Google Wants To Build The Ultimate Personal Assistant - TechCrunch

2013-12-27T05:57:00.001-08:00

Google Wants To Build The Ultimate Personal Assistant
TechCrunch
Google Search is changing rapidly. Given the company's love of small, rapid-fire updates, its sometimes hard to keep track of where the company is going, but earlier this month, at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Google Engineering Director Scott Huffman ...
Google and Apple gear up for coming battle for supremacy in mobile computing ...Vancouver Sun

ZDNet

Researchers publish Snapchat code allowing phone number matching after ...
ZDNet
Summary: Snapchat's previously undocumented API and code for two exploits have been published, allowing mass name/phone number matching, and mass creation of bogus accounts. Violet Blue. By Violet Blue for Zero Day | December 25, 2013 -- 01:13 ...
Researchers Claim Snapchat Still Isn't Secure, Security Flaw Exposes Users ...AppAdvice
Elephanti, a startup that’s supposed to make it easier for physical stores to connect with shoppers online, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding from LMJ Holdings.

The basic selling point for consumers, according to founder and CEO Lalin Michael Jinasena, is avoiding situations where you end up wandering from store to store, asking, “Do you sell Item X?” Instead, you can just visit the website or open the app, then search for a specific item, bringing up a list of stores that carry it. Or you can look up a retailer and browse a catalog of in-store items.

The concept isn’t too different from Milo, the local shopping startup that was acquired by eBay back in 2010, but Elephanti has a number of additional features that make it more than just a product search engine.

For one thing, after shoppers identify their interests, Elephanti can show them recommendations and offers from nearby stores. Users can also build shopping lists with multiple items, and the app will point to stores where they can buy all the items on the list. Plus, shoppers can check-in at stores and, in a promised update, share photos of what they’ve purchased, so their friends will know that something is really in-stock and available at a certain price.

Since the company is working directly with merchants, Jinasena said it’s focused on a specific geography (namely, San Francisco) for now, although it works in other cities. In fact, I tested it out today in Los Angeles, and it would have saved my mother some time — a few days

NYPD's cruiser of the future knows if you're on the lam, can detect radiation

2013-12-26T17:57:00.001-08:00

New York City's Police Department is one of the most well-financed in the world, and the prototype for its next-generation patrol car clearly reflects that. A rear-mounted infrared sensor scans, records and checks license plates against a database ...

Photography 101: Learning the ropes with your new camera

2013-12-26T17:28:00.001-08:00

Whether you're new to photography or learning how to use a new camera, taking a methodical approach makes it go a lot faster. [Read more]

Plain Vanilla Games, the company behind ultra-hot trivia app QuizUp, has raised a $22 million Series B Round of financing. The financing was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from all existing investors, including Tencent, Greycroft Partners, IDG Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, CrunchFund (owned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington), and MESA+.

QuizUp is an iPhone app that pits users against one another in either real-time or asynchronous trivia matchups. Users choose from up to 300 different topics and can challenge friends or strangers to answer a fast, six-question round of trivia questions.

It’s incredibly fun, and has become extremely popular over the last several weeks, with more than 5 million downloads since launch.

This round of financing is the third that Plain Vanilla has raised since the beginning of the year, but it’s by far the biggest, and brings the total amount raised to $27 million. Along with the new cash, the company is adding Sequoia’s Roelof Botha to its board of directors.

The game studio’s last round of financing — the addition of $2 million from Sequoia and e.Ventures — was timed basically right around the time of QuizUp’s launch, which means the company took money before it knew that it had a hit on its hands.

At the time, Plain Vanilla was looking for a little insurance and some money to fund marketing around the launch of the game. What it found instead was that QuizUp spread like wildfire, thanks to impressive word-of-mouth and growth through soci

Google Destroys Rap Genius' Search Rankings As Punishment For SEO Spam ... - TechCrunch

2013-12-26T05:43:00.001-08:00

Complex.com

Google Destroys Rap Genius' Search Rankings As Punishment For SEO Spam ...
TechCrunch
Google hit back hard today after it learned lyrics site Rap Genius had been using dubious SEO tricks to attain top spots in search results. Now RapGenius.com doesn't appear on the first page of results for a search of “Rap Genius,” and popular queries like ...
Google strikes back against Rap Genius's shady SEO spamTechRadar UK

LG mum on smarwatch rumors but confirms that a wearable device is coming

2013-12-26T04:13:00.001-08:00

Amidst rumors of 2K displays and octa-core CPUs for the LG G3, the Korea Herald has just added another: the upcoming smartphone will come with a G-Arch smartwatch and G-Health fitness band. The journal's insider sources pegged the devices as ...

Alibaba Unit to Offer Telecom Services in China - Wall Street Journal

2013-12-26T03:43:00.001-08:00

The West Australian

Alibaba Unit to Offer Telecom Services in China
Wall Street Journal
BEIJING—China will allow arms of e-commerce giant Alibaba and its closest rival to offer telecommunications services there, as Beijing looks to give private businesses a greater role in state-run industries such as telecom and banking. China's telecom ...
Alibaba Unit Wins License to Compete in China Wireless MarketBusinessweek
China

Such Hack. Many Dogecoin. Very Disappear. So Gone. Wow.

