W riting on a computer is awful. Without discipline – in my case, at least – an effort to get out 1,000 words of non-fiction usually ends up consisting of thirty minutes of web browsing before writing, intermittent Facebook trips while tapping out a few hundred words, and a nice jaunt through Hacker News at […]
At nearly every major technology event for the past five years we’ve been given at least one “wow” moment — when one of the big players would unveil some sort of product or service that no one had ever seen before. The bar was set high for innovation, because there were wide-open spaces to be filled. […]
Nobody loves change, especially when it hits our most beloved digital services like Gmail, Facebook, Spotify, or Instagram. The majority of the time we get over these changes and suddenly forget what these services were like before. It’s like seeing a friend’s new haircut — shocking at first, but eventually that haircut is the only […]
Facebook’s latest diversity report is a lot more of the same, with the exception of two components: LGBTQA employee representation and hiring data from the last 12 months. Facebook also announced a $15 million investment in Code.org to help the non-profit organization develop computer science curriculum among underrepresented student populations. Here are the high-level stats. Facebook […]
Reading the links your friends share with you in Messenger is getting a little easier, starting today. Facebook says it’s beginning to roll out support for “Instant Articles” – the fast-loading, distraction-free versions of publishers’ sites – in its popular mobile messaging app. The Android version of Messenger will be the first to receive this […]
Facebook invited a small group of reporters to its Prineville, OR data center this week. Most companies don’t even give their own employees access to their data centers (outside of the relatively small group of people it takes to keep the millions of servers inside up and running), but because Facebook open sources most of its server and networking […]
If you’re anything like me you want your apps to let others follow you around but refuse to let them share photographs of your food. But how can you tell each individual app on your phone what you will and won’t share? Researchers at CMU have some ideas. Their app is a smart privacy system […]
Facebook is clearly very serious about its mission to connect the world and in the process, it has launched solar-powered drones that use lasers to connect to each other and the ground, and more prosaic efforts like new antennas for covering both urban and rural areas. Today, Facebook is expanding this work with the launch of […]
The original PlayStation console, launched when I was the managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment for Europe, shook the gaming world. The 3D environment was unfamiliar to gamers, and some in the industry at large were initially reluctant to adopt such a new technology. But with time, 3D gaming became the standard of video games, […]
The developing world can’t join the age of social video since streaming sucks up too much costly data and is sluggish on slow connections. But Facebook wants to change that with a new video download option it will start testing on July 11th with a small percentage of users in India. While on WiFi, people […]