Music
Trailers
DailyVideos
India
Pakistan
Afghanistan
Bangladesh
Srilanka
Nepal
Thailand
StockMarket
Business
Technology
Startup
Trending Videos
Coupons
Football
Search
Download App in Playstore
Download App
Best Collections
Technology

We all carry smartphones. Itbecome one of the most important things we grab along with our keys and wallet when we walk out of our home in the morning. However, companies are going under the microscope with how they intrude on our privacy with these devices. It started with Facebook and Marc Zuckerberg in front of Congress. Now itApple and Google. Whatnext
After the recent eye opening and jaw dropping testimony from Marc Zuckerberg and Facebook lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are finally getting more interested in how companies take, use and abuse our privacy in order to grow.
Now this investigation is spreading to smartphone makers Apple and Google with their iPhone, Android smartphones and Gmail. Whonext AI like what we use in Amazon Alexa and Google Home are one of the hottest new technologies and areas of growth. They are always listening to every word we say.
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: IDG Contributor Network: Lawmakers investigate how AI in Apple, Google invade privacy
Write comment (92 Comments)It's far away and long ago -- so long ago, in fact, that there are still IT trade shows where vendors can show off their wares, says a pilot fish working at just such a show.
"I was on hand to set up a demo machine," fish says. "The equipment arrived at a loading dock on one floor, but needed placement on a mezzanine area half a flight of stairs down.
"The person in charge of the demo was anxious to load the software and ensure everything was ready. But after moving some of the equipment down a ramp, the folks responsible for moving the 19-inch racks disappeared and were nowhere to be foundfor a long time.
"A marketing guy returned from his liquid lunch, and conspired with me -- I was, somewhat sadly, naive -- to make the exhibitor happier by moving a rack down to the mezzanine.
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: The show must go on!
Write comment (94 Comments)Need to resize a video for IGTV Add subtitles for Twitter Throw in sound effects for YouTube Or collage it with other clips for the Instagram feed Kapwing lets you do all that and more for free from a mobile browser or website. This scrappy new startup is building the vertical video eracreative suite full of editing tools for every occasion.
Pronounced &Ka-pwing,& like the sound of a ricocheted bullet, the company was founded by two former Google Image Search staffers. Now after six months of quiet bootstrapping, itannouncing a $1.7 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins.
Kapwing hopes to rapidly adapt to shifting memescape and its fragmented media formats, seizing on opportunities like creators needing to turn their long-form landscape videos vertical for Instagramrecently launched IGTV. The free version slaps a Kapwing.com watermark on all its exports for virality, but users can pay $20 a month to remove it.
While sites like Imgur and Imgflip offer lightweight tools for static memes and GIFs, &the tools and community for doing that for video are kinda inaccessible,& says co-founder and CEO Julia Enthoven. &You have something you install on your computer with fancy hardware. You should able to create and riff off of people,& even if you just have your phone, she tells me. Indeed, 100,000 users are already getting crafty with Kapwing.
&We want to make these really relevant trending formats so anyone can jump in,& Enthoven declares. &Down the line, we want to make a destination for consuming that content.&
Kapwing co-founders Eric Lu and Julia Enthoven
Enthoven and Eric Lu both worked at Google Image Search in the lauded Associate Product Manager (APM) program thatminted many future founders for companies like Quip, Asana and Polyvore. But after two years, they noticed a big gap in the creative ecosystem. Enthoven explains that &The idea came from using outdated tools for making the types of videos people want to make for social media — short-form, snackable video you record with your phone. Itso difficult to make those kinds of videos in todayeditors.&
So the pair of 25-year-olds left in September to start Kapwing. They named it after their favorite sound effect from the Calvin - Hobbes comics when the make-believe tiger would deflect toy gunshots from his best pal. &Itan onomatopoeia, and thatsort of cool because video is all about movement and sound.&
After starting with a meme editor for slapping text above and below images, Kapwing saw a sudden growth spurt as creators raced to convert landscape videos for vertical IGTV. Now it has a wide range of tools, with more planned.
