Mind Candy Slims Down Ahead Of Major New Mobile Push

Mind Candy, the company behind the Moshi Monsters web game for kids, has in the past been considered one of the breakout successes of the UK startup and gaming world. But while it continues to extend its life as a licensing gangbuster  Mind Candy has laid off 30 staff in recent weeks, bringing total numbers to just over 100 down from 200 in 2012. The downsizing comes as Mind Candy prepares to launch World of Warriors, its biggest game in years.

Can Mind Candy, which has already defied a defeat in its earliest days, pull it all off again? In an exclusive interview, founder Michael Acton Smith says it can, and has major plans going forward.

In 2012 Mind Candy, at the height of the Moshi Monsters craze, had a staff of around 200 people. But that number has been slowly whittled down as the company changes direction.with every incarnation of possible merchandise it is clearly going through the bumpy ride of shifting toward the mobile future.

In Mind Candy’s yearly accounts at UK’s Companies House for 2012, the last published year (2013 are due to be published at the end of September this year), it reported total revenues of £46.9 million ($80.3 million), up over 60 percent on a year before, on pre-tax profit of £10 million (£17 million).

However, traffic to moshimonsters.com has decreased markedly in the last year. In August 2013 it had 796,000 U.S. unique visitors, but as of August this year it had 366,000, according to Comscore. Unfortunately, a game losing this much traffic in a year is not good, no matter now many licensing deals you have to sell fluffy toys.

As with Rovio, Mind Candy has licensed it’s Moshi brand to toys, a film and TV shows. In 2013, Moshi Monsters claimed it had over 80 million registered users.

Acton Smith said revenue had been affected. “Revenue was down in 2013 on 2012 but that was the first year revenue has declined.”

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Facebook Data Privacy Class Action Now Oversubscribed

A civil class action lawsuit being brought against Facebook on privacy grounds by Europe vs Facebook campaigner Max Schrems has hit its current maximum of 25,000 participants less than a week after the action was announced.

The class action was submitted to a Vienna, Austria court last Thursday and attracted 11,000 participants over the weekend. It’s now hit its initial limit of 25,000 — imposed by the organizers because of the associated admin burden.

Additional participants wanting to join the action are being asked to register their interest, via a Facebook class action website, in the eventuality of the case organizers being able to increase the number of participants.

“If we can join more people for whatever reason (good feeling in courts, easier handling than we expected, more capacities after proceeding the first 25.000, …) [we will],” Schrems told TechCrunch via email. “The cut was just necessary to not have expectations that we might not be able to meet in the future. We want to be straight-forward with the people joining.”

“The current maximum has nothing to do with [legal] costs (as we are insured via the procedure financing company), but with the administrative burden that e.g. 100.000 class members would mean to us. Mind that we are consumers that invite other consumers to join an existing case. I don’t get a single cent more than any class member,” he added.

Schrems is the only named claimant in the case, so there are no risks of any costs for participants in the class action. The case is being financed by Austrian law firm ROLAND ProzessFinanz AG, which will net a fifth of any winnings.

Damages have been set intentionally low — at “a token €500 per user” — but given there are now 25,000 participants if the case prevails and those full damages are granted that’s currently a €12.5 million toll for Facebook.

Earlier today, when the suit had reached 21,000 participants, the top 10 countries joining the action were as follows:

1. Germany — 5.287
2. Austria — 3.712
3. Netherlands — 2.438
4. Finland — 1.179
5. Croatia — 1.106
6. United Kingdom — 913
7. Belgium — 894
8. France — 736
9. Serbia — 588
10. Poland — 415

In all, individuals from more than 100 countries have signed up to participate in the suit, according to the case organizers. At peak times the case was registering up to 7,000 participants per day.

Schrems said the response had exceeded his “most optimistic expectations”.

“With this number of participants we have a great basis, to stop complaining about privacy violations and actually do something about it. If we are successful, the outcome will of course have a positive impact on all users,” he added in a statement.

