Friday 30 June 2017

Crunch Report | Facebook Helps You Find Wi-Fi

Crunch Report June 30 Today’s Stories Facebook is rolling out its ‘Find Wi-Fi’ feature worldwide Delivery Hero’s valuation surpasses $5B following successful IPO Chat app Kakao raises $437M for its Korean ride-hailing service Cabin secures $3.3M for its ‘moving hotel’ Credits Written and Hosted by: Anthony Ha Filmed by: Matthew Mauro Edited by: Chris Gates Notes: Tito… Read More

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Game publisher GameMine inks a $20 million partnership with South Africa’s Vodacom

 On the heels of a $20 million funding round last month, the new game publishing company GameMine has inked its first big deal with a global carrier. The company has partnered with the South Africa mobile carrier Vodacom Group to bring GameMine’s subscription-based mobile games to the South African market. Read More http://ift.tt/2u8wLzw

Snapchat bought the AR location intellectual property of startup Drop

 Snap Map is Snapchat’s plan to tie together its online content with ways to augment your offline reality, and its got the patent to back it up. Augmented reality location startup Drop tells TechCrunch that Snap Inc acquired its intellectual property in 2015 including its “Location-based messaging” patent. In 2013, Drop developed an app that would let you post photos or text to… Read More

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Best Amazon Fire TV deals

July’s Amazon Prime Day is going to be the best day of the year for those looking to pick-up an Amazon Fire TV or Amazon Fire TV Stick. The internet retailer is going to slash the prices of its top streaming players, making it the best time to cut the cord and go all-in on over-the-top video.

To that end and to prevent you from getting burned on a bad deal before that sale starts up, we’ve rounded up the best deals on the planet for the Amazon Fire TV and its pint-sized compatriot. 

But why choose an Amazon Fire TV over something like a Roku? While Roku has the better operating system behind it, Amazon’s latest player has made it a close competition. Both the Amazon Fire TV and Roku’s top-tier player offer full 4K resolution, but only the Amazon Fire TV ties into other services like Prime Music. (That said, if you want a player that can handle high dynamic range, you’ll need to spend more time looking at the Roku Premiere+ and Roku Ultra…) 

For anyone tied into the Amazon ecosphere of products, the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick are the perfect center for your smart homes: both streamers come with Alexa, Amazon’s artificial intelligence, built-in. That means they can talk to devices like the Samsung SmartThings Hub and Nest Thermostats, allowing you to command your smart home using your Fire TV remote. 

But you knew all of that already. That’s why you’re here looking for the best deal on an Amazon Fire TV device. Well, you’ve come to the right place. 

Here are the best Amazon Fire TV deals we’ve found today: 

The new Amazon Fire TV is a pretty impressive little device. For your money you get an Ultra HD media player which also makes a decent fist of some light gaming. 4K playback is generally smooth, and the Amazon connection gives you access to the motherlode of paid-for UHD movie content. If you've picked up a cheap, dumb 4K TV (although one that has the necessary HDCP 2.2 compatibility for DRM'd content) then the new Fire TV is a fantastic choice for getting some UHD Netflix or Amazon Prime viewing on your screen.

Read the full review: Amazon Fire TV

Looking for the Amazon Fire TV experience without another black box on your shelf? Check out the Amazon Fire TV Stick. It offers all of the same content that you'd find on the full-size box, but in a mini, USB stick-esque form factor. You'll love how quick and snappy the Fire TV Stick's interface is, and that it’s intuitively laid out, making most content quick and easy to find. Once you get to your content it streams without any complaints or buffering while playback is smooth and good-looking. The voice search functionality is quick and accurate when searching for Amazon or Netflix content, and it’s also a speedy way of hopping between apps. Most major streaming services are also supported.

Read the full review: Amazon Fire TV Stick

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Manufacturing civility

 Facebook’s task is unenviable. Two billion people, all yammering on about everything in the world — and hidden in that unending torrent are hidden an unknown number of abhorrent, hateful utterances better off unuttered. But the method Facebook has applied to this problem, a tangled system of ethical arithmetic revealed in a report from ProPublica, seems unsuited to the task… Read More

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Harver raises $8.1M to replace the tedious trawl though résumés with an AI

 The problem of dealing with CVs during the hiring process is a perennial one. There are a number of approaches and there are various assessment companies and recruitment companies providing human services to do so. But it’s tought to get around the fact that having to read a lot of CVs is often just pure grunt work. Imagine instead if you could apply machine-learning and a platform… Read More http://ift.tt/2tt3odL

How Flipkart’s F7 Labs is building AI products to engage with customers

The ecommerce company Flipkart is a household name in India today which has made deeper inroads over the last few years across the country. The company, which claims to have come up with new payment model called Cash on Delivery (CoD), is now building artificial intelligence (AI) based products to fix challenges for its customers and sellers. 