The current selection includes:
- Meme Maker
- Subtitles
- Multi-Video Montage Maker
- Video Collage
- Video Filters
- Image To Video Converter
- Add Overlaid Text To Video
- Add Music To Video With MP3 Uploads
- Resize Video
- Reverse Video
- Loop Video
- Trim Video
- Mute Video
- Stop Motion Maker
- Sound Effects Maker
Kapwing definitely has some annoying shortcomings. Therean 80mb limit on uploads, so don&t expect to be messing with much 4K videos or especially long clips. You can&t subtitle a GIF, and the meme maker flipped vertical photos sideways without warning. It also lacks some of the slick tools that Snapchat has developed, like a magic eraser for Photoshopping stuff out and a background changer.
The No. 1 thing it needs is a selective cropping tool. Instead of letting you manually move the vertical frame around inside a landscape video so you always catch the action, it just grabs the center. That left me staring at blank space between myself and an interview subject when I uploaded this burger robot startup video. Itsomething apps like RotateNFlip and Flixup already offer.
Beyond meme-loving teens and semi-pro creators, Kapwing has found an audience amongst school teachers. The simplicity and onscreen instructions make it well-suited for young students, and it works on Chromebooks because thereno need to download software.
The paid version has found some traction with content marketers and sponsored creators who don&t want a distracting watermark included. That business model is always in danger of encroachment from free tools, though, so Kapwing hopes to also become a place to view the meme content it exports. That network model is more defensible if it gains a big enough audience, and could be monetized with ads. Though it will put it in competition with Imgur, Reddit and the big dogs like Instagram.
&We aspire to become a hub for consumption,& Enthoven concluded. &Consume, get an idea, and share with each other.&
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: Kapwing is Adobe for the meme generation
Write comment (95 Comments)Years ago, in the heyday of home video, I played a boardgames that used VHS tapes and electronic parts to help spur the action along. From Candy Land VCR to Captain Power, game makers were doing the best they could with a new technology. Now, thanks to Alexa, they can try something even cooler & board games that talk back.
The first company to try this is Voice Originals. Their new game, When In Rome, is a family board game that pits two teams against each other in a race to travel the world. The game itself consists of a board and a few colored pieces and the real magic comes from Alexa. You start the game by enabling the When In Rome skill and then you start the game. Alexa then prompts you with questions as you tool around the board.
The rules are simple because Alexa does most of the work. The game describes how to set up the board and gets you started and then you just trigger with your voice it as you play.
The companyfirst game, Beasts of Balance, was another clever hybrid of AR and real life board game action. Both games are a bit gimmicky and a bit high tech & you won&t be able to play these in a cozy beach house without Internet, for example & but ita fun departure from the norm.
Like the VCR games of yore, When In Rome depends on a new technology to find a new way to have fun. Ita clever addition to the standard board game fare and our family had a good time playing it. While itnot as timeless as a bit of Connect 4 or Risk, ita great addition to the boardgames shelf and a cool use of voice technology in gaming.
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: When In Rome is the first Alexa-powered board game
Write comment (91 Comments)Skype redesign launched last year was met with mixed reviews, but the company is forging ahead by rolling out a number of its new features to other platforms, including the desktop. Microsoft today is launching Skype version 8.0 that will replace version 7.0 (aka Skype classic), the latter which will no longer function after September 1, 2018. The new release introduces a variety of features, including HD video and screen-sharing in calls, support for @mentions in chats, a chat media gallery, file and media sharing up to 300 MB, and more. It will also add several more features this summer, including most notably, supported for encrypted audio calls, texts, and file sharing as well as built-in call recording.
The 8.0 release follows on the update to Skype desktop that rolled out last fall,largely focusing on upgrading the visual elements of new design, like the color-coding in chat messages and &reaction& emojis. This release also included the chat media gallery and file sharing support, which are touted as new today, but may have already hit your desktop.