Specifically the suit targets the following — as the case views it — “unlawful” acts on Facebook’s part:

Data use policy which is invalid under EU law
The absence of effective consent to many types of data use
Support of the NSA’s ‘PRISM’ surveillance programme
Tracking of Internet users on external websites (e.g. through ‘Like buttons’)
Monitoring and analysis of users through ‘big data’ systems
Unlawful introduction of ‘Graph Search’
Unauthorised passing on of user data to external applications

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Pinterest Rolls Out Messaging So Pinners Can Have Conversations Around Shared Pins

Pinterest today is unveiling a new way users can communicate, collaborate and share with one another. With the launch of a new messaging feature, users will be able to keep discussions going on Pinterest around their favorite Pins without having to leave the site or apps.

Last spring, Pinterest launched its Send a Pin feature, which enabled users to share interesting Pins with their friends on and off the site. Users that were connected on Pinterest would receive a notification that would point them to the shared pin. And others would receive emails about the content that was shared.

Since then, the feature has become incredibly popular with users — which Pinterest like to call “Pinners” — with more than 2 million Pins sent each day. But it wasn’t all that useful.

The Evolution Of Pinterest Messages

While sending a Pin was a good way for users on Pinterest to pass along content that users had common interest in, there wasn’t much that users could do with those pins after they were sent. Many users ended up responding to email notifications as a way to continue the conversation around things that were shared with them.

The hope is that the new messaging feature will enable Pinners to keep conversations going without having to leave the site.

Believe it or not, the messaging feature has been only a few months in the making. According to Product Manager Michael Yamartino, the messaging feature was the result of a prototyping session that took place over the course of a week in Portland.

A team of five made the trip north to work with Product Designer Tom Watson, formerly of Facebook. They lived out of an Airbnb and worked out of the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) for five days. On Friday, they had the first Messaging prototype.

That was about two months ago. Since then, Pinterest has been working internally with employees and so-called “Power Pinners” to refine the product. That meant working out the kinks, and to ensure that the user experience wouldn’t take away from what users come to the service to do — which is to Pin stuff.

What Pinterest Messaging Is… And Isn’t

Pinterest’s take on messaging is similar to what you’ll see on other social networks, but there are some key differences. One of those differences is that unlike Facebook, Pinterest’s messaging feature doesn’t have a persistent contact list that follows you around everywhere. That’s by design. Pinterest doesn’t want its service to become about messaging, but wants messaging to empower the way people use its platform.

“We’re not a communications service,” Yamartino said. “We’re not trying to be the place to say ‘What’s up?’ or ‘When are you coming home?'”

When users choose to Send a Pin, they are shown a list of contacts to choose from. Once that Pin is sent, the conversation appears in the lower left-hand corner of the website or tablet app. (Mobile users will be treated to an entirely separate dialogue screen for messages.)

The avatars of users that you’ve exchanged messages with look kind of like Facebook’s “chat heads,” and conversations can be selected by clicking on them. They can be just as easily shut down by clicking the “x” in the corner of each. On the website, avatars and conversations only partially cover the frames behind them, allowing Pinners to scroll through and still see the content shared in their global feed.

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Internet.Org’s App With Free Access To Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, Local Info Launches In Zambia

85% of the 5 billion people without Internet simply can’t afford data plans. So Facebook’s accessibility initiative Internet.org today launches its Android and web app for the developing world with free data access to a limited set of services including Facebook, Messenger, Wikipedia, and Google Search. It also provides local health, employment, weather, and women’s rights resources.

Internet.org’s app is launching in Zambia before coming to other developing countries eventually, and is a partnership with local carrier Airtel who provides the free access in hopes that Zambians see the web’s value and buy pre-paid data through the app to explore the rest of the Internet. The Facebook Zero has been giving the developing world access to a stripped down version of Facebook since 2010. But this new Internet.org app with other services will be available as a compact, standalone Android app, baked into the Facebook for Android app, or freely available as a mobile website that the feature phones carried by the vast majority of Zambians can access.

Internet.org, Facebook’s partnership with six telecom companies, is also working on drones and satellites to deliver Internet connection infrastructure to the 15% of people who are unconnected because they’re in remote areas with no cellular towers in range. The initiative to get more people on the Internet is sometimes criticized as a Facebook growth tactic masquerading as altruism. In this, Internet.org’s app will in fact grow Facebook by making usage free in Zambia.