2015 was when the company set up a lab in the Silicon Valley with the aim to employ latest technologies for its datasets and gain insights on shopping behaviour of customers. F7 Labs over has been working to help Indian ecommerce giant improve its business processes and enhance shopping experience. The director of the lab, Mihir Naware, believes that “online commerce will soon become as easy and familiar as that of brick and mortar experience.’’ 

The 10-member team of data scientists and data engineers of the lab is betting on data science and machine learning technologies to rethink ground up the challenge areas as their priorities.  

The journey so far 

The team say they have amassed a lot of fascinating insights on their customer behaviour --from the nature of their ‘search queries to how they evaluate products before clicking the buy button. ‘’These insights have helped our product teams to optimize the experience for customers and sellers,’’ says Jatin Chhugani, Principal Architect, F7 Labs.     

Their AI-based model called, DeepInsight for instance, can extract 50 different features of an image while automating image processing for the entire catalogue of Flipkart. The insights are then conveyed back to their sellers to work on them. 

‘’One problem we encountered is the difference in language usage of our customers. Compared to customers in the US or UK, the vocabulary used by our audience to express their sentiment is quite different,’’ says Mihir. Given the current size of its audience, the company can’t rely on manual moderation of reviews. They have developed a new NLP-powered algorithm which can generalize the search terms and phrases, including abbreviations. “We are now able to handle 100s of thousands of reviews with 98%+ accuracy,’’ says Mihir.


The image optimization technique they call LightSpeed is another attempt by the lab to reduce the amount of data sent over the wire, which they say, is impacting 100M Indian customers. “For a typical browsing session, a user would save 500Kb - 1Mb data because of this improvement. In other words, customers can save 35% - 40% of image data,’’ claims Mihir.  

For the F7 Labs, there are a few things on the anvil. The team is working on a one-step process of information discovery on its platform. The goal of the initiative, called Mira, is to enable customers to express their desire in the most natural way possible. Users of Flipkart may soon get to see this in action, as ‘’this is closer to becoming a reality,’’ says Jatin. 

The company is working to come up with chat-bots, as Jatin hints at, to automate its customer interactions. The Lab plans to roll this feature over the next few months.

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The best Linux distros 2017: 7 versions of Linux we recommend

If you can’t stand the lackluster security of a Windows computer, but macOS is much too shallow, allow us to introduce you to Linux. Basically the Doom of open-source software, Linux started out exclusive to x86 PCs and has since made its way to everything from Android phones to servers and even to Chromebooks.

Based on a family of operating systems called Unix, which rose to modest fame in the late 1970s, Linux has been adopted by various software developers who have all made it their own in different forms known as distributions, or distros. All of the top Linux distros take the Linux kernel, the heart and soul of the operating system and shape it to fit their own desktop environments.

The best Linux distros are each tailored to specific types of users. So while Ubuntu is popular for its accessibility to newcomers, Arch Linux has the opposite appeal. It’s intended for users to take advantage of the Linux terminal and type their own commands to achieve otherwise simple tasks like installing apps. Technical details aside, these are the best Linux distros.


Shashank Sharma, Nick Peers, Nate Drake and Gabe Carey have also contributed to this article

If you’re after a distro that gets you as far away as possible from the image of a nerdy hacker type bashing away at a terminal interface, Elementary OS is what you need. It’s probably the most attractive distro around, with a style similar to that of macOS. This operating system’s superb desktop environment is known as Pantheon, and is based on Gnome.

The latest version of Elementary OS is called Loki, which as well as being that bit prettier and neater than its predecessor Freya, has its own application installer UI called AppCenter. It’s a delightfully simple way to install apps outside the terminal, which is handy as there aren't very many preinstalled. 

