Technology

Itnot news at this point that BuzzFeed has a serious news organization — one whose reporting on Russia made it a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize this year.

But italso a news organization whose stories are published alongside the social media friendly quizzes and lists that BuzzFeed remains known for — which can be confusing, or even provide easy ammunition to those who want to criticize the reporting.

Yes, the company already taken steps to give the more serious reporting its own home and identity, with a BuzzFeed News app, a section on the main BuzzFeed site and a &BuzzFeed News& label on every story.

Still, Senior Product Manager Kate Zasada said the companyown research has found that some readers &don&t completely understand& that while BuzzFeed is famous for GIF-filled lists, it also produces &deeply researched and fact-checked& journalism.(The snarky comments I get whenever I write about BuzzFeed seem to back this up.)

So the company is making that distinction a clearer with the launch of a new BuzzFeed News website.

News stories will still run on the main BuzzFeed homepage, and the BuzzFeed News site will include links to other BuzzFeed content. But it looks and feels more like a standalone site, giving the team what Zasada said is &a new domain and a new brand.&

The site won&t be divided into traditional topics like politics, sports and so on — Product Manager Sam Kirkland argued that these divisions &didn&t make much sense with how we work internally or how we consume news.& Instead, therea Trending News Bar at the top of the page, highlighting the most important topics of the day, as chosen by BuzzFeed News editors.

And while the new site will include advertising, such as links to sponsored BuzzFeed posts, Zasada said there won&t be any sponsored posts hosted on BuzzFeed News itself.

Of course, not every reader will actually find these stories by typing buzzfeednews.com into their web browser. But Zasada said that even if you click over from social media or elsewhere on the web, you&ll see each news article is accompanied by not just the BuzzFeed News logo, but also the Trending News Bar.

And it won&t just be photos and text dominating the page. Zasada said the site will also support YouTube videos and GIFs, and Editor in Chief Ben Smith added that the site will provide &a very seamless way& to promote BuzzFeedbroadcast-style video programming like its Twitter series AM to DM and Follow This, a Netflix series about BuzzFeed reporters.

Smith also noted that while the company is creating a new home for its journalism, that doesn&t mean the site will be unrelentingly serious and highbrow. As we spoke yesterday afternoon, he said that some of the most popular BuzzFeed News stories included multiple articles about Trump, a long essay about Gwen Stefani and a story on the sadly neglected aerial tram emoji.

In other words, he said, ita &general interest news organization& that covers the &full range& of relevant topics.

And even as itcompeting with all that other BuzzFeed content, itstill drawing an audience. The company says BuzzFeed News stories receive 200 million pageviews each month, and that one third of BuzzFeedtotal audience reads news stories each month.

In Smithview, the new website reflects &an organizational change thatalready happened.&

&I don&t think anybody finds it confusing that ABC does news programming and scripted shows on prime time,& he said. &On the web, the conventions are less clear. I think we&re trying to be very clear. We feel our audience wants that.&

Once upon a time, it looked like cloud-based serviced would become the central hub for analyzing all IoT data. But it didn&t quite turn out that way because most IoT solutions simply generate too much data to do this effectively and the round-trip to the data center doesn&t work for applications that have to react in real time. Hence the advent of edge computing, which is spawing its own ecosystem of startups.

Among those is Swim.ai, which today announced that it has raised an $11 million Series B funding round let by Cambridge Innovation Capital, with participation from Silver Creek Ventures and Harris Barton Asset Management. The round also included a strategic investment fromArm, the chip design firm you may still remember as ARM(but don&t write it like that or their PR department will promptly email you). This brings the companytotal funding to about $18 million.

Swim.ai has an interesting take on edge computing. The companySWIM EDX product combines both local data processing and analytics with local machine learning. In a traditional approach, the edge devices collect the data, maybe perform some basic operations against the data to bring down the bandwidth cost and then ship it to the cloud where the hard work is done and where,if you are doing machine learning, the models are trained. Swim.ai argues that this doesn&t work for applications that need to respond in real time. Swim.ai, however, performs the model training on the edge device itself by pulling in data from all connected devices. It then builds a digital twin for each one of these devices and uses that to self-train its models based on this data.

&Demand for the EDX software is rapidly increasing, driven by our softwareunique ability to analyze and reduce data, share new insights instantly peer-to-peer & locally at the ‘edge& on existing equipment. Efficiently processing edge data and enabling insights to be easily created and delivered with the lowest latency are critical needs for any organization,& said Rusty Cumpston, co-founder and CEO of Swim.ai. &We are thrilled to partner with our new and existing investors who share our vision and look forward to shaping the future of real-time analytics at the edge.&

The company doesn&t disclose any current customers, but it is focusing its efforts on manufacturers, service providers andsmart city solutions.

Swim.ai plans to use its new funding to launch a new R-D center in Cambridge, UK, expand its product development team and tackle new verticals and geographies with an expanded sales and marketing team.

The rise and rise of subscription streaming services continues, with UK media regulator Ofcom revealing that memberships to the top three web-based video distributors (Netflix, Sky's Now TV and Amazon Prime) now outnumber legacy pay-TV subscribers in Britain.

Netflix, NOW TV and Amazon Prime amassed 15.4 million paying account holders, while pay-TV