But Internet.org product manager Guy Rosen defends the project’s benevolent side by reiterating Mark Zuckerberg’s white papers, telling me that Internet access can have a profound positive impact on the carrier opportunities and education for people in the developing world. “We’re here to build a program that covers more than Facebook so we can accelerate the pace at which people are connecting to the Internet which is 9% a year” says Rosen. “We really want to make that happen faster.”

Internet.org’s app is designed to provide critical services to all Zambians for free, while also spreading awareness of why the Internet is useful and might be worth paying for. The 4.25 billion people who aren’t on the Internet but could be because traditional cellular connections are available fall into two buckets, says Rosen. Those who want the Internet but can’t afford it because data plans are too expensive. And those who don’t fully understand the web. Rosen tells me “a lot of people don’t know what the Internet is. They don’t know what it could do for their lives and livelihood. It’s a vague concept.”

Of course this perspective assumes the Internet is equivocally good for people, which may not be true for all cultures. But the app is designed for people who would want the Internet if they about it and could afford it.

To promote the Internet.org app in Zambia there will be call-outs in the Facebook app, an awareness campaign, and notifications to Airtel subscribers. The country’s residents can then visit Internet.org from their smartphone or browser-equipped feature phone for an entirely free entry point. Alternatively, they can pay for a little data to download the Internet.org app that’s just 800 kilobytes, or the Facebook For Android app where the Internet.org app is baked into a tab.

Internet Dot Org AppFrom these three identical entry points, users can use one of a selection of apps entirely for free. These include:

Facebook – for staying in touch with friendsFacebook Messenger – for direct contact with loved onesGoogle Search – to find information, though clicking through to results will require a data planWikipedia – to learn about anything, and all internal Wikipedia links are free to accessAccuWeather – to get updated weather information that’s critical for farmersAirtel – to learn more about the carrier and buy data planseZeLibrary – to learn about Zambian government informationFacts for Life (by UNICEF) – to find heath and hygiene info including advice on pregnancy, childbirth, childhood illnesses, child development, parenting, protection, and child careGo Zambia Jobs – to search for jobsKokoliko – search for jobsMAMA (Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action) – Info on maternal health for impoverished mothersWRAPP (Women’s Rights App) – learn about women’s rights and what to do if rights have been violatedZambia uReport (by UNICEF) – To find HIV and AIDS health info

If Google’s inclusion seems a little odd considering it has its own Internet accessibility initiative Project Loon, know that Facebook tells me content providers in the  app don’t need to be official Internet.org partners.

An On-Ramp To Paid Data Plans

Airtel pays for all this free access. Rosen tells me Facebook and Internet.org don’t pay at all. Instead, the free access acts as an on-ramp to Airtel’s data plans.

Data ChargesIf users click through to links outside of these services or use other apps, Internet.org will show users a roadblock screen that warns them they’ll be expending their data plan or need to buy one. Zambians would then go to a local store and top-up with pre-paid credit on Airtel if necessary. The model works because Airtel believes it can earn more money using the free limited access as a loss leader to drive data plan purchases. This works out well for locals, because those who can’t afford these plans get a ton resources at no cost because they’re effectively subsidized by those who can.

Facebook has been offering free access to a stripped down version of its service under the name Facebook Zero since 2010 when it launched with 50 operators in countries around the world. The program has been hailed for driving Facebook penetration in Africa.

In the last six months, though, Internet.org own deals have come to fruition. On last week’s earnings call, Zuckerberg said that “our initial partnerships in the Philippines, Paraguay, and Tanzania have helped around 3 million people connect to the Internet who had no access before.” And back in February at Mobile World Congress, he highlighted how the deals are delivering customers to its carrier partners. Discussing a Filipino Network Globe when he said “what we’re seeing in Globe users is the number of people who are using the internet — the data — was doubled, and Globe subscribers have grown by 25%, so it’s a home run.”

It is a little scary that Facebook and Internet.org could decide what qualifies as a basic Internet service offered free and what doesn’t. You’ll notice Twitter isn’t in the list. But Facebook’s worldwide appeal makes it a valuable ally to carriers who need flagship services to point to for why people should want the Internet. So it gets to call the shots.