Elementary OS does, however, come bundled with the Epiphany browser, the Geary email client and a few basic ‘tool’ apps. You may need to add more programs but this is more than made up for by Elementary OS’ Elegance. 

You can get started with Elementary OS here

Linux Mint is a great ‘default’ distro for new Linux users, as it comes with a lot of the software you’ll need when switching from Mac or Windows, such as LibreOffice, the favoured productivity suite of Linux users. It also has better support for proprietary media formats, allowing you to play videos, DVDs and music out of the box. 

You can download four main starter flavours of Mint 18, each of which uses a different desktop environment, the top-most layer of the interface allowing you to change elements such as the appearance of windows and menus. Cinnamon is currently the most popular, but you can also choose the more basic MATE, Xfce or even KDE. 

All these desktop environments offer a good deal of customisation options, so feel free to download a few and boot as Live CD prior to installing to see which works best.

You can get started with Mint here

If you’re willing to try a slightly less user-friendly distro, Arch Linux is one of the most popular choices around. Arch allows you to customise your build using the terminal to download and install packages, and it’s particularly handy for developers and those with older machines who may not want unnecessary packages taking up space.

Of course, this used to be the way all Linux distros were set up, but there are now much more user-friendly methods available. There’s even such a version of Arch Linux – it’s called Antergos. This comes with more drivers, more applications and a bunch of desktop environments to let you change the look of the system. Its aim is to hold your hand and get you up and running with all the basics right from the initial install, but it’s still Arch Linux underneath.

The hardcore crowd may turn their noses up at packages like Antergos, but when it saves those newer to Linux hours of potentially frustrating fiddling about, we’re all for it.

Antergos’ graphical installer can guide you through the setup process and boot you to the Gnome 3 desktop environment. It can also use the Cinammon, MATE, KDE and Xfce environments if you prefer. Antergos doesn't come with an office suite but you can install this and other programs via the delightfully named Arch package manager ‘pacman’.

You can get started with Arch Linux here or Antergos here

Ubuntu is one of the most popular flavours of Linux and along with Mint is strongly recommended for Linux newbies, as it's extremely accessible. 

At the time of writing we’re up to Ubuntu 17.04, just note that this is not an LTS (long term support) release. These guarantee five years of security and general maintenance updates, so you can carry on using your machine without the hassle of running a full upgrade every few months. 

The current version of Ubuntu uses the Unity interface, which may be less familiar to Windows and macOS users. There are variations of Ubuntu which employ different environments such as Lubuntu, which uses the minimal LXDE desktop environment and a selection of fast, lightweight applications. This places far less strain on system resources than the graphic-intensive Unity. 

You can get started with Ubuntu here and Lubuntu here

Tails is a privacy-oriented Linux distro which has the aim of concealing your location and identity as much as possible. Even Edward Snowden used it. 

The OS routes all its internet traffic through the anonymising Tor network, which is designed to prevent data from being intercepted and analysed. Underneath all the security measures, it’s based on Debian Linux and uses the Gnome desktop so the interface is still clear and user-friendly. 

Tails isn’t for everyone, but this niche OS does give you some peace of mind if you’ve been fretting about all the worrying privacy-trampling legislation being passed these days. 

You can get started with Tails here

CentOS 7 is a community offshoot of the Enterprise version of Red Hat Linux, and its focus is on stability rather than constant updates. Like Red Hat, security and maintenance updates for CentOS are pushed out up to 10 years from the initial release of each version. 

The idea is to make CentOS super-reliable. For that reason, it’s a great choice for a server, if not quite so hot for someone looking for a new OS for daily use on their desktop PC or laptop.

On the plus side, you can enjoy the pleasure of having something for nothing – packages compiled for the commercial version of Red Hat Linux are fully compatible with CentOS, so you can use them free of charge. 

You can get started with CentOS here

If you want a home music recording studio or a video production workstation without spending the thousands of pounds involved with industry standard software, consider installing Ubuntu Studio. 

This officially recognised flavour of Ubuntu Linux has been designed for audio and video production, as an alternative to paid software such as Pro Tools. Support for audio plug-ins and MIDI input is built in and a virtual patch bay comes preinstalled. 

Ubuntu Studio’s repositories have access to the packages in the main Ubuntu OS as well as a few digital audio sequencers. Its main strength is in audio recording through tools like the JACK Audio Connection Kit.

