-native news network Cheddar in all-cash, or all-cheddar, rather, deal. The price tag comes at a 25 percent premium to the media startup’s $160 million Series D valuation. Jon Steinberg, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Cheddar and former president and chief operating officer of BuzzFeed, will become president of Altice News. Altice, an existing Cheddar investor, plans to leverage Cheddar’s broadcasts and CheddarU, a growing network of 1,600 screens on 600 college campuses, to expand its portfolio of news businesses. “Our goal is to make Altice News a leader in local, business, national and international news everywhere,” Steinberg said in a statement . “The Altice team and Altice Way are as entrepreneurial as it gets with amazing markets, world-class local and international news, an amazing broadband network, and a soon to launch mobile offering.” Cheddar d...

Docker appears to be searching for ways to simplify the core value proposition of the company — creating, deploying and managing containers. While most would agree it has revolutionized software development, like many technology solutions, it takes a certain level of expertise and staffing to pull off. At DockerCon, the company’s customer conference taking place this week in San Francisco, Docker announced several of ways it could help customers with the tough parts of implementing a containerized solution. For starters, the company announced a Beta of Docker Enterprise 3.0 this morning. That update is all about making life simpler for developers. As companies move to containerized environments, it’s a challenge for all but the largest organizations like Google, Amazon and Facebook, all of whom have massive resource requirements and correspondingly large engineering teams. Most companies don’t have that luxury though and Docker recognizes if it wants to bring containerization to a...

Over the last five years, Docker has become synonymous with software containers, but that doesn’t mean every developer understands the technical details of building, managing and deploying them. At DockerCon this week, the company’s customer conference taking place in San Francisco, it announced new tools that have been designed to make it easier for developers, who might not be Docker experts, to work with containers. As the technology has matured, the company has seen the market broaden, but in order to take advantage of that, it needs to provide a set of tools that make it easier to work with. “We’ve found that customers typically have a small cadre of Docker experts, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of developers who also want to use Docker. And we reasoned, how can we help them get productive very, very quickly, without them having to become Docker experts,” Scott Johnston, chief product officer at Docker told TechCrunch. To that end, it announced a Beta of Docker En...

We’re in hot pursuit of bold exhibitionists. It’s time to show the world your stuff. By that we mean it’s time to secure your spot in Startup Alley , the exhibition floor at the very heart of Disrupt San Francisco 2019 , which takes place on October 2-4. Simply buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package to place your early-stage startup in the path of more than 10,000 influential technologists, founders, investors and media. Startup Alley epitomizes world-class networking and opportunity. It’s where hundreds of early-stage startups showcase their tech and talent to an enthusiastic, targeted audience. And it’s where people make connections that can potentially change the course of their future. Here’s just one example. While exhibiting in Startup Alley, TestCard received media coverage from several different outlets. Luke Heron, the company’s CEO, said that the article helped to push TestCard in the right direction: The coverage we received while exhibiting in Startup Alley — among all...

Glovo , the Spain-headquartered on-demand delivery app that has similarities to Postmates in the U.S., has raised $169 million (€150m) in Series D funding. Lakestar led the round alongside Drake, owner of global pizza franchise Papa John’s. Idinvest Partners and Korelya Capital also participated, bringing total raised to approximately $322 million. The company last raised funding ten months ago: a $134 million Series C round from Seaya Ventures, Cathay Innovation and Rakuten Capital. Founded in January 2015 by Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud, Glovo offers a ‘shop on your behalf’ app that promises to let you order anything locally on-demand and have it delivered “within minutes”. This includes food items — the company is known for its McDonald’s deliveries in Spain — and non-takeout food and other verticals, such as groceries and pharmaceuticals. The fast-growing company claims more than 5.5 million unique users and 16,000 associated partners, and now operates in 124 cities across 21...