If the app is a success in Zambia, you can expect Internet.org will roll it out in other carriers and countries in Africa, Asia, and South America where the same data affordability problem persists. And if Facebook can be one of the first ways people experience the Internet, they won’t forget it as they become full-fledged Internet users. Seems altruism can be a business model.

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Temporary Tattoo Can Unlock Your Phone

Motorola has teamed up with a company called VivaLnk to make a temporary tattoo that can unlock a smartphone, no PIN required. Slap it on your skin, hold your phone up to it, and bam — phone unlocked.

Who needs gestural passwords or face recognition when you can unlock your phone like a time-traveling space wizard?

So how does it work? It’s an ultra-thin NFC circuit, wrapped up in medical-grade 3M adhesive that won’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) freak out your skin.

A 10 pack of tattoos will set you back $10 bucks. Motorola says these things should stand up to swimming and other exercise and should last for up to five days — so that 10 pack would optimally last you a bit over a month and a half.

Before you go and order a pack, there’s one catch: these tattoos only work with the Motorola X right now (because nothing helps test a wacky niche product concept like severely limiting the potential customer base). If you’ve got any other Android phone, you’re stuck unlocking your phone manually like a chump.

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Google Chromecast

Google launched the Chromecast exactly one year ago today, and the $35 streaming stick has made some impressive progress in the intervening 365 days. The media player has added a ton of features, but Google also revealed that it has powered over 400 million Casts thus far, which involve users running software on their Android, iOS or PC device to displays connected to the Chromecast.

The device is also now more international than ever, with sales extending across 20 countries including the latest addition, Ireland, as of this writing. 30,000 stores now stock the Chromecast, too, in addition to its online availability through Google Play devices store. The app now has support for scores more apps than it did at launch, can mirror the screens of select Android devices, and has sold “millions” of units according to Google.

Chromecast is becoming more and more of true streaming over-the-top device replacement thanks to lots of iteration and feature additions, but its special power of Casting from Android devices is being baked into Android TV means that the Chromecast could become a transition device as its features are rolled into third-party settop boxes, TV sets and other devices. If Android TV succeeds as I’m sure Google hopes it will, users should be able to get their casting elsewhere. In the meantime, however, $35 remains an amazing price to pay for an accessory that does what Chromecast can do, especially given how keen Google seems to be on continuous improvement for the gadget.

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Fifa World Cup 2014 Cortana Free Download {Germany Victory Over Argentina} (Cortana Prediction) (Cortana Free Download)

Germany will defeat Argentina and claim the trophy at the World Cup final on Sunday, according to the latest prediction by Microsoft's artificially intelligent digital assistant, Cortana.
Cortana, named after the AI character that appears in the Halo video games, has accurately predicted the outcome of every match of this year's World Cup elimination round so far, surpassing even Paul the 'psychic' octopus in her prophetic abilities.
When asked "who will win the Germany Argentina match", Cortana responds: "It's too early to say for sure, but I'd give Germany the edge over Argentina".
Other responses include: "Germany seems to have a slight edge. But don't card me if I'm wrong", and "Probably Germany. But you never known what can happen in the beautiful game..."
Cortana also predicts that Brazil will beat the Netherlands to claim third place.
Microsoft's predictive models evaluate the strength of each team through a variety of factors such as previous win/loss/tie record in qualification matches and other international competitions, and margin of victory in these contests.
Further adjustments are made related to other factors which give one team advantages over another, such as home field (for Brazil) or proximity (South American teams), playing surface (hybrid grass), game-time weather conditions, and other such factors.

In addition, data obtained from prediction markets allows Microsoft to tune the win/lose/tie probabilities due to the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ phenomenon captured by the people wagering on the outcomes.
Microsoft's Cortana is currently ahead of search rival Google for correct predictions.
After correctly predicting eight out of eight match results in the Round of 16, Google slipped up with its prediction for the Germany vs France quarter final. However, it went on to correctly predict the results of the two semi final matches.

Microsoft’s prediction model is based on an array of variables such as previous win/loss record, the strengths and weaknesses of teams, results in the qualifying stages of the competition and the margin of victory in the same.