You can get started with Ubuntu Studio here

Previously known as SUSE Linux and subsequently SuSE Linux Professional, openSUSE is aimed at developers and system administrators. For that reason, it’s extremely stringent on security protocols. 

It’s so exact, for instance, that to carry out virtually any task in openSUSE, you’ll need to enter a root password. At the same time, however, openSUSE brings with it a KDE and a GNOME desktop, covering everyone’s login needs.

One of the more polished Linux distros around, openSUSE is consistently ranked in the top five distros on DistroWatch.com. What’s more the openSUSE Project’s website offers the ability for users to choose which packages, a la carte, are included in their openSUSE install.

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Facebook News Feed change demotes sketchy links overshared by spammers

 Technically, Facebook can’t suspend people’s accounts just for sharing 50-plus false, sensational, or clickbaity news articles per day. It doesn’t want to trample anyone’s right to share. But there’s nothing stopping it from burying those links low in the News Feed so few people ever see them. Today Facebook announced an algorithm change that does just that. It… Read More

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Facebook is rolling out its “Find Wi-Fi” feature worldwide

 Facebook is expanding one of its newer features designed to help mobile users find accessible Wi-Fi networks. The company had begun testing a “Find Wi-Fi” option last year on mobile, which highlighted free, public Wi-Fi networks nearby. At the time, the option was only available on iOS in select countries, as something of a test. Today, Facebook announced users worldwide on both… Read More

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Twitter inks live stream deals for Wimbledon, Comic-Con coverage, and more

 Twitter is continuing to grow its live streaming business, with a series of new deals announced over the past week or so, including a partnership that will bring live streams from the floor of the San Diego Comic-Con in July, as well as behind-the-scenes action and news from Wimbledon, among several other efforts. You may recall that Wimbledon was the first live-streamed sport to pop up on… Read More

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Thursday 29 June 2017

Crunch Report | Blue Apron IPO Has A Rocky Start

Crunch Report 6.29 Today’s Stories  Blue Apron IPO off to a rough start Microsoft confirms Cloudyn acquisition, sources say price is between $50M and $70M Instagram implements an AI system to fight mean and harassing comments Uber crosses the 5 billion trip milestone amid ongoing issues A brief history of the iPhone Credits Written and Hosted by: Anthony Ha Filmed by: Matthew Mauro Edited by: Joe… Read More

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Facebook's internet drone reaches new heights with first successful landing

Facebook's internet-beaming autonomous drone Aquila has completed a successful second full-scale test flight, the company announced today. 

While the solar-powered aircraft, designed to fly non-stop for 60-90 days at high altitudes, flew once before, the first flight ended in a crash landing. This time, Aquila "landed perfectly."

This second flight took place on May 22 and lasted one hour and 46 minutes. The team constructed a special landing area for Aquila, and having made adjustments including adding wing spoilers, modifying the craft's autopilot software and locking the propellers horizontally before landing, were able to pull off a smooth landing.

This is especially impressive because the lightweight Aquila, which has a wingspan wider than a Boeing 737, lacks traditional landing gear; it basically lands on pads made of Kevlar as it skids to a halt.

According to Facebook, everything except the propeller locking function worked as they should have.

One standout stat is that Aquila's climb rate was almost twice as fast as the first flight at 180 feet per minute, attributable to the changes Facebook implemented. Facebook didn't provide a peak altitude, but said the craft reached at least 3,000 feet before continuing to climb.

There's still more work to be done before Aquila is beaming internet to remote parts of the world, but this is a huge step forward for Facebook in its quest to connect everyone. 

The social network turned all-encompassing tech company has forged ahead with its plans to deliver internet connectivity to more people, which is part of its newly revised mission statement to build community and bring the world closer together.

Aquila's flight is an important milestone for these kinds of drone aircraft, and an even bigger one for Facebook. 

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macOS High Sierra public beta is available to download right now

Apple promised it would drop the public beta for macOS High Sierra this week and it’s finally here at long last.

The early version of Apple’s latest operating system for Macs is available to download now, all you have to do is follow through this link, enroll your devices and follow our how to install guide

Just be aware there are always inherent risks and potential device bricking bugs that come with new operating systems, especially untested betas such as this.

High Sierra is the second installment of macOS – since the name change from OS X – and it brings some big changes including a completely new APFS-based file system that replaces the aging HFS architecture. Now that probably won’t really mean a whole lot to you unless it complete borks all your files, but you should notice the new system is faster and save a bit more storage space.

