Author: kenmay

Expedia to pay $3.9 billion for Airbnb competitor HomeAway

The short-term rental market is growing, and Expedia understandably wants a piece of it. After snapping up Orbitz and Travelocity earlier this year, it has now decided to purchase HomeAway. It’s an online service that focuses on renting out vacation homes, further intensifying Expedia’s rivalry with Airbnb. The travel empire has been displaying HA properties alongside hotels for a couple of years, but it will now completely own the company and all its brands. In its press release , Expedia admits that it has agreed to pay a hefty $3.9 billion for HomeAway, because it has “long had [its] eyes on the fast growing ~$100 billion alternative accommodations space.” Both companies are expecting to close the deal in 2016, and if they obtain regulatory approval, Expedia will pay in cash and stock worth $38.31 per share. Source: Expedia , Bloomberg , The New York Times , HomeAway , Reuters , USA Today

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Expedia to pay $3.9 billion for Airbnb competitor HomeAway

Facebook reportedly launching a standalone news app next week

According to Financial Times , Facebook will be releasing yet another standalone app. The yet-to-be-released Notify app will feature news from media partners like The Washington Post, CBS and Vogue . Users will receive alerts when one of the outlets publishes an article and it becomes available within the app. Unlike Instant Articles — which embed articles within the main Facebook app — Notify will be a one-trick pony. Both the app and in-app features are meant to reduce the load time of stories and give the social network the opportunity to become the go-to destination for news from multiple sources. If the app does emerge from the company next week, it’ll join a growing number of single-use apps the company has released over the years including, Messenger , Poke, Camera , Rooms , Slingshot , Groups and Pages . [Image credit: Shutterstock] Source: Financial Times

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Facebook reportedly launching a standalone news app next week

Facebook averaged over 1 billion daily users in September

Facebook’s growth shows no sign of stopping. Today is announced that it has over one billion users on average using it everyday . In August it announced it had passed a milestone of having one billion users on the site in a single day. By the next month that was the average. That’s a year-over-year increase of 17 percent. Monthly active users increased by 14 percent to 1.55 billion as of the end of September, an increase of 14-percent from the year before. Meanwhile the company continues to see a majority (78-percent) of its ad revenue come from mobile. In the earnings statement CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated, “we’re focused on innovating and investing for the long term to serve our community and connect the entire world.” Source: Facebook

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Facebook averaged over 1 billion daily users in September

Bill Gates Says Our Energy System Is Broken And He’s Giving $2 Billion To Fix It

Infectious diseases like polio and malaria might be gone in 15 years because the founder of Microsoft devoted a foundation to eradicating them. Now Bill Gates has turned his attention towards our global energy crisis, which he thinks can also be fixed with better R&D. And, yes, he’s going to fund it. Read more…

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Bill Gates Says Our Energy System Is Broken And He’s Giving $2 Billion To Fix It

Saying "Wasted" On Facebook Can Affect Your Credit Score

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: According to a recent report by the Financial Times (paywalled), some of the top credit rating companies are now using people’s social media accounts to assess their ability to repay debt. “If you look at how many times a person says ‘wasted’ in their profile, it has some value in predicting whether they’re going to repay their debt, ” Will Lansing, chief executive at credit rating company FICO, told the Financial Times. “It’s not much, but it’s more than zero.” According to the Financial Times, both FICO and TransUnion have had to find “alternative ways” to assess people who don’t have a traditional credit profile — including people who haven’t borrowed enough to give creditors an idea of what kind of risk they pose. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Saying "Wasted" On Facebook Can Affect Your Credit Score

MPAA shuts down major torrent sites, including Popcorn Time

The site that provides much of the content for illegal movies shown on the “Popcorn Time” app,  PopcornTime.io, has been shut down after the Motion Picture Association of America won court orders in Canada and New Zealand. “Popcorn Time and YTS are illegal platforms that exist for one clear reason: to distribute stolen copies of the latest motion pictures and television shows without compensating the people who worked so hard to make them,” said MPAA Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd in a statement (PDF) . According to the piracy news site TorrentFreak, YTS stopped functioning  in mid-October. Now the MPAA has taken credit for that and the PopcornTime.io shutdown. MPAA sued three “key Canadian operators” of PopcornTime.io on October 9 in Federal Court in Canada. PopcornTime.io was said by its operators to be the “official” PopcornTime fork. On October 16, the MPAA’s member studios obtained an injunction ordering the site to shut down. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MPAA shuts down major torrent sites, including Popcorn Time

Sprint faces ‘thousands’ of job cuts and price hikes

SoftBank , Sprint’s Japanese parent company, made a ton of profit over the last three months, but not as much profit as people were expecting. That’s largely due to it having to carry Sprint on its back, since the network has gone from plucky bronze medalist to sitting in the doldrums of fourth place in America’s hotly-contested carrier wars. In order to try and reduce the amount of red printer ink that Marcelo Claure (pictured, right) has to buy, SoftBank has ordered a “sustainable run rate reduction” of more than $2 billion. In order words, the company is about to have to learn how to do a lot more with a heck of a lot less cash. Via: WSJ Source: SoftBank (.PDF)

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Sprint faces ‘thousands’ of job cuts and price hikes

YIFY: The rise and fall of the world’s most prolific movie pirate

It’s never been hard to pirate movies, but for a long time, one collective has made it easier to watch the latest blockbusters than any other: YIFY. By focusing on speed, better quality rips and small file sizes, the group quickly grew to become the number one source for illegal movies, catering for the needs of millions of content pirates around the world. However, the YIFY name may soon fade into obscurity after it was revealed that its leader had been traced and named in a New Zealand lawsuit following a joint operation between the MPAA and its “international affiliates.” While many believe that its releases won’t be missed, YIFY’s shutdown will leave a big hole in the piracy market and have a knock-on effect on streaming services like Popcorn Time — at least until another group steps up.

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YIFY: The rise and fall of the world’s most prolific movie pirate

Magic cards generated by neural networks

@RoboRosewater is a twitter account that posts, once a day, a Magic: The Gathering card generated by a recurrent neural network. [via Ditto ] This is an implementation of the science described by Vice’s Brian Merchant in this article . Reed Morgan Milewicz, a programmer and computer science researcher, may be the first person to teach an AI to do Magic, literally. Milewicz wowed a popular online MTG forum—as well as hacker forums like Y Combinator’s Hacker News and Reddit—when he posted the results of an experiment to “teach” a weak AI to auto-generate Magic cards. He shared a number of the bizarre “cards” his program had come up with, replete with their properly fantastical names (“Shring the Artist,” “Mided Hied Parira’s Scepter”) and freshly invented abilities (“fuseback”). Players devoured the results. Here’s the code , and here’s a simple text-only generator . Magic: The Gathering is Turing-complete .

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Magic cards generated by neural networks