Last night, as the coup de grace of Fortnite‘s tenth season, a black hole sucked up the entire map and booted all of its players out. Fortnite has effectively gone dark — the official Twitch channel is showing nothing but the black hole surrounded by swirling blue mist. No one’s exactly sure when it’s going to come back, though of course everyone’s losing their collective minds trying to figure it out....
If your business or brand doesn’t have a reasoned content marketing strategy, you’re really putting yourself behind the 8-ball. With so much depending on the copy used to promote and sell that brand, it’s no surprise that more than half of organizations reported they had specialized writers in-house for tackling their specific content marketing needs. But if you can’t afford the luxury of an on-staff copywriter, that doesn’t absolve you of the need for getting your ad copy, social media posts, product descriptions and the rest of your writing assignments handled correctly....
Sure, OLED TVs are common these days, but this one has a trick up its sleeve: it’s transparent. Verbosely named the Mi TV LUX OLED Transparent Edition, the TV literally lets you see through the screen, allowing you to keep an eye on your shows as well as whatever is behind the TV. And no, this isn’t just vaporware: you can actually buy it starting August 16 for approximately $7,200 — if you live in China, anyway (¥49,999)....
These speakers are not exactly cheap by domestic standards in India. You’d have to spend anywhere between ₹3,500 ($47.50) to ₹5,000 ($68) to get their smallest speakers — namely, the Echo Dot and the Nest Mini. I’ve been using the Mi Smart Speaker for more than five days, and it manages to provide you all smarts while being loud enough sound for your desk or a small room. Design and features The Mi Smart Speaker has a semi-cylindrical design with a 0....
This month marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month and Google released some safety features to celebrate. In a blog post published today, first reported by CNET, the search engine announced multiple enhancements to some of its products to better protect your data — including the ability to manage your Google Assistant data, and how long it’s stored for. This means you can ask your Google Assistant to delete your search voice-command history from your Google account by saying things such as “Hey Google, delete the last thing I said to you,” or “Delete everything I said to you last week....
Each brother frequently says “contrariwise” as if he’s about to disagree with his counterpart, only to inadvertently say the same thing. Unfortunately, far too many companies end up with teams that look and act in much the same way. Every organization would say they want to hire according to merit. The problem is that many people unconsciously evaluate merit in a self-validating way. The most successful candidate will often mirror the traits and experiences of the hiring manager....
Hi, my name is Yessi and, even though I should know better, I’m a complete sucker for influencer marketing. While it brings me great shame to admit this, recent research suggests I’m not alone. The industry is huge. In 2017, eMarketer reported that marketers spent $570 million on influencer marketing globally. In 2018, a staggering $1.6 billion was funneled into sponsored posts on Instagram alone. And if that isn’t enough to convince you it’s massive, a recent poll showed businesses make $6....
The chart below shows the year-to-date performance of digital assets grouped by market capitalization size. Notice how large-cap cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin) have absolutely crushed smaller projects in 2019. “Bitcoin continues to separate itself from the pack given the strength and spread of its ‘digital gold’ narrative,” reports boutique research firm Delphi Digital in commentary shared with Hard Fork. Still, the firm warned that Bitcoin is yet to fully retrace from its recent price peak of just below $14,000 — but political and economic factors could favor the cryptocurrency in the near future....
But what’s really at stake? And how can businesses prepare for the next pandemic — or for that matter, any international crisis? What’s at stake varies, since every company’s exposure to international trade is unique. Until this year, it seemed inevitable that international trade and interdependence would only increase in the coming years — and it still may — but regardless of how the COVID crisis resolves, we can reasonably argue that global supply chains will see dramatic changes....
Please note, I say marry: this is not about thirsting over the hot men and women of games. We’re a classy establishment, darn it. Sure, many video game characters are attractive people, but you wouldn’t want to marry all of them. I love Dante from Devil May Cry, but the fact that, as of the latest game, his business is kind of failing makes me question our future together. Also, let’s be frank: while some characters are amazing and we’d all love to get a drink with them, their sins are too multitudinous to overcome for a happy life together....