2013-12-26T00:13:00.001-08:00

Dogecoin, the virtual currency that was named after a silly meme but has been described as a potential successor to Bitcoin, was successfully hacked for the first time today, with Dogewallet users losing an estimated 21 million Dogecoins. The incident was confirmed by Dogewallet in a Reddit post after users reported disappearing Dogecoins on Doges.com’s forum. We’ve emailed Dogewallet to see if it has additional information beyond what its shared so far.

Dogewallet promised to fully refund all lost coins and has temporarily shut down its site.

Each Dogecoin is currently worth about US$0.00057. Together, the stolen Dogecoins are the equivalent of about $12,000, which is not a massive amount, but still a loss for users who spent a lot of time accumulating the virtual currency.

In its Reddit post, Dogewallet said that they are “currently looking at logs and have found thousands of attempts to hack our systems.” The hacker gained access to Dogewallet’s filesystem and modified its send/receive page to send coins to a static address.

Along with several hacking attempts on Bitcoin wallets, the Dogecoin incident is a reminder that all online wallets are vulnerable to hacking.

“We’re incre

Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes - Search Engine Land

2013-12-25T23:43:00.001-08:00

Complex.com

Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes
Search Engine Land
rapgenius-logo Google has penalized Rap Genius for link schemes this morning. If you go to Google and search for [rap genius], rapgenius.com will not be found on the first page. Instead you will find links to their Twitter account, Facebook page, Wikipedia ...
Rap Genius Confesses After It Was Caught Gaming GoogleBusiness Insider

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Google Wants To Build The Ultimate Personal Assistant

2013-12-25T15:43:00.001-08:00

Google Search is changing rapidly. Given the company’s love of small, rapid-fire updates, its sometimes hard to keep track of where the company is going, but earlier this month, at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Google Engineering Director Scott Huffman presented a pretty compelling overview of the direction Google is taking in search.

Here’s the gist of it: Google knows our expectations of what a search engine should be able to do is quickly changing. The old “ten blue links” search results page is quickly going away for something far smarter that, according to Huffman, will resemble a personal assistant more than the search tool Google that launched over fifteen years ago. Indeed, that’s what Huffman considers Google’s goal: creating the ultimate personal assistant. The next generation of search, he said, is all about making “all your tasks as you go through the day simpler and quicker.”

That also means that in a large number of cases, you will interact with Google on something that may not even have a screen. The car, he believes, is prime real estate for the Google Search of the future, where you simply interact with the search engine and then engage in a conversation with Google. The living room, too, he believes is a place where Google should just work. That may be on a large screen, but maybe also just through microphones and speakers that wait for your “ok Google” command.

That interaction with Google will be in the form of a back-and-forth conversation, something the company has been working on for a while now. Thanks to its AdEspresso, a startup offering Facebook ad tools for small and medium businesses, is announcing that it has raised its first outside funding, a seed round of $500,000.

The company focuses on ad optimization, namely finding the most effective combination of text and images for your ads. It says that customers upload possible images and text for the ads, then AdEspresso will test out different combinations and track the performance based on metrics like clicks, leads, and sales. For example, the company says it could tell an advertiser, “This picture for Female from 18 to 24 is performing 40% worst than your campaign’s average. Stop displaying it now!”

The idea of testing and optimizing different ad “creative” isn’t new, but CEO Massimo Chieruzzi said there aren’t many companies offering a product targeted at SMBs advertising on Facebook. Similarly, he acknowledged that there are plenty of social ad companies out there, but he said most of them aren’t really direct competitors (he mentioned Qwaya as one).

AdEspresso spun out of an Italian ad agency but has moved to Silicon Valley to participate in the 500 Startups incubator. The company says it spent about a year developing the product before launching an open beta six months ago, and it’s on-track to sign up 5,000 advertisers by the end of 2013, with nearly $900,000 in ad spending managed so far.

While there’s still more work to be done on the product, the biggest item on the AdEspresso to-do list is probably making money — Chieruzzi said he’ll be implementing a business

Google Destroys Rap Genius’ Search Rankings As Punishment For SEO Spam, But Resolution In Progress

2013-12-25T11:43:00.001-08:00

Google hit back hard today after it learned lyrics site Rap Genius had been using dubious SEO tricks to attain top spots in search results. Now RapGenius.com doesn’t appear on the first page of results for a search of “Rap Genius”, and popular queries like “Jay-Z Holy Grail Lyrics” don’t bring up the startup like they used to. [Update: But the two companies are working on a resolution.]

Founded in 2009, Rap Genius is a lyrics and text annotation site. It lets users provide their own explanations for song lyrics, religious texts, legal documents, images, and more that other users see when they hover over snippets of text hosted on the site. The startup lept into the limelight when it received a massive $15 million investment led by Andreessen Horowitz in late 2012.

Known for their foul-mouths and outrageous behavior, the Rap Genius founders had been riding high over the last year as their site climbed into prominent and lucrative slots in Google search results. For a sense of how ridiculous these guys are, check out our on-stage talk at TechCrunch Disrupt NY where founder Mahbod Moghadam apologizes for telling Mark Zuckerberg to “suck his d*ck”.

But earlier this

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