Although Skype still has some 300 million monthly users, it no longer appears to be growing. While once a must-have app for communication, Skype has faced increased competition over the years from the likes of AppleFaceTime, and other apps for texting and calls, like Messenger and WhatsApp, among others, plus new communication apps for business, like Slack. To better compete, Microsoft gave Skype a facelift starting last year, which introduced a number of social features seemingly aimed at a younger user base, including its own take on Stories.
Todaydesktop release focuses again on consumer-friendly features, with the added support of HD (1080px video) video calls which can include up to 24 people, as well as the Twitter-inspired @mentions.
Later this summer, Microsoft says Skype will add support for profile invites (to invite friends to join you on Skype), read receipts for messages, group links for chats and calls, and other features.
The most significant of the forthcoming additions includes an end-to-end encrypted experience where Skype audio calls, text messages, and shared files like images, audio and video, and secured with the industry standard Signal Protocol. Messages and notifications in these conversations will also be hidden in the chat list to keep the communication private.
And, at long last, Skype is adding built-in call recording. Many Skype users today use third-party add-ons in order to record calls & something that should have prompted Skype to react years ago by making this a native option. The calls will be recorded in the cloud and everyone in the call will be notified the call is being recorded, for privacysake and for legal reasons. The recorded calls will additionally include everyonevideo and screen shares, Microsoft notes.
Skype 8.0 will also soon roll out to iPad users with features likequoted messages, personalized themes, chat list, @mentions, and more.
Skype version 7.0 will continue to work until the cut off date, Microsoft says. (If you&re not sure which version you&re on, herehow to check on Windows, Mac and Linux desktops.) Afterwards, you&ll need to update to version 8.0 if you want to keep using Skype.
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: Skype 8.0 launches on desktop with HD video, and soon encryption call recording
Write comment (91 Comments)Last round before the IPO. Thathow Fastly frames its new $40 million Series F round. It means that the company has raised $219 million over the past few years.
The funding round was led by Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners with participation from Sozo Ventures, Swisscom Ventures, and existing investors.
Fastly operates a content delivery network to speed up web requests. Letsay you type nytimes.com in your browser. In the early days of the internet, your computer would send a request to one of The New York Times& servers in a data center. The server would receive the request and send back the page to the reader.
But the web has grown immensely, and this kind of architecture is no longer sustainable. The New York Times use Fastly to cache its homepage, media and articles on Fastlyservers. This way, when somebody types nytimes.com, Fastly already has the webpage on its servers and can send it directly. For some customers, it can represent as much as 90 percent of requests.
Scale and availability are one of the benefits of using a content delivery network. But speed is also another one. Even though the web is a digital platform, itvery physical by nature. When you load a page on a server on the other side of the world, itgoing to take hundreds of milliseconds to get the page. Over time, this latency adds up and it feels like a sluggish experience.
Fastly has data centers and servers all around the world so that you can load content in less than 20 or 30 milliseconds. This is particularly important for Stripe or Ticketmaster as response time can greatly influence an e-commerce purchase.
Fastlyplatform also provides additional benefits, such as DDoS mitigation and web application firewall. One of the main challenges for the platform is being able to cache content as quickly as possible. Users upload photos and videos all the time, so it should be on Fastlyservers within seconds.
The company has tripled its customer base over the past three years. It had a $100 million revenue run rate in 2017. Customers now include Reddit, GitHub, Stripe, Ticketmaster and Pinterest.
There are now 400 employees working for Fastly. Itworth noting that women represent 42 percent of the executive team, and 65 percent of the engineering leads are women, people of color or LGBTQ (or the intersection of those categories). And if you haven&t read all the diversity reports from tech companies, those are great numbers.
- Details
- Category: Technology
Read more: Fastly raises another $40 million before an IPO
Write comment (96 Comments)Page 4729 of 5614