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Showing posts from October, 2015

Man's $600,000 Facebook Ad Disaster - Business Insider

Man's $600,000 Facebook Ad Disaster - Business Insider : A review of emails from Facebook, ad campaign dashboard screengrabs, and billing records show a confusing, acrimonious dispute in which both sides believe the other acted badly. It's not even entirely clear what Brar's total spending was: Campaign budget data seen by Business Insider appear to show that Brar ran at least $489,000 in ads on Facebook. One email from Facebook demands payment of an unpaid bill for $370,000. Brar himself believes he ran up to $640,000 in ads.
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Sepp Blatter Deal Revealed - The New York Times

Sepp Blatter Deal Revealed - The New York Times : The German soccer federation on Thursday revealed a deal worth 6.7 million euros, about $7.4 million, between Sepp Blatter, the suspended FIFA president, and Franz Beckenbauer, one of the 2006 World Cup organizers. FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, said the payment “in no way corresponds to FIFA’s standard processes and regulations.” The German publication Der Spiegel reported that Germany
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The New York Times strategy memo - Oct. 7, 2015

The New York Times strategy memo - Oct. 7, 2015 We will continue to lead the industry in creating the best original journalism and storytelling. We will transform the product experience to make The Times an even more essential part of our readers' daily lives. We will continue to develop new audiences and grow The Times as an international institution, just as we once successfully turned a metro paper into a national one. We will improve the customer experience for our readers, making it easier to form and deepen a relationship with The Times. We will continue to grow digital advertising by creating compelling, integrated ad experiences that match the quality and innovation of The Times. We will continue providing the best newspaper experience for our print readers and advertisers, while carefully shifting time and energy to our digital platforms. We will organize the way we work around our readers, not legacy processes and structures.
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Apple confirms it is disabling its News App in China | 9to5Mac

Apple confirms it is disabling its News App in China | 9to5Mac : It was discovered by�Larry Salibra�and others that Apple has been disabling its Apple News Service in China. Perhaps most troubling is how Apple is doing this: They’re censoring news content that I downloaded and stored on my device purchased in the USA, before I even enter China just because my phone happens to connect to a Chinese signal floating over the border. On device censorship is much different than having your server blocked by the Great Firewall or not enabling a feature for customers with certain country iTunes account. That Apple has little choice doesn’t make it any less creepy or outrageous. The New York Times reports�that Apple confirmed, off the record, that it is�indeed turning off Apple News in Mainland China. Apple has disabled its news app in China, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, the most recent sign of how difficult it can be for foreign companies to manage the st
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9to5Mac: Apple iPhone, Mac and iPad News Breaking All Day

9to5Mac: Apple iPhone, Mac and iPad News Breaking All Day : In an interview with London’s�Evening Standard, Apple SVP Eddy Cue said that Apple is relaxed about how many Apple Music subscribers are immediately willing to pay for the service once their free trial ends. Ultimately, you never know until it happens.�But we’re pleased with the number of people who have tried. Everybody gets fixated on the short term but we’re in this for the long haul.
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9to5Mac: Apple iPhone, Mac and iPad News Breaking All Day

9to5Mac: Apple iPhone, Mac and iPad News Breaking All Day : Aaron Sorkin, screenwriter of Steve Jobs, told�Wired that he had no idea how he was going to turn the huge biography into a movie, and when he finally did come up with an idea for it, he didn’t think the studio would agree. I didn’t know that much about Steve Jobs, and the idea of doing a biopic was daunting.�I work very slowly, and the first couple of months are spent just pacing around, climbing the walls […] [Finally,] I got this idea, and I wrote an email to Scott saying, “If I had no one to answer to, I would write this entire movie in three real-time scenes, and each one would take place backstage before a particular product launch” […] Really, I was emailing Scott to get help: Take this thing that I really want to do and tell me what I’m allowed to do, because no studio is going to let me do this. Two or three minutes later, I got an email from Amy Pascal—Scott had forwarded my email to her—and she said, “I think
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9to5Mac: Apple iPhone, Mac and iPad News Breaking All Day

9to5Mac: Apple iPhone, Mac and iPad News Breaking All Day : Andy Hertzfeld, one of the key designers�of the original Macintosh system software, has told�Re/code that the Sorkins/Boyle movie�Steve Jobs “deviates from reality everywhere” but “exposes deeper�truths” about the man. It deviates from reality everywhere — almost nothing in it is like it really happened — but ultimately that doesn’t matter that much. The purpose of the film is to entertain, inspire and move the audience, not to portray reality. It is cavalier about the facts but aspires to explore and expose the deeper truths behind Steve’s unusual personality and behavior, and it often but not always succeeds at that. Hertzfeld said that Sorkin had�convinced him that an impressionistic approach was valid
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Emails, Not Emojis, Reveal Clinton's Real Personality | WIRED

Emails, Not Emojis, Reveal Clinton's Real Personality | WIRED : This is the Hillary Clinton that her private emails reveal—a woman of a certain age who actually acts her age, who sometimes struggles with technology and who cracks corny jokes. But she is all the more relatable for it, because what millennial�hasn’t taught her�parents how to use a smartphone or hummed along while they played Sweet Baby James in the car? (Hey, mom and dad!)
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NEWS FLASH: AI Startups Are Reinventing Media | WIRED

NEWS FLASH: AI Startups Are Reinventing Media | WIRED : Over the last five years, processing power and huge corpuses of teaching data have given computers the ability to detect emotions and moods. Soon, perhaps, they will be able to recognize a sideline scuffle or a player’s shift in attitude. Combine that with sensors gathering crowd reactions, the movement and changes in velocity for players and passes, historical statistics that provide context for the game and a player’s performance—and now AI is starting to encroach on analysis as well. As that definition of “reliable data” continues to expand, so too will AI applications. Here are a few AI-oriented ventures making inroads with content and media: � Arria — Natural language generation platform that parses complex data sets, in any vertical, from finance to meteorology and writes expert-level reports formerly assigned to human analysts. � Banjo — Ingests all types of digital signals from Twitter, Facebook and around the Web, t
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Facebook Doesn't Make as Much Money as It Could—On Purpose | WIRED

Facebook Doesn't Make as Much Money as It Could—On Purpose | WIRED : When he joined Facebook in 2007, after getting a master’s in economics at Stanford University, Hegeman helped build the online auction that drives the company’s advertising system. Auctions are the standard way that online services accept ads from advertisers and place them on web pages and inside smartphone apps. That’s what Google uses with AdWords, the system that serves up all those ads when you look for stuff on the company’s Internet search engine. Advertisers bid (in dollars) for placement on the results page when you key in a particular word or group of words. But in building Facebook’s advertising system, Hegeman and team took online auctions in a new direction. The VCG auction spent decades as little more than an academic exercise. But then Hegeman and Facebook came along and applied it to online ads. They built a system based on what’s called the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction, or VCG, an auction mech
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