In order to prepare, you need to test, test and test again to ensure there won’t be any problems with the product launch, or later down the road, that will force you to issue a recall or endanger your customers’ trust in you. To find out the most important things to remember during the testing process, I asked a panel of entrepreneurs from YEC the following question: What is the best way to test hardware or software before a product is released to the public in order to avoid facing a backlash for unforeseen issues or, worse, having to issue a recall?...
The companies, which raised a combined $40 million during 2017’s cryptocurrency bull run, agreed on the deadlines as part of their settlements with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a result, they were given reduced fines. Airfox, which offers mobile banking services in developing countries, and Paragon Coin Inc, which applies blockchain tech to the cannabis industry, both agreed to pay $250,000 each after settling with the SEC in November last year....
So, you decide to put out more content, tap into more channels, widen your targeting, increase budgets, among other things. You wait a few weeks but quickly learn that even though all of your efforts have helped, it’s just not what it used to be. In essence, what this means is that you’re starting to hit the ceiling in your operating region. So, it’s probably time to expand your business geographically — and this is exactly what happened to my company....
While personalised medicine currently exists, its strictly small batch stuff, as compounding (the manual preparation of individualised drug treatments) is difficult, time-consuming, and lacks quality control. But now Helsinki startup CurifyLabs is automating the process by bringing 3D drug printing to hospitals and veterinary facilities. CurifyLabs was founded last year and has since raised €3.5M in seed funding. With an ethos of Medicine-as-a-Service, the company 3D prints drugs. It’s created a way to safely develop medicines that respond to a patient’s exact needs and can accommodate their size, physiology, and species — as well as any allergies....
Their hold on the public seems to be waning. Two recent polls suggested over 75 percent of Americans think humans are causing climate change. School climate strikes, Extinction Rebellion protests, national governments declaring a climate emergency, improved media coverage of climate change and an increasing number of extreme weather events have all contributed to this shift. There also seems to be a renewed optimism that we can deal with the crisis....
There isn’t really a wrong way to move through life I can scan from top to bottom, left to right, only match horizontally or only vertically, completely in reverse, or at random. Whatever way I choose to go, I still make progress. In life, we can only make decisions based on the knowledge, experience, support, fears, and dreams we have at the time we’re presented each opportunity. At these crossroads in life, there are many directions we can take and each has its costs but also comes with its own set of benefits....
Credibility can be expressed in various ways. How fast do you respond to new issues? Do you frequently maintain the code? It’s unlikely that an infrequently maintained project will receive a lot of adoption. Therefore, monetization chances will be lower. However, there are plenty of monetization options you can employ — even for projects with low adoption. Here are six methods you can employ: Paid support Software as a Service (OpenSaaS) Open-core model GitHub sponsors Paid feature requests Get paid to build open source extensions for existing products...
NASA has unveiled a range of visionary tech that could be used in future space missions. The projects are the latest members of the Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which funds early-stage studies to evaluate their potential. The new cohort joins an array of innovations that were already in the program. Here’s our pick of the most intriguing ideas. Turning asteroids into giant spacecraft Project RAMA has proposed a scalable way of exploring the solar system: converting entire asteroids into enormous autonomous spacecraft....
We’ve decided to take a look at some of the best tech podcasts from all around the world. Our selection includes some tech podcasts intended for both the professional and the regular listener. 1. OxyCast OxyCast is a tech podcast discussing all things web scraping hosted by Oxylabs, a market-leading proxy solutions provider. So far, they’ve launched several episodes, each of which goes in-depth about automated online public data collection....
Among the most common misconceptions surrounding machine learning technology is the idea that video games dating back to the 1970s and 1980s had built-in “artificial intelligence” capable of interacting with a human user. If you’re curious but in a hurry, video game “AI,” in the traditional sense, is not what people refer to in the modern era when they’re talking about artificial intelligence. The “bots” in an online multiplayer game, the enemies in a first-person-shooter, and the CPU-controlled characters in old-school Nintendo games are not examples of artificial intelligence, they’re just clever programming tricks....