Other elements which give one team an advantage over the other like the home conditions (e.g Brazil), proximity to home field (South American teams), playing surface (hybrid grass) and game-time weather conditions are also factored in. Microsoft also relies on the number of the people who bet on a specific team; the majority always wins right.

Microsoft’s rival Google though have fallen behind in the prediction stakes though. The Google Now feature on Android systems had got 8 out of 8 predictions right but incorrectly predicted the Germany v/s France quarter-final. However it did accurately predict the outcomes of both the semifinals.

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Twitterball Power

In the old days of Twitter — at least ‘old’ by Silicon Valley 2.0 standards, which is anything over five years — you could count on a couple of things. First, Twitter would go down almost every time people started really seriously using it. There’s a reason ‘fail whale’ is still part of our vocabulary.

The second is that every time that there was a m​ajor event during which Twitter’s construction-paper servers managed to stay up, Twitter PR would break coverage records of Twitter records. Most tweets, most re-tweets, most memes, you get the drill. And, like clockwork, Twitter PR would bash out a blog post describing the new peak and why it was so awesome and fantastic.

A Google search for the last couple of years returns hundreds of news articles related to record Twitter moments. Or you can just ask anyone covering the space how repetitive it’s gotten — Twitter record pieces fit in the journalistic lexicon somewhere between momentum number posts and X site is down posts.

Yesterday, another record was hit during the absolute massacre that was the Brazil v. Germany match at the World Cup. Twitter says that 35.6 million tweets were sent about the match, with a peak of over 580,000 being sent as Germany scored its 5th goal. There. Now I’ve contributed to the colophon of Twitter record news, a long and illustrious journalistic centipede of regurgitated statistics.

Those numbers, if you’re tracking, are also bigger than the Super Bowl’s number of tweets (24.9 million) earlier this year — and Twitter growth only accounts for part of that differential, as it’s been growing but not that fast. We can attribute that to a few things, but the fact that the World Cup is actually a real international championship is probably one of them. And Twitter’s international user base is actually growing a ton faster than the U.S., with over 78 percent outside its borders by recent count.

And, let’s not forget, more people watched the World Cup online than the Super Bowl, too.

The brutal dominance of Twitter over live events like sports is evidenced by the sentiment that was attached to this tweet I sent yesterday:The combination of the raw enthusiasm of the channel’s announcers and the running commentary on Twitter produced a potent cocktail that matched, for me, the kind of thing that happens when my fantasy (American) football league gets together to watch a game we all have skin on.

It all blends together in a Sporgy of trash talk, context, banter and enthusiasm that makes for the next best thing to being there.

Anecdotally, the World Cup feels like a big moment for Twitter and sports. I’ve seen more uptake of the personalized profile makeovers than I’ve ever seen by a promotional Twitter effort before, for instance. And surprisingly few grumpy ‘ugh sportsball’ tweets.

The narrative, especially over the past couple of years, has always been ‘Facebook vs. Twitter’. And many of Facebook’s product decisions certainly seem to reflect that the network views Twitter as competing for time that could be spent on Facebook.

But everything competes for time. This is the truth that the best product designers in Silicon Valley, and the best people in media and publishing etc., know: There is only one finite, precious resource and it is not money. It’s time.

Twitter’s pry bar, its tool to lever away a few precious minutes of your attention span each day, is the fact that it provides a continuous stream of crowd-generated context.

That’s what I meant by “covering it better than ESPN.” Broadcast-only mediums like TV are at an immediate disadvantage when things are happening in real time. Not only are they rarely up to the second (not minute, second), but they’re also lacking any context that isn’t provided on the screen or via an anchor or commentator.

Given a source of immediate news, I would take Twitter over television any day.

But the fact that it’s ‘faster’ is just part of the equation. As I mentioned earlier, it’s about the amount of context that’s provided. There’s a reason that people scroll to the bottom of an article about a game or movie or football match to read the comments — they want to know whether other people have the same opinion they do, or something to add that will put it in context for them.

Twitter isn’t just ‘stuff, quickly’, it’s a human-powered difference engine that quickly churns through fact and fiction to produce a rough cut of the truth.

