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Friday 27 September 2013

Agolo Aims To Algorithmically Curate Your Twitter Feed

For all the good it’s capable of, Twitter is all too often a cacophonous mess of marketers, celebrities, talking heads, and friends who all like to jabber at the same time. Sage Wohns and Mohamed Altantawy are co-founders of a New York startup called Agolo, and as far as they’re concerned, not every bit of information pouring forth from that social firehose is worth paying attention to. Instead, they want to home in on just the stuff that’s important to you and make sure you see if before it’s too far gone to catch up with.


Sounds logical enough. After all, if you’re up to your neck in a Twitter debate centered around, I don’t know, whether the Palm Pre was a bigger smartphone flop than the BlackBerry Z10, you’re probably not going to pay much attention to the snarky quips your followers are flinging at each other. That’s where Agolo comes in.


Co-founder Sage Wohns showed me an incredibly early version of Agolo several months ago, and it bears very little resemblance to the service the team ultimately hopes to bring to the masses. The original concept saw users tweeting the @agolo Twitter account asking for advice on local venues and happenings — as long as you defined a location in the tweet or enabled the proper location settings, you’d almost immediately receive a reply with three of the most popular options nearby.


To their credit, the service still works rather well (I used it to track down some lunch the other day), but the pair have bet the startup’s future on the notion that people often miss the things that they care most about because of the sheer volume of tweets being sent and delivered every second. It’s madness. But Wohns and Altantawy are conducting a private beta for the new Agolo, which quietly keeps tabs on your Twitter followers, the people you follow, and the things you talk about the most.


By gathering that information and chewing on it with the help of some clever natural language processing algorithms, Agolo is able to cobble together a profile of you that includes your preferred topics of conversation and the sorts of events that you like. The real gist of the revamped Agolo is that it’s able to sift through all that stuff in realtime, so you’re ultimately left with a mobile web app (native apps are said to be in the works) displaying a curated feed of tweets that align with what Agolo thinks your interests are.


If you’re a big music fan for instance, all of your friends’ tweets mentioning upcoming concerts will be flagged for your perusal. There’s one more hook, though: while the service highlights relevant conversations and events that you may otherwise miss, the team also wants to make it easy to take action. Going back to that concert example, Agolo will be able to provide links to ticket vendors so users can close the loop that much faster.


Sounds like a pretty natural way to make money, right? Since Agolo can highlight certain trends or events and make it easy for users to jump in and engage with them, Wohns said that they’re starting to build up “key affiliate partnerships to monetize some of the actions we recommend.”


At this point though, there’s one major drawback to the Agolo system — it only works with Twitter. It’s not a bad place to start considering how the service facilitates conversations and sharing at a breakneck pace, but it only accounts for a fraction of the social conversations that take place at any given moment. Ultimately, the small team hopes to be able to digest Facebook and LinkedIn messages, along with that bane of my existence: email. I suspect it’ll be quite some time before they manage to get that far, but they may just be on the right track.








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A Simple Change to Contraceptive Rings Could Halt HIV in Women

Windows app install limit increases to 81 devices starting October 9th



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In the Future, Wars Will Be Fought with Lasers and Robots

This week on gdgt: Apple's new iPhones, Loewe's Speaker 2go and Steam Machines



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Apple photo patent declared invalid as it had already been shown... by Apple



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This Camera Array Lets You Tweak the Shot Angle In Post-Production

Rdio rolling out custom recommendations based on what you play, who you follow



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15 Years of Google: What's Your Favorite Product?



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In the Garage Where Google Was Born



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Distro Issue 109: Turning the lights off on innovation



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Hotel Booking App JustBook Pivots Slightly Away From HotelTonight Model As It Aims To Conquer The U.S.

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Is there enough growth in the last-minute or same-day hotel booking app space? With HotelTonight raising $45 million in Series D funding earlier this month, the consensus amongst the Silicon Valley investment community would appear to say yes. But one player, Berlin-headquarted JustBook, which is backed by European VCs Index Ventures and DN Capital, has had a change of heart.


Timed to co-incide with its U.S. launch this week, the German startup is pivoting slightly away from the model pioneered by HotelTonight to allow users to also book a curated selection of hotels at “last-­minute” prices even when they book well in advance. Less hotel tonight and more hotel sometime in the not-too-distant future.


In addition, JustBook, whose U.S. expansion sees it initially target New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, is rolling out weekend deals, offering its “hotel shopping club members” discounts of up to 50 percent on the best hotel rooms at weekends. That said, it’s still keeping the last-minute model in place, although by broadening its proposition the company is undeniably putting itself up against incumbent hotel booking aggregators/sites, including major players like Booking.com.


“Honestly, how often do you need a hotel on the same day?,” says JustBook co-founder and Managing Director Stefan Menden. “It is a huge market, but our customers gave consistently the same feedback: they love our simple UI, they love the curation (especially on the go you don’t want to sort through hundreds of hotels). But many times they want to book in advance.”


