kenmay

Tool personalizes automated outreach emails

Add / Remove Cold emails — outreach messages sent by companies to prospective clients — inevitably end up reading like they were composed by a machine rather than a person, which makes them much more alienating to the reader. Now, Woodpecker is a tool designed to help companies streamline their cold emailing, while also retaining a personal touch. To begin, users import their contact list and provide an initial opening messaging. The tool then adapts the message for each email, personalizing it to the recipient. Users can monitor their email campaign, seeing how many messages have been delivered, opened and replied to. They can also line up different follow-up emails for those who reply and those who don’t, automating that process too. Woodpecker is one of a number of marketing tools that enable automation to be more personalized. What other time-consuming tasks could be managed in such a way? Website: www.woodpecker.co Contact: hello@woodpecker.co The post Tool personalizes automated outreach emails appeared first on Springwise .

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Tool personalizes automated outreach emails

Sennheiser’s Built Probably the World’s Best Headphones—But They Cost $55,000

In the ‘90s, Sennheiser asked it engineers to make the best headphones ever and the result was 300 sets of the legendary Orpheus , each pair of which sold for $16, 000. Now, Sennheiser has created an ever better-sounding successor to those luxurious cans—but they’ll set you back $55, 000. Read more…

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Sennheiser’s Built Probably the World’s Best Headphones—But They Cost $55,000

Vast, uncharted viral world discovered on human skin

A transmission electron microscopy image of a bunch of bacteriophages. (credit: ZEISS Microscopy/Flickr ) In the microbial metropolises that thrive in and on the human body, underground networks of viruses loom large. A closer look at human skin has found that it’s teeming with viruses, most of which don’t target us but infect the microbes that live there. Almost 95 percent of those skin-dwelling virus communities are unclassified, researchers report in mBio . Those unknown viruses may prune, manipulate, and hide out in the skin’s bacterial communities, which in turn can make the difference between human health and disease. The finding highlights how much scientists still have to learn about the microscopic affairs that steer human welfare. Past attempts to unmask the viruses on the human body have been hindered by technical difficulties. Viral genomes are much smaller than those of bacteria, making them hard to identify and sift from contamination. In the new study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used an advanced method to specifically isolate the DNA of virus-like particles from skin swabs. The researchers also screened viral DNA found on swabs that never touched human skin, allowing them to quickly identify and toss contaminating viruses from their analysis. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

EPA finds more toxic VW emissions fraud in Audis and Porsches

The EPA, the California Air Resources Board and Environment Canada have detected more fraudulent firmware in VW products; this time in 2014-2016 cars from the super-profitable Audii and Porsche lines. (more…)

Activision bought the ‘Candy Crush’ developer for $5.9 billion

Say what you will about the quality of Activision’s output, but the company makes incredibly smart business moves. Like the announcement that it purchased Candy Crush studio King Digital Entertainment for a cool $5.9 billion. For comparison’s sake, Amazon paid a paltry $970 million for Twitch while Facebook spent $2 billion on Oculus VR and $19 billion on messaging platform Whatsapp. Oh, and Minecraft only set Microsoft back $2.5 billion . Bobby Kotick and Co. definitely think this is a big deal, and considering just how many people play the mindless puzzler this is likely a smart investment. Source: Activision Blizzrd

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Activision bought the ‘Candy Crush’ developer for $5.9 billion

FCC Fines Hilton and MC Dean $750,000 Over Blocking Guests’ Wi-Fi

The FCC has been taking a much-needed stand against companies that block personal Wi-Fi hotspots in an effort to get people to buy overpriced access to (normally crap) Wi-Fi networks. The latest pair of cartoon corporate villains: Hilton Hotels, and M.C. Dean, provider to Wi-Fi to the Baltimore Convention Center. Read more…

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FCC Fines Hilton and MC Dean $750,000 Over Blocking Guests’ Wi-Fi

Somebody Just Claimed a $1 Million Bounty For Hacking the iPhone

citadrianne writes with news that security startup Zerodium has just paid a group of hackers $1 million for finding a remote jailbreak of an iPhone running iOS 9. Vice reports: “Over the weekend, somebody claimed the $1 million bounty set by the new startup Zerodium, according to its founder Chaouki Bekrar, a notorious merchant of unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities. The challenge consisted of finding a way to remotely jailbreak a new iPhone or iPad running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system iOS (in this case iOS 9.1 and 9.2b), allowing the attacker to install any app he or she wants app with full privileges. The initial exploit, according to the terms of the challenge, had to come through Safari, Chrome, or a text or multimedia message. This essentially meant that a participant needed to find a series, or a chain, of unknown zero-day bugs.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Somebody Just Claimed a $1 Million Bounty For Hacking the iPhone

OEMs to stop selling PCs with Windows 7 by October 31, 2016

In February last year , Microsoft said that it would give a one year warning of when systems with Windows 7 preinstalled would no longer be available from OEMs. That time has finally come to pass. As spotted by Ed Bott , there’s now a date after which Windows 7 OEM preinstalls will no longer be available: October 31, 2016. That same date will also apply to Windows 8.1. Windows 8 preinstalls will end a few months earlier than that, June 30, 2016. This means that after October 31 next year, the only version of Windows that will be available on a new system from a PC builder will be Windows 10. Right now, OEMs can still offer Windows 7 Professional (though not any of the other versions), Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10. Windows 7 will remain supported until January 10, 2020. It left mainstream support earlier this year, so it’s no longer eligible to receive non-security fixes or extra features but still has many years of security updates. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OEMs to stop selling PCs with Windows 7 by October 31, 2016

Linux 4.3 Released As Stable; Improves On Open-Source Graphics, SMP Performance

An anonymous reader writes: The Linux 4.3 kernel was released as stable today. The Linux 4.3 kernel brings Intel Skylake support, reworked NVIDIA open-source graphics support, and many other changes with the code count hitting 20.6 million lines of code. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux 4.3 Released As Stable; Improves On Open-Source Graphics, SMP Performance

AMD Radeon Software Crimson: A new name and a new look for Catalyst

AMD’s Radeon Software Crimson replaces Catalyst. 16 more images in gallery AMD is taking the fight directly to Nvidia with the long-overdue launch of a new driver software package and UI. Called Radeon Software Crimson, the new software replaces the old AMD Catalyst Control Center (CCC) with a flat modern UI, and simplified menus. Most importantly, AMD is promising that a new major version of the software will be released every year, with minor versions arriving every month. Each new major version will have a different, colour-themed name. The software is due to roll out later this year. Crimson has been developed in QT, a cross-platform application framework that AMD says is much quicker than the old .NET framework CCC used to use. It claims that start-up time has been reduced from eight seconds to 0.6 seconds on a mid-performance AMD E-350-based laptop; high-end desktops will be even faster. Crimson is the first in a number of software changes that AMD is implementing following the restructuring of its graphics group into the Radeon Technologies Group under the leadership of Raja Koduri. For now, AMD is only talking about the UI changes in Crimson, which is dramatically different from the old CCC. (More will be revealed about underlying driver changes at a later date, but AMD was vague about when that might be.) The new flat design features five tabs at the top for Gaming, Video, Display, Eyefinity, and System, while then buttons at the bottom for Updates, Preferences, and Notifications. In the middle, taking up the lion’s share of the window, there’s a carousel that displays announcements and promotions about games when not being used to display settings. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD Radeon Software Crimson: A new name and a new look for Catalyst

Ken May

Author: kenmay