That doesn’t eliminate the need for deeper thought or other kinds of media, of course, but it is completely unique. There is nothing else like it, for sporting events or anything else that’s happening in real time.

I don’t know whether Twitter will be able to make a go of it in a business sense, though its ad department does seem to be doing well by Wall Street standards. But the mere fact that it has existed means that, in one form or another, it will always exist.

There is no such thing as the future web without a mechanism for the real-time flow of information. And, for now, Twitter is that mechanism.

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SoundCloud For Sonos

Sonos has today announced yet another way for you to listen to the music you love, wirelessly of course, in your home. SoundCloud, the social sharing platform for audio, has joined Sonos as a music partner and goes live today as a beta for Sonos users.

For those of you who are not familiar with Sonos, the company sells a wireless hifi speaker system taht includes multiple speakers and a bridge (or smart hub). Through your smartphone, you can set up playlists and songs from loads of your favorite platforms, including Spotify, Pandora, iHeart, Songza, your own music library (of course), and now SoundCloud.

According to the official blog post, SoundCloud now sees 12 hours of audio and music uploaded to the platform every minute, so there surely won’t be a shortage of options for music fans.

Here’s what Sonos had to say about it:

By bringing SoundCloud’s ever-expanding library of new and established publishers on to Sonos, you can easily discover music and audio that is not available anywhere else and with Universal Search on the new Sonos controller app, stumble upon music from your favorite artists on SoundCloud that you never knew existed.

With SoundCloud, we bring Sonos customers in every country around the world a truly global experience, all at once, connecting you to a unique, expanding library of music and audio.

Original sounds from artists and creators, unleashed to your home the way they were meant to be heard:

With 12 hours of music and audio uploaded on SoundCloud’s platform every minute, Sonos expands your world of listening by freeing those sounds from the computer, giving millions of homes a direct way to stream to HiFi speakers.

Easy discovery without limitations:

By bringing SoundCloud’s ever-expanding library of new and established publishers on to Sonos, you can easily discover music and audio that is not available anywhere else and with Universal Search on the new Sonos controller app, stumble upon music from your favorite artists on SoundCloud that you never knew existed.

Try SoundCloud’s free service in beta on Sonos now by visiting ‘more music’ in the new Sonos app and dive into a world of new music.

Interested Sonos users can check out the new SoundCloud integration now.

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Google's New Killer APP Review

Google’s I/O keynote may have been a bit of a jumble of different product announcements — many of which won’t be available until later this year — but Android Wear was what most people in the audience wanted to hear about. While there is plenty of Android in Google’s smartwatch operating system and while developers will be able to develop apps specifically for it, Wear in its current form is fundamentally about bringing Google Now notifications to your wrist.

While I’ve had Google Now on my phone for a long time now, the more I use Wear, the more I feel like it was custom-made for Google Now. Indeed, this is the first time I really feel Now is living up to its promise. It’s also the first time I find myself paying full attention to Now, despite its prominence on Android before.

CaptureAndroid Wear, of course, also shows you all of your notifications from your phone (and when they are interactive, Wear will automatically mimic those, too). You could push all of your phone notifications to your watch, but that would be overkill. Thankfully, Google lets you choose which applications can push to Wear. But its most useful feature — and maybe its killer feature overall — is definitely easy access to Google Now.

At this point, everybody is pretty much familiar with Google Now, but there is something fundamentally different between using it on your phone and on your wrist. Sure, the mission is the same on both platforms: Google wants to give you the right information at the right time. When you’re at work, it shows you the drive time to home. Got an appointment somewhere else? It’ll show you when to leave. At the airport? It’ll show you the barcode for your boarding pass. It’s one thing for that information to be available on your phone, but on your wrist, it suddenly becomes so much more accessible.

now_wearThat is, of course, only when Google Now gets it right — and most of the time, it does. The company has been working hard on bringing more information to Now and that has made it quite a bit more useful by regularly adding more information and new cards to it. Some cards that Google shows on the phone don’t make sense on Wear (links for topics you recently search for, for example) and those thankfully never make it to the watch.

