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Friday, 7 February 2014
Ephemeral And ‘Anonymish’, Wut Is About Mass-Texting Friends Without Revealing Your Identity
Somewhere between Snapchat’s rise and the NSA spying revelations, it became en vogue not to have our daily adventures and thoughts etched in stone on a timeline or profile page.
Capitalizing on this trend were Whisper, Confide and then Secret.
Now there’s Wut, from one member of Square’s founding team, Paul McKellar.
It’s a very, very, very simple app. Just a text screen with a fluorescent background. You type in what you want to say, and then it shoots out as a push notification to all of your friends. You never reveal who you are. (But people might be able to guess because they’re your friends, after all.)
“It’s an ambient pulse of what your friends are doing and using,” said McKellar, who quietly launched the app a few weeks ago with Beamer Wilkins.
Like Secret, it riffs off Frank Warren’s PostSecret project.
But Wut’s updates are even more transient than Secret’s. They live on the lockscreen, and then they disappear. You can’t go into the app to find them.
“Wut’s messages don’t build up over time. You don’t have to go back and read 47,000 tweets. The most you can see at any time is five messages,” McKellar said.
The app’s deceptively simple design — no content in a feed and nothing to look at inside — made it difficult for Apple’s app store reviewers to understand Wut’s purpose. They kept sending it back to McKellar until he had to literally record a video of himself using two phones for it to make sense.
The messages I get on Wut are pretty frivolous (see the attached screenshot where I asked a bunch of people to send me messages. Wut wut?!).
Occasionally, memes run through the community. Last week, it was about saying who you were having dinner or coffee with that day or night.
Wut’s push notifications are also silent, meaning the app won’t interrupt you if you aren’t looking at the screen.
“You’d never get woken up in the middle of the night by this,” said McKellar, who was most recently an entrepreneur-in-residence at SV Angel after leaving Square.
The hope is that this might take off amongst teens, who are used to being bombarded with messages all day long and get the idea of self-destructing content from products like Snapchat. Wut is currently bootstrapped.
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Newly Discovered Snapchat Weakness Could Allow Hackers To Crash Your Phone
With great power comes great responsibility, and as Snapchat continues to grow rapidly, security researchers grow increasingly interested in the security of the platform.
Security researcher Jamie Sanchez has today exposed a vulnerability within Snapchat that opens up the app to a denial-of-service attack. By overloading an inbox with messages, hackers can freeze and crash the iPhone, requiring the user to reset their device. For Android devices, the attack doesn’t crash the device, but does make it noticeably slower, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“We are working to resolve the issue and will be reaching out to the security researcher who publicized the attack to learn more,” said Snapchat in a statement.
The original report explains that hackers can reuse tokens (that are generated by the app to verify user identity) to send hundreds of messages within seconds, which could be used by spammers to take down large groups of Snapchat users, or individual accounts.
Sanchez notified the Los Angeles Times of the vulnerability before notifying Snapchat, claiming that Snapchat “has no respect for the cyber security research community.”
And he kind of has a point.
Over the holidays, Snapchat was notified by security researchers that a security hole opened up the app to hackers who might want to expose user data. When the notification was ignored, hackers proceeded to publish the phone numbers of 4.6 million users to prove their point.
If you want to see the DoS go down, the LATimes has a demo video of the attack right here.
We’ve reached out to Sanchez for clarity, and will update the post as soon as we know more.
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Blizzard to fund competitive gaming at the college level
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Facebook lets users rewrite the past by editing their 'Look Back' videos
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India’s MakeMyTrip Acquires EasyToBook In A Push To Grow Online Hotel Bookings
Indian travel booking site, MakeMyTrip, has acquired EasyToBook, an Amsterdam-based hotel booking portal for around $5 million. With this acquisition, MakeMyTrip is hoping to increase its proportion of revenue earned through online hotel bookings, and also target inbound customers traveling to Asia.
“With the ETB acquisition, we are expanding our presence beyond South East Asia,” MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra told me.
“One of our key company objectives is to continue growing the share of the hotels and packages business in our overall revenue mix,” he added.
MakeMyTrip is among the early online businesses in India. It became the poster child for the country’s growing Internet population after raising $70 million in a Nasdaq public offering in August 2010. Since then, MakeMyTrip has experienced a roller coaster ride. In the year ending March 2013, it even posted loss of $1.9 million.
