Mailbox – Put Email In Its Place

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We redesigned the inbox to make email light, fast, and mobile-friendly. Quickly swipe messages to your archive or trash. Scan an entire conversation at once with chat-like organization. Snooze emails until later with the tap of a button.

It’s a whole new inbox.

via Mailbox – Put Email In Its Place.

Who would have thought a company could arise out of good old email?  According to this article this mailbox app has added 1.25 million people while processing 50M messages per day (i.e. ~40 emails per user).  I wonder what percentage of that are old fashioned spammers and name squatters?

Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory

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Cross-document coreference resolution is the task of grouping the entity mentions in a collection of documents into sets that each represent a distinct entity. It is central to knowledge base construction and also useful for joint inference with other NLP components. Obtaining large, organic labeled datasets for training and testing cross-document coreference has previously been difficult. We use a method for automatically gathering massive amounts of naturally-occurring cross-document reference data to create the Wikilinks dataset comprising of 40 million mentions over 3 million entities. Our method is based on finding hyperlinks to Wikipedia from a web crawl and using anchor text as mentions. In addition to providing large-scale labeled data without human effort, we are able to include many styles of text beyond newswire and many entity types beyond people.

via Wikilinks – Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory.

First Bitcoin Hedge Fund Launches From Malta

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The private key itself is AES-256 encrypted. After exporting Bitcoin private keys from wallet.dat file, data is stored in a TrueCrypt container on three separate flash drives. Using Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm, the container password is then split into three parts utilizing a 2-of-3 secret sharing model. Incorporating physical security with electronic security, each flash drive from various manufacturers is duplicated several times and, together with a CD-ROM, those items are vaulted in a bank safety deposit box in three different legal jurisdictions. To leverage geographic distribution as well, each bank stores only part of a key, so if a single deposit box is compromised, no funds are lost.

via First Bitcoin Hedge Fund Launches From Malta – Forbes.

Gone house hunting online? Revived patent lawsuit says you’re a “joint infringer”

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Few, if any, of the defendants make their own mapping software. Move.com, for instance, uses maps provided by Microsoft’s Bing. But patent laws allow a patent-holder to sue anyone who makes, sells, or uses a patented item. In this case, it’s the real estate companies, together with their users, who are alleged to be “jointly infringing” the patent.

via Gone house hunting online? Revived patent lawsuit says you’re a “joint infringer” | Ars Technica.

Coming and Going on Facebook

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Two-thirds of online American adults 67% are Facebook users, making Facebook the dominant social networking site in this country.   And new findings from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project indicate there is considerable fluidity in the Facebook user population:

via Coming and Going on Facebook | Pew Internet & American Life Project.

  • 3% of Facebook users say they plan to spend more time on the site in the coming year.
  • 27% of Facebook users say they plan to spend less time on the site in the coming year.
  • 69% of Facebook users say they plan to spend the same amount of time on the site this coming year.

Customer Reviews: SimCity – Standard Edition

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The hours upon hours since launch that I haven’t been able to log in, whether it be sitting in queues, or server busy messages, or just plain old not working screens, I’ve managed to do a heap of things that I never do when I’m locked in my man cave playing video games.

I’ve washed the dishes, the laundry, changed the oil in the car, mopped the floors, dusted, did a spot of gardening, greeted my children who I hadn’t really seen since Christmas, walked the dog, asked how my wife’s day has been and listened to the entire response, restocked the groceries and many more things! My family has never been happier that they’ve got a father and husband again.

In fact, I feel like Simcity has given me a new lease on life. This wouldn’t have been possible without the seemingly crazy decision to have constant online connections and server side save points even for single player.

So I can only thank EA and Maxis. Your failures have been my rewards. 5 stars!

via Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: SimCity – Standard Edition [Download].

I don’t ever recall a product launch that went this badly.  I’ve been playing Sim City since version 2 and was looking forward to this.  This needs to be filed under what were they thinking?!

Startup Creates Software to Give Companies an Edge Recruiting Tech Talent

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Since launching in beta last March, Gild has profiled four million software developers and has 70 customers, from high-profile Silicon Valley startups such as Palantir Technologies and Box to large IT providers such as Salesforce and EMC.

via Startup Creates Software to Give Companies an Edge Recruiting Tech Talent | MIT Technology Review.

One of Gild’s biggest data sources is Github, a software developer collaboration site that hosts the most open-source code in the world. Github profiles are already replacing programmers’ résumés in many cases.

Mobile Grabs $813.6M in February Funding

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TruPhone: This London-based company develops low cost voice-over-IP software. The company got $118 million in February from the Russian business tycoon Roman Abramovich, who is currently worth over $10 billion, according to Forbes.

via Light Reading – Mobile Grabs $813.6M in February Funding.

From: http://www.truphone.com/en-GB/Business/

Truphone is the mobile phone network specially designed for international businesses.

  •  Save between 30-90% on voice, text and data compared with major UK operators
  •  Enjoy price plans that cover usage in the UK, plus Europe, the US and Australia
  •  Experience business-class coverage in 220 countries
  • Multiple international numbers on a single handset