Wear doesn’t always get it right, though. If you end up swiping the weather card away by mistake, for example, you can’t easily get it back. That’s a fundamental problem with Wear — and maybe the only one that really annoys me. For Google Now, at least, it’d be nice to have an easy way to flip through all of your cards at all times.

Just like Google Now brings together a number of Google’s services into one product, Wear has a similar feel to it. It’s a mix of what it has learned from Android and its ecosystem, its advances in voice recognition and its newly found design chops.

All of that comes together to bring Google Now to your wrist, and while that may sound like a minor thing, it’s actually a very useful experience. Whether that’s worth $200 to you is a different question, but after using Wear for a bit more than a week now, I can actually see myself wearing one of these watches going forward — and before this I hadn’t worn a watch for at least a decade.

Conclusion:

In the next few months, Google will get some competition from Microsoft, Apple and a few startups in this space. For better or worse, none of them know as much about you as Google does, so it’ll be hard for them to replicate the Google Now experience. That should give Google a bit of an edge against the competition — unless the iWatch turns out to be so amazing that people will buy it even if it just shows the time and phone notifications.

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Google Keynote Inspiring

Google’s I/O developer conference kicked off today, and the company held its keynote address to give an overview of all the news it revealed at the event. The changes included a preview of the upcoming version of Android, dubbed “L” for now, which brings a new design paradigm to Google’s OS that helps it work across different types of screens and devices.

There were ups and there were downs during the nearly three-hour keynote, but ultimately, Google unveiled a lot of amazing new stuff. The company also spent a lot of time talking about stuff that even developers would have a hard time getting excited about, at least when presented on stage. They really did paint a vision of a unified future of Android and Chrome on the desktop, on mobile, in your car, on your wrist and beyond – in a way that isn’t just an awkwardly forced translation of one way of using software across each different usage scenario.

Overall, we were impressed, as you generally are when a multi-billion-dollar corporation spends a sizable chunk of money on cool stuff. But Cardboard may have won the day in the end.

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Facebook Diversity report 2014

Facebook just released its employee diversity report, and here’s our chart comparing it to Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn. While you could conclude that Facebook is a bit more diverse than Google and a bit less than the others, they all get an F for being heavily skewed male, white and asian. Facebook comes in at 69% male worldwide, while in the US it’s 57% white, 34% asian, 4% hispanic, 2% black, and 3% two-plus races.

As for the breakdowns by job type, Facebook’s technical talent is 85% male, while non-tech team members are 53% male, and senior level employees are 77% male.

As for ethnicity across job types, Facebook technical employees are 53% white, 41% asian, 3% hispanic, and 1% black. Non-tech employees are 63% white, 24% asian, 6% hispanic, and 2% black. And senior level employees are 74% white, 19% Asian, 4% hispanic, and 2% black.

Google prompted the trend of more diversity transparency when it released its report last month. Yahoo and LinkedIn followed suit, and now Apple and Amazon are beginning to stand out for not releasing theirs.

Facebook outlined a number of initiatives its Strategic Diversity team has been working on to enhance equality amongst genders and ethnicities. Facebook University is a program that provides undergraduate freshmen from underrepresented groups with internships at Facebook. It has partnerships with Girls Who Code, Code 2040, the National Society of Black Engineers, and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and Management Leadership for Tomorrow. It’s working with Yes We Code to help connect 100,000 “low opportunity youth” to computer programming education programs.

Facebook also provides unconscious bias training to employees to help them nullify racism and sexism they may be expressing without knowing it. It also has an inclusive benefits program that aids employees across the sexual preference spectrum, and Employee Resource Groups that help support employees from different ethnic bacgrounds, the LGBTQ community, and military veterans.

Women have long been known to be underrepesented in tech, but the real issue these reports highlight is that non-white, non-asian people are widely absent from the industry. Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn are all 89% to 91% white and asian.

Blaming these companies isn’t the answer, though. While hiring practices could certainly improve, they’re dealing with systemic inequality. Women and non-asian minorities are not getting the same encouragement in science, technology, engineering, and math that could prepare them for jobs at the tech giants. Without this education early, they aren’t enrolling in computer science programs at top universities like Stanford, Harvard, and MIT where the big tech companies recruit.

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