Praise be! The 'search nearby' function in Google Maps has been reinstated, so now you can find bars and ATMs close by with ease once more.
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/GcPI3SX0DcI/praise-be-the-search-nearby-function-in-google-maps-ha-1556780770We may have had to deal with the usual April articles yesterday, but one that stood out from all the jokes was T-Mobile’s plans to scrap corporate discount from Simple Choice plans. The mobile network has today confirmed a partial reversal, allowing only existing customers to retain their discount. Sorry, new subscribers.
Those who take out new rate plans will be met with a T-Mobile gift card worth $25 when purchasing a new device, while those who are already with the network will be able to continue with their general bill savings. It’s a positive move, especially since discounts from T-Mobile have been up to 15 percent, depending on where you work.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere previously wrote the following in a blog post:
"The old programs were designed to help big carriers close big corporate contracts, with employees as bargaining chips. We aren’t playing that game anymore. This change is about simplifying wireless for everyone… including employees of small and large companies alike."
Does this partial reversal help you out at all?
Source: Re/code
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/hfgYoLqLKmA/story01.htmHere you have them: The rumored Lego Simpsons minifigs in all their glory! 16 of them, including Itchy and Scratchy with deadly weapons! Even the Simpsons themselves look better than the ones in the house set,
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/6tDa-wDxZbs/the-new-16-lego-simpsons-minifigs-are-awesome-and-i-wan-1551815125Today, Spotify starts rolling out a new darker redesign. It's the biggest stylistic change we've seen since the service launched
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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/rCfO-FfZZCM/spotifys-deep-black-redesign-makes-your-favorite-music-1556534199
You know Twitter spam when you see it—but wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to see it?
Unfortunately, email-style filters, which analyze message contents, are of little help. Due to the rigors of 140-character communication, even legitimate tweets tend to read like Nigerian phishing scams, while the hucksters often hide their pitches in links. So Twitter simply puts the onus on users to report offending accounts.
But a fascinating recent study from Imperial College London suggests a new approach. Borrowing some tricks from computational neuroscience, coauthors Gabriela Tavares and Aldo Faisal have come up with an algorithm that can tell—with 85 percent accuracy—whether a Twitter account is home to a bot or (worse) a corporate shill instead of a regular person.
It’s all in the timing. By analyzing the timestamps on 165,000 tweets, the researchers found that these three user types—individuals, companies, and robots—have very distinct activity patterns. Think of it as temporal fingerprinting. The approach could eventually be used to create more effective filters for all kinds of social networks.
Click to see the time profiles for each user type:
Looking at just the relative frequency of tweets sent over the course of the day, characteristic patterns emerge for each account class.
But the new algorithm also parses user activity on a much deeper level.
Chart: Onformative | Source: “Scaling-Laws of Human Broadcast Communication,” PLOS ONE, July 2013
Could a spammer simply program their bots to mimic human behavior? “It would be very hard,” says Tavares, now at Caltech. “This isn’t a deterministic model—it’s not a matter of just tweeting at certain times of day or certain intervals. The classifier uses machine learning to build probability distributions; without knowing the parameters of the model, you couldn’t simulate the expected behavior.”
Stopping spam is a cause everyone can get behind. But as Faisal, a lecturer in neurotechnology at Imperial College, points out, the results also tell a bigger story about the informational richness of communications metadata—the seemingly trivial details of our connected lives. “It illustrates how even the most basic metadata can reveal a great deal about who you are,” he says. Something to think about, perhaps, in light of revelations that the NSA is busily skimming just such data from our telephone calls.
In fact, the new algorithm can not only tell whether you’re a good Twitter citizen or a spammer, it can even predict the timing of your next tweet with surprising accuracy—provided you’re human, that is. Turns out that people, as a group, are more predictable than robots. So much for our vaunted human spontaneity. Those annoying tweets that arrive with machinelike regularity each day? Those are actually your friends.
The Chrome logo is displayed at a Google event, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2013 in New York. Google is introducing a $279 laptop that runs its Internet-centric Chrome operating system, borrowing many of the high-end features found in models that cost $1,000 or more. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
The Chrome logo is displayed at a Google event, Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2013 in New York. Google is introducing a $279 laptop that runs its Internet-centric Chrome operating system, borrowing many of the high-end features found in models that cost $1,000 or more. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
NEW YORK (AP) — Google's stock surpassed the $1,000 mark for the first time, helped by strong third-quarter results.
Shortly after the markets opened Friday, Google Inc. shares jumped 14 percent to $1,015.46 and closed a day heavy trading at $1,011.41. The gains marked Google's biggest one-day jump in more than five years.
The stock had never been higher than $928 in regular market trading since Google went public at $85 per share nine years ago.
Late Thursday, Google reported a 36 percent jump in third-quarter net income that beat Wall Street's predictions. The numbers showed that while the company's average ad prices continue to decline, they're being offset by a larger number of people clicking on ads.
Over the years, Google has expanded its reach far beyond the powerful search engine that made it famous. It now includes the video sharing site YouTube, along with the Android operating system that runs on close to 1 billion smartphones and tablets. The company ranks as the No. 1 digital ad company by revenue, leaving rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Facebook Inc. far behind.
Google's stock has climbed steadily in the last five years, more than doubling in value. But the stock slipped slightly in recent months, while the overall market has risen, amid worries about deteriorating ad prices.
Google's average ad price has fallen from the prior year in each of the last eight quarters, primarily because advertisers aren't paying as much for mobile ads because the screens on smartphones and tablet computers are smaller than those on laptop and desktop computers.
As more people rely on mobile devices to connect to Google's search engine and other services, the trend is driving down the company's average ad price, or "cost per click."
But the number of so-called "paid clicks" on Google's ads helped offset the lower prices in the third quarter. The clicking volume increased 26 percent from last year, an indication that Google's data analysis is doing a good job matching ads with the interests of its services' users.
Friday's stock surge takes Google's market capitalization to about $333 billion, which still pales in comparison to that of technology industry rival Apple Inc. The iPhone and iPad maker ranks No. 1 in the world with a market capitalization of $462 billion.
It's unlikely that Google shares will stay above $1,000 for very long. The Mountain View, Calif., company plans to issue a new class of stock that will likely cut the value of the shares in half, though its market capitalization will be unaffected.
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AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in san Francisco contributed to this report.
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Follow Bree Fowler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/APBreeFowler
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-10-18-Google-$1000%20Stock/id-791b9fa090be406a813d2602dd73912c