The company has been pushing to go beyond just online travel, and even explore markets outside India. In 2011 for instance, MakeMyTrip acquired two companies — Singapore-based Luxury Tours & Travels and travel search engine Ixigo.com. In November of that year, it also bought Delhi-based MyGuesthouse Accommodations for $1 million.
As this Businessweek story highlighted, the Indian online businesses are facing challenges in growing the base of people who actually transact online.
MakeMyTrip’s biggest challenge will be to not only grow its business in India by acquiring new customers, but also identify opportunities to expand beyond the country.
“We have been open to inorganic growth and acqua-hiring. Other than niche travel tech firms and specialist travel firms, we also look for opportunities in ‘supplier disintermediation’,” Kalra said.
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WSJ: NSA collects data from fewer than one-fifth of all cellphone records
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Founders Pitch Startups From Inside An Ice Hole Near The Arctic Circle
While the whole of Silicon Valley got sucked into the vortex of insecurity and ego called Secret this week, there was actually something cooler (or colder) that happened on the other side of the world today.
Up in the city of Oulu, Finland by the Arctic Circle, the local tech community held a small startup pitch contest today.
The rules?
There was no time limit, but you had to do it from inside a bear-sized ice hole, which the organizers cut from a nearby frozen lake.
Oh, and no diving or wet suits allowed.
“You might feel like you can’t breathe. Relax, that’s only normal and harmless. It will pass,” warned the invite.
Twenty-six companies took the plunge. The winners included Laturi, which makes tools for companies offering corporate fitness programs, Tosibox, which sells a plug-and-play device for remote access and mobile app developer Minus Degree Mobile.
I didn’t watch the whole thing, but at the beginning, a guy in a polar bear suit rides in triumphantly upon a bicycle.
At 33:00, there is a half-naked man playing a violin from within the ice hole. Then there appears to be some kind of strange folk dance performance at around 1:47:00 or so.
Enjoy! (I secretly hope this gives the TC events team some more ideas for the Disrupt Battlefield competition.)
toosa on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free
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El nuevo Cosmos llegará a España (y a otros 179 paÃses) el 10 de marzo de 2014
En realidad llegará a a la vez a 180 paÃses en 48 idiomas tan solo un dÃa después de su estreno en los Estados Unidos.
En España el primer capÃtulo de Cosmos: a spacetime odyssey podrá ser visto a la vez en National Geographic Channel, FOX, FOX Crime, Nat Geo Wild y Viajar a las 13:00 del 10 de marzo.
Los siguientes capÃtulos se emitirán los lunes, a partir del 17 de marzo, a las 23:30 en National Geographic Channel.
Esperamos ansiosos, aunque también esperamos ansiosamente que esa espera ansiosa no se convierta en una gran desilusión.
En Magonia hay una entrevista con Neil deGrasse Tyson, el presentador de esta nueva versión de Cosmos, sobre esta nueva versión de Cosmos, para ir haciendo boca: “Sagan era mucho más activo como escéptico público de lo que yo soy o planeo ser”.
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Y Combinator-Backed Sendwithus Offers A/B Testing And Analytics Tools For Email Marketers
Sendwithus aims to bring optimization and A/B testing to marketers and anyone else sending out targeted promotional emails.
The company, which is part of the current class of Y Combinator-incubated startups, was founded by Matt Harris and Brad Van Vugt. Harris told me that Sendwithus emerged from the pair’s work as developers, when they found themselves repeatedly having to change a bunch of email templates and wanting to test different variants but finding that there was no real technology in place to do so. (Larger companies will usually build their own systems for this, he said.)
So Sendwithus created a website where customers can select from pre-made email templates or upload their own, log in to their preferred email provider, and then set up A/B tests and drip campaigns. Customers also have access to analytics showing how variants and campaigns are performing.
Harris said Sendwithus is focused on “transactional emails” (i.e., the emails that are sent to specific users at specific times, usually to accomplish a specific task) as opposed to newsletters or other broad campaigns. Just managing all the different templates and automatically sending the right one out at the right time is important to the company’s customers, he added.
Plus, those templates are dynamic, and not just in the sense of filling in your name at the right spot. For example, Harris said that whenever one company using Sendwithus sends a lost password email, it checks to see whether the person receiving the email is a free or paid customer. If they’re free, the company add a short “upgrade to our paid plan” message at the end of the email.