Menden says the company has carefully added “just a few options”, including advance bookings, and filtering hotels with free WiFi etc., in order to offer more choice. “We kept the same simple 3-step booking process,” he says, emphasising that the company is keeps its mobile-DNA, despite also rolling out a desktop Web version of the service. In fact, mobile accounts for 80% of bookings. Another reason for pivoting slightly, says Menden, is that a broader use-case should see usage of the app increase and enable the startup to “acquire customers profitably, more easily”.


Does Menden think that HotelTonight will follow suit? (Or indeed other last-minute hotel booking apps such as Groupon-owned Blink, or Hot Hotels). “I am sure they have similar discussions but so far have opted to focus on a very clear USP,” he says. “But I am sure everybody will agree that customers will value the broader use-case. At least that’s what we see our customers doing.”


Interestingly, in a quintessential European story, JustBook’s tweak to its model comes hot on the heels of a ruling in JustBook’s favour by Germany’s Federal Cartel Office that paves the way for greater competition in the online hotel booking space. When the company first launched back in January 2012, it upset legacy players who, Menden says, routinely put pressure on hotels to give them the best rates or threatened to delist them. “We complained with the Federal Cartel Office which ruled in our favour, effectively making it impossible for the big portals to continue their practice and allowing more competition. Similar action is happening across the EU,” he says.








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Mozilla working on Chromecast-like mirroring for Firefox Android browser



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Netflix Rolls Out Super HD and Other News You Need to Know



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The 6 Best Launchers to Turn Your Android Into an iPhone



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Intel Capital throws money at Recon Instruments, hints at wearable war with Google



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Google's Piñata-Bashing Birthday Doodle: A Perfect Friday Time-Waster

Google's Open Project mirrors Android apps on any connected touchscreen



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BlackBerry loses almost a billion dollars, blames it on the failed Z10



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El poderío de los motores de la primera etapa de un Saturno V en Dolby 5.1


Esos mismos motores F1 –u otros iguales– que los Jeff Bezos sacó recientemente del fondo del Atlántico y que sirvieron para lanzar las naves del programa Apolo grabados en el banco de pruebas en Dolby 5.1 y desde distintos ángulos.


Mejor con el volumen a tope… O con cascos si hay gente a tu alrededor.


# Enlace Permanente







via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/ciencia/poderio-motores-primera-etapa-saturno-v-en-dolby-5-1.html

Nissan treats new Leaf owners in Texas to one year of free charging



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5 iOS Settings to Limit Your Child's Mobile Usage



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Comillas inteligentes para gente inteligente, otro recordatorio de que no usamos máquinas de escribir

Comillas-Comillas


¡Ah! La eterna batalla entre las comillas verticales (" "), las comillas anglosajonas (“ ”) y las latinas (« »). A las más bastas, verticales y fáciles de teclear (e iguales las de apertura y cierre) se las conoce en círculos informales como comillas tontas, comillas del Dr. Maligno, comillas en el aire, comillas Kruger y cómo se deben usar «correctamente». Algunos programas las convierten en «comillas inteligentes» de diversos tipos automáticamente.


En Smart Quotes for Smart People hacen un nuevo intento de educación y concienciación sobre el buen uso de la tipografía, incluyendo un resumen con las teclas y abreviaturas de todos estos signos ortográficos.


También citan a Straight and curly quotes y Quotes & Accents como fuentes para ampliar información.


Luego la gente hace lo que quiere, como de costumbre.


# Enlace Permanente







via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/arte-y-diseno/comillas-inteligentes-gente-inteligente.html

Beats Electronics pulls away from HTC with $265 million share buyback



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Intel may ditch OnCue IPTV service project if it can't find an investor



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Voltaic Switch solar bag powers your tiny tablets with sunlight



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Type "Google in 1998" Into Google for a Blast to the Past



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San Francisco visto como check-ins de Foursquare


Una interesante visualización sobre Foursquare, que muestra los check-ins de la gente como una película en la que el tiempo está comprimido. Cada tipo de lugar tiene un color distinto. Lo verde se asocia con la comida: se ve que a la gente sobre todo le gusta compartir dónde o qué está comiendo.


En Foursquare están haciendo un trabajo interesante con todos estos datos, incluyendo cuando publicaron los últimos 500 millones de check-ins, la preciosa máquina del tiempo y algunas otras visualizaciones bien trabajadas.


# Enlace Permanente







via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/internet/san-francisco-check-ins-foursquare.html

Partially automated Nissan Leaf prototype approved for use on Japanese roads



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Microsoft reportedly close to unifying its app stores across Windows and Windows Phone



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Un mogollón de naves de ciencia ficción a la misma escala

Esto es solo la esquina superior izquierda

Esto es solo la esquina superior izquierda, clic para ir a la imagen completa


La ilustración Starship Size Comparison Chart de Dirk Loechel no recoge todas las naves imaginadas por el género de la ciencia ficción como se dice por ahí sino las de unas cuantas sagas / series / juegos, pero aún así es absolutamente impresionante.


(Vía media Internet o así).





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Roli Seaboard Grand up for pre-order, bendable music starts at $2,000



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​FAA committee concludes that flyers should be allowed to use smartphones, tablets during takeoff and landing



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Twitter focuses on photos in embedded tweets



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Dish Hopper DVRs open up to home automation control, we wonder what's next



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