Some changes you will actually notice include a completely reworked Photos app that adds more image editing options to make it a truer successor to Apple’s Aperture. Safari now has more options to disable autoplaying videos on websites and shield you from advertisers from tracking your online web browsing. Mail has also been tweaked to take up to 35% less space and make searching easier.

  • Those were just a few of the changes that comes with macOS High Sierra, check out our hub article for everything else and good luck with the beta.
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Free choice must be free

 It is time to have a serious conversation about the limits of choice architecture online. We should acknowledge legitimate business interests alongside the long-established practice of choice architecture. At the same time, we should put restrictions in place to prohibit the use of nudges when they act as mere exploitation of weaknesses for the sake of profit-making. Read More

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Get a $10 credit on Amazon Prime Day with this new promotion

Amazon is giving users a $10 credit to be spent on Amazon Prime Day through a new promotion.

Here's the deal: the Amazon Prime Day 2017 date is Tuesday, July 11. From now until Friday, July 7 at 11:59pm PT, whenever a Prime member streams a Prime video for the first time on their TV using an eligible device, they'll get 10 big ones to spend on Prime Day. 

If you're not currently an Amazon Prime member, you can sign up and then take advantage of the promotion. Here's where you can sign up for a free Amazon Prime trial.

Once you've got Prime membership in hand - or if you're already a member - sign into Amazon Video on your TV. Then, pick a Prime show or movie watch. 

You can peruse the entire Amazon Prime Video selection here, or keep an eye out for videos with a 'Prime' label on them.

You'll need to stream the video through one of these eligible devices in order to tap into the Prime Day deal: 

Once you've watched the video, it will take 3-4 days for the credit to come through. You'll get an email confirmation you've received the $10 credit, and though you won't see it appear in your account, your receipt will show the credit was applied when you make a purchase on Amazon Prime Day.

If you like the idea of $10 off your Amazon Prime Day purchases, you have until July 7 to get the credit. And be sure to spend it on Prime Day as the $10 disappears after July 11.

  • Bookmark this page for all the best Black Friday 2017 deals
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Facebook introduces new ad metrics and promises that more are coming

 Facebook says it’s introducing a number of new measurements for businesses that buy ads and own Facebook Pages. Last year, the company admitted that it had been misreporting some metrics — individually, none of the mistakes seemed particularly serious, but cumulatively, they created the impression that the company needs to work harder on transparency for advertisers. (It’s… Read More

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Facebook Messenger wants to be buddy and business: but can it really be both?

Facebook Messenger is in an interesting stage of its existence, in the same week it launched a collection of fun Snapchat-style video add-ons and Discover, where you can find and communicate with businesses.

It makes sense for Messenger to be integrating businesses into the platform, as currently there doesn’t seem to be a way for Facebook to monetize the platform. 

Our question is: is there room for both things to exist on the same platform? We were invited to a roundtable with David Marcus, head of Messenger for Facebook where we were able to discuss this with him.

“The experience itself works, it’s just the term is not compelling to consumers. You’d be hard pressed, even in the Discover surface of Messenger to find the term ‘bot’ because people want to interact with brands, with services, but not with bots, because they don’t know what that is.”

But we’re not sure we agree. We don’t think that people don’t want to talk to bots because they don’t know what they are; we think people don’t want to talk to bots because they aren’t yet developed enough that you can communicate with them naturally. Which makes the hiding of all references to bots feel a little suspect. 

Who are you talking to?

Marcus was reticent to discuss exact numbers of users that are interacting with bots on Messenger, but he did tell us: “There are about 2 billion messages a month exchanged between businesses/services on Messenger. That number has doubled in a year, and that includes automation and human interaction.”

Clearly with the amount of interaction increasing at that rapid pace, there is a demand for someone (or something) to be handling that demand. And possibly a chatbot is the best way to go about it.

The problem is, we’re a long way from your standard brand bot in Messenger passing the Turing test. And what this means is that Messenger is in a place where you have dry, corporate conversations with an unnatural corporate chatbot at the same time as a frivolous video chat with your friends wearing a digital rabbit mask. 