As I mentioned, Sendwithus integrates with existing email delivery services, including SendGrid, Mandrill, Mailgun, and Amazon Simple Email Service. I asked Harris if he might find himself competing with those services down the line, and he didn’t sound too worried, because he said, “Email deliverability is a really hard problem that they’re solving, and we’re solving another hard problem.”
Founded 11 months ago, Sendwithus already processes more than 1 million emails a day, he added, and its customers include 8tracks, uSell, SuperRewards and App.net. Pricing starts at $19 a month.
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This concept car uses its own reconnaissance drone to spot traffic jams
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La camiseta para vestirse de Marty McFly
Esta es LA camiseta que cualquier geek que se precie deberÃa vestir el 21 de octubre de 2015. Idla pidiendo ya, no vaya a ser que se agote.
Para los despistados, esa es la fecha en la que Marty y Doc llegan al futuro –al menos al futuro de cuando se hicieron las pelÃculas– en Regreso al futuro II.
(VÃa Boing Boing).
- Diez pelÃculas para educar a tus hijos como pequeños geeks y Más pelÃculas para hacer de tus hijos pequeños geeks, nunca es tarde para empezar.
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Amazon Prime snags 'Archer' and 5 more Fox series, launches ten free pilots
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Bruce McCandless II: el primer astronauta en flotar sólo en el espacio
Tal dÃa como hoy hace 30 años Bruce McCandless II se convertÃa en el primer astronauta en realizar un paseo espacial sin estar sujeto por ninguna lÃnea de seguridad a su nave.
Durante el primer paseo espacial programado para la misión STS-41-B McCandless dejó la bodega de carga del Challenger para probar la MMU, la Unidad de Maniobra Tripulada , en cuyo desarrollo habÃa colaborado, llegando a alejarse unos 100 metros de la nave.
Durante el segundo paseo espacial de la misión, el 9 de febrero de 1983, probó la segunda unidad que iba a bordo en otro paseo espacial libre.
Es cierto que con la capacidad de maniobra de un transbordador podÃan haberlo recogido en caso de fallo de alguna de las MMU, pero aún asà tiene que haber sido impresionante flotar en el espacio sin estar sujeto a nada.
Las dos MMUs serÃan usadas luego en las misiones STS-41-C y STS-51-A para capturar satélites para su reparación o para devolverlos a Tierra en la bodega de carga de los transbordadores, pero después del desastre del Challenger nunca volvieron a ser usadas.
SAFER
En su lugar los astronautas de la NASA disponen ahora de unas mochilas cohete más sencillas conocidas como SAFER que se acoplan a sus trajes espaciales, aunque tampoco se usaban en todos los paseos espaciales, pues la agencia prefiere programar los paseos espaciales de tal forma que los astronautas puedan estar siempre sujetos por lÃneas de seguridad a sus naves o, como poco, a la plataforma que el brazo robot de los transbordadores o de la Estación Espacial Internacional tienen en su extremo para que un astronauta se ponga de pie sobre ella.
- ¿Se puede hacer algo si un astronauta queda accidentalmente flotando en el espacio? Pues no mucho, casi mejor no probar.
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California law could end grand theft mobile with kill-switches in all smartphones
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Google refuses to pay French privacy fines in a battle of company versus country
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Insultos pasivo-agresivos con estilo para desconsiderados que aparcan como el culo: «Do Your Park»
«El Titanic. El Hindenburg. Este aparcamiento de mierda que has hecho. Aparca mejor. Pásalo.»
La vida es dura, pero es más dura cuando hay gente que aparca de forma desconsiderada en donde le viene en gana. DoYourPark se une ahora al movimiento de amenazas pasivo-agresivas del tipo Aparcas como un gilipollas (todavÃa existe: YouParkLikeAnAsshole) con nuevos y divertidos mensajes para dejar en los coches de los gañanes.
«Asà que eres un ‘espÃritu libre’. Lo captamos.
Aparca mejor. Pásalo.»
Esta versión se ofrece en prácticos imanes magnéticos que se pueden ir reciclando de coche en coche – si el zote que aparca donde le da la gana tiene a bien pasárselo al «siguiente». La versión barata consiste en imprimir los insultos sin ilustraciones –de los hay unas cuantas muestras en la web– y dejarlos en un papel.
¿Qué pasa, que aparcar correctamente es demasiado mainstream para ti?
(VÃa Technabob.)
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