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Two-Thirds Of The World’s Mobiles Are Dumb Phones. Meet The Company Getting Them Online
And yet U2opia mobile, a Singapore-based company founded by Indian entrepreneurs, has catapulted to 17 million users in 36 countries as a result. To understand why, you have to unlearn Facebook—its blue background, viral videos, photo uploads—as you know it. And put yourself in the position of someone who has never been on the internet before. Read More »
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University of Oklahoma Researcher Asks Twitter Users to Help with Research
Did you ever consider that your tweets could be used for scientific research? Researchers at the University of Oklahoma are taking to the Twitterverse to help them investigate the use of Twitter for public health research. Christan Grant, a computer science researcher in the Gallogly College of Engineering, is asking active Twitter users over the age of 18 to complete a quick two-minute online survey...
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UPDATE 1-Apple, Google, Dozens Of Others Urge U.S. Surveillance Disclosures
Dozens of companies, non-profits and trade organizations including Apple Inc, Google Inc and Facebook Inc sent a letter on Thursday pushing the Obama administration and Congress for more disclosures on the government's national security-related requests for user data. Read More »
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Upstream Conference to Feature Open Source Maintainers
Imagine the chaos that would occur if all open source software vanished with the snap of a finger. Picture the devices that would turn to bricks in our hands, the infrastructure that would fail, and the machinery that would fall silent. The truth is we probably don't stop to think about all the open source libraries, frameworks, and components we depend on-until something goes wrong. The extraordinary impact of open source is difficult to measure or quantify...Open source is a testament to human ingenuity, and it's not often that we take the time to celebrate what we-the creators and users of open source-have made together. We think it's time we did. That's why we're announcing a new type of open source event called Upstream. It's a one-day celebration of open source for the developers who use it and the maintainers that create it. We'd like you to join us on June 7 for this entirely virtual and free event where we'll focus on the creators behind essential open source packages and the developers who build amazing things with them.
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Urgent Supplies Through the Air
Drones can do so much more than take photos and inspect cell phone towers. They can ferry critical supplies to hard-to-reach areas and drop off life-saving packages to disaster survivors. One company, Zipline International in San Francisco, is deploying unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to drop off lifesaving packages of blood in Rwanda—and is the world’s first national drone delivery service. Another company, Windhorse Aerospace in Wells, England, is developing a UAS intentionally designed for a one-way trip. The aircraft is made of combustible or even edible materials that can be taken apart by disaster survivors after it lands and used for fires or meals...
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Veterans Outreach Project To Spend $1 Million On Facebook Ads This Year
A Veterans Affairs Department outreach campaign that spent $2 million on Facebook advertising last year plans to spend an additional $1 million this year, VA officials said on Thursday. Read More »
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What Everyone Gets Wrong In The Debate Over Net Neutrality
We shouldn’t waste so much breath on the idea of keeping the network completely neutral. It isn’t neutral now. What we should really be doing is looking for ways we can increase competition among ISPs—ways we can prevent the Comcasts and the AT&Ts from gaining so much power that they can completely control the market for internet bandwidth.
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What Is Deep Learning, and Why Should You Care About It?
Whether it's Google's headline-grabbing DeepMind AlphaGo victory, or Apple's weaving of "using deep neural network technology" into iOS 10, deep learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage these days, promising to take applications to new heights in how they interact with us mere mortals. To go deeper (yes, I went there) on the subject, I reached out to the team at the deep learning-focused company Skymind, creators of Deep Learning For Java (DL4J), and authors of the recently released O'Reilly book Deep Learning: A Practitioner's Approach, Josh Patterson and Adam Gibson...
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What Silicon Valley Can Teach Feds About Innovation
Wired Workplace spent the day in Silicon Valley on Thursday checking out the work spaces and work cultures of some of the nation’s most innovative companies, like Facebook, IDEO and Kaiser Permanente. I’ll have more on my visits next week, but I wanted to share a few of the key things I learned that I think are important for federal agencies: Read More »
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What's New in Facebook Open Source
With more than 1.65 billion people on Facebook and more coming online every day, our engineers are hard at work making sure that our services work smoothly for everyone. Part of this work involves streamlining our processes so we can keep moving fast as we continue to scale: We build tools that enable engineers to work more easily across platforms, automate testing to catch problems sooner, and help improve the overall performance of our products...
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WhatsApp Shows How Phone Carriers Lost Out On $33 Billion
Facebook Inc. (FB)’s $19 billion purchase of mobile-messaging startup WhatsApp Inc. is a stark reminder of how much money phone carriers are losing out on as competitors let users text and chat at no charge. Read More »
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When the Hacker Ethic Meets Old Ideas About Brand
Open organizations apply principles from open source software development more broadly. Existing organizations find the open approach appealing because it promises gains in productivity and efficiency—but openness may have farther-reaching consequences than we anticipate or intend. One influential set of open principles comes from Steven Levy's book about the early history of the computing revolution, Hackers. Levy lays out what he calls "the Hacker Ethic," and it begins with "the Hands-On Imperative"...
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Why Are Dead People Liking Stuff On Facebook?
Last month, while wasting a few moments on Facebook, my pal Brendan O’Malley was surprised to see that his old friend Alex Gomez had “liked” Discover. This was surprising not only because Alex hated mega-corporations but even more so because Alex had passed away six months earlier. Read More »
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Why Are Facebook, IBM, Microsoft And Oracle Backing The Fight *Against* The Blind?
One of the more disgraceful examples of the inherent selfishness of the copyright world is that it has consistently blocked a global treaty that would make it easier for the blind and visually impaired to read books in format like Braille... Read More »
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Why Crowdfunding Is Set To Explode In Size Over The Next Few Years
The type of social-driven lending that helped fund flashy startups such as virtual reality goggles maker Oculus VR could more than double over the next few years, according to research from the Tabb Group. Oculus was scooped up by Facebook for a cool $2 billion less than a month ago after receiving its original funding through the crowd-funding company Kickstarter.
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