Marcus thinks that this disparity is not a problem: “I think this notion that people want to be serious on some platforms and fun on other platforms is pretty antiquated. You want to communicate. And of course, when you want to communicate with your bank, you’re not going to send them a pic of yourself with a rabbit mask.”

Digital Jekyll and Hyde

“The same way that you as a person can walk in a bank branch and be very serious and have a conversation,” Marcus continued, “and then go to the pub and goof around with friends. You’re still the same person, you just interact differently in different situations. We think the same is true in your digital life.”

And to a certain extent he’s right. In a browser window you can go from online banking to trawling Reddit with the click of a button, but that feels different somehow. Perhaps it’s to do with branding. 

Messenger feels like a tool, and if you can’t tell if a tool is a hammer or a whisk, are you going to use it for either function? 

This isn’t the first time that a company has tried to bridge the gap between fun and financial; Blackberry’s Messenger BBM tries to tread this line, and it has never fully managed to make it work while gaining the popularity of Messenger of WhatsApp.

Facebook does manage to be sprawling enough as a platform that it can handle a diverse range of content, so perhaps it is the best company to try and make this diverse Messenger work. 

Discover has only just launched in the US, and will be launching worldwide in the not-too distant future, so we probably have a little while to wait before we can get an accurate gauge of how successful it is. 

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Instagram implements an AI system to fight mean and harassing comments

 Instagram is flipping the switch on a system that will automatically detect mean, offensive and harassing comments and make sure that people never see them. The new system is based on work that Facebook and Instagram have done with DeepText, a text classification engine meant to help machines interpret words as used in context to fight spam. As Wired first reported, the Instagram system… Read More

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Windows 10’s AutoPilot feature could see the OS take off with businesses

Microsoft has been spilling the beans on further goodies which will arrive for businesses in the Fall Creators Update for Windows 10, including a juicy new feature which will make it a snap to set up a business PC.

Of course, deploying a PC (or indeed multiple PCs) to staff can be a headache of a task, so Microsoft is gunning to seriously simplify the whole process with what’s called Windows AutoPilot.

As the name suggests, this takes all the hassle out of setting up a new Windows 10 PC, automatically doing pretty much everything for you. A new Windows AutoPilot Deployment Program will allow PC vendors to link a device to an organisation, and enable a new PC to immediately be made ready, and joined to Azure Active Directory, enrolled in Intune and so forth.

Specific settings can be automatically applied, appropriate business apps installed, Office 365 set up, and everything will theoretically be ready to go with a minimum of fuss.

AutoPilot should mean that a staff member can set up their own new PC without any help from the IT department; a pretty bold claim indeed.

This new feature could certainly help accelerate Windows 10’s progress in the business world, because anything that makes organising the deployment of a new OS easier is obviously going to be very welcome.

Microsoft says that the Surface team is already working with partners to get the scheme ready to roll, and Windows AutoPilot should be available to business customers ‘later in the year’ (obviously after the Fall Creators Update emerges).

The big autumn update will also incorporate Windows AutoPilot Reset, a quick and simple way to reset a machine to the last good working state without messing up device management and Azure Active Directory settings.

MDM magic

Speaking of mobile device management (MDM), new capabilities will be coming in this area, including the ability to configure and deploy Windows Defender Application Guard, as well as baseline security settings, making it easy to impose recommended security settings on managed devices across a business.

It will also be possible to configure Windows Firewall rules.

Furthermore, Microsoft also said that Windows Analytics will be getting a new feature by the name of Device Health. The idea here is to monitor system stability and health, pick out potential issues that the user may not have even noticed yet, and remedy them, thus avoiding future problems and downtime.

Along with AutoPilot, this should be a major boon for businesses who have made the leap to Microsoft’s latest desktop operating system.

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Accel leads $22.8M Series A in Swedish telehealth startup, KRY

 Swedish digital healthcare startup KRY has closed a €20 million ($22.8M) Series A round of funding to grow its on-demand video-call-a-doctor business, including expanding into new markets. Existing investors Index Ventures, Creandum and Project A also participated in the round. Read More http://ift.tt/2toPWHb

The best cheap broadband only deals in June 2017

Wednesday 28 June 2017

Twitch’s mobile app is adding live streaming, dark mode and more

 Amazon-owned game streaming site Twitch today announced a series of changes coming soon to its mobile application, the most notable of which is the ability for broadcasters to stream directly to their channel from the app itself. That doesn’t mean you can livestream gameplay as of yet, though. However, being able to go live directly from mobile is a more important part of… Read More

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Twitch’s mobile app is adding live streaming, dark mode and more

 Amazon-owned game streaming site Twitch today announced a series of changes coming soon to its mobile application, the most notable of which is the ability for broadcasters to stream directly to their channel from the app itself. That doesn’t mean you can livestream gameplay as of yet, though. However, being able to go live directly from mobile is a more important part of… Read More http://ift.tt/2tm5xaV

Facebook Messenger launches Discover as it takes on chatbots (again)

 Facebook isn’t done with chatbots quite yet; today, the company is launching Discover, a hub inside Messenger for discovering new and interesting chatbots to message with. The section is going live for users stateside, and the company is billing it as an opportunity for people to interact with businesses and brands in more useful ways. Read More

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LG’s latest 77-inch OLED costs more than some college degrees

LG has officially announced the pricing for the 77-inch version of its Signature Series W7 OLED. The verdict? It costs more than the average in-state tuition for a four year college – which, according to CollegeBoard.com, is around $9,650. 

To buy one of these bad boys for your playboy bachelor pad will cost you $19,999 (around £15,500 or AU$26,000). 

Before today, the TV was only available in a minuscule 65 inches (in itself, a $7,999 investment) but, starting today, you’re free to blow your kid’s college tuition on the humongous 77-inch iteration of the TV. 

You might be wondering why in the world a TV costs more than a car, or several vacations, or a down payment on a house. The answer is the TV is drop-dead gorgeous – at least the 65-inch LG OLED65W7 was when we reviewed it. 

Both TVs are less than 0.2 inches (2.75mm) thick all the way through, support four kinds of HDR and have individually lit pixels that allow for insanely deep perceivable black levels of less than 16 nits. 

They’re two of the best TVs of 2017 and some of the best 4K TVs on the market, but is the LG OLED77W7 worth $20,000? We’ll let you and your corpulent checkbook figure that one out for yourselves.

TVs for the proletariats 

OK, so what if you can’t afford a new W7 OLED but you still want amazing OLED picture quality? Your best bet is to look at the W7’s two younger siblings – the C7 and B7 OLED. 

Both the C7 and B7 use the same panel as the W7 OLED (meaning you’ll see the same picture quality with any of LG’s OLED TVs) with the only difference being the sound system that comes with the TV. The W7 uses a 4.2.X Dolby Atmos soundbar while the other two use smaller 10-watt built-in speakers. 

It makes a big difference in terms of sound performance but, considering that one of the best soundbars of 2017 can be bought for less than two grand, it’s probably a smarter investment buying a soundbar separately. 

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Analysts think Petya ‘ransomware’ was built for targeted destruction, not profit

 The description of the Petya infections hitting computers worldwide as “ransomware” may be a misnomer, security analysts suggest. The malicious software’s code and other evidence indicate that the profit motive may have been a camouflage for an act of cyber-espionage targeting Ukraine. Read More http://ift.tt/2s3iu5A

Mysterious stealth gaming startup Wonder announces $14 million in funding

 Ah, another day, another stealth mobile gaming startup getting funded by Shakira. LA-based Wonder announced today that it has closed a Series A round of funding. The startup is building what it claims to be a new breed of “VR-ready” gaming hardware in secret, but seems to have been gesturing loudly about just how secret it is. Read More http://ift.tt/2tlfbus

Snapchat now lets you create custom geofilters right in the app

 Snapchat introduced a way to create custom geofilters back in February of last year, and now it’s making the feature easier to use. U.S. Snapchat users can now create and submit custom filters directly in the app, rather than having to go to the studio website to make their custom filter. The mobile creative studio is now located in settings, under a menu item called “On-Demand… Read More

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Now you can quantify your cat’s comings and goings too

 Cat owners rejoice! Now you can quantify the comings and goings of your furry friend — thanks to an app-controlled pet door that can send push notifications when Tibbles enters and leaves your abode. Read More http://ift.tt/2t0tBxk

Wayra UK launches accelerator to tackle the ‘poverty premium’

 Wayra, the Telefónica backed accelerator network, is launching a new startup program in the UK that aims to tackle the so-called ‘poverty premium’ — whereby people on low incomes pay more for some goods and services. Read More http://ift.tt/2tkhfTv