What began as a simple ode to the old-world leisurely lifestyle that India once boasted, two female entrepreneurs have turned into an enterprise that is testament to the power of the country’s e-commerce market, when they decided to dip their toes into the business of selling sustainable luxury.
In the Spring of 2008, I sat down for lunch with Charlene Li — an industry analyst who had made a name for herself covering digital innovation for Forrester — at a place that would later seem prophetic. It was the Sky Kitchen, a small diner that serves the pilots at the San Carlos airport in Silicon Valley.
With the wealth of video content online these days, it has become increasingly difficult to find the time to consume it all. You could spend hours watching videos across social media sites and in mobile apps and still only scratch the surface of the day’s popular video offerings before tomorrow rolls around and brings with it a fresh wave of interesting clips.
Minute is a video discovery app that wants to make this video viewing experience simpler and more efficient. And it aims to do so by synthesizing the best of viral video and by bringing you a personalized daily digest of the web’s video content based on your likes and dislikes.
When you first open the free Minute app, you’ll be greeted with a couple of splash screens explaining the purpose of the app — “All the best videos, just shorter” — before jumping straight into the content. There’s no need to create an account, you can simply begin watching videos straight away.
Using crowd-sourced data and some algorithmic smarts, Minute presents users with sections of 6-10 videos to peruse. At the top page, you’ll see a section labeled ‘Your Daily News’ containing a collection of the day’s important, interesting, popular and noteworthy videos from a variety of publishers and on a broad spectrum of topics. Below it, lie curated sections dubbed ‘Entertain Me!’, ‘World of Sport’, ‘Geeks Only’, and ‘Funny as Hell’ to name a few. These can feature anything from movie trailers to wildlife to extreme sports and more.
Minute isn’t simply curating video playlists, though. When you enter into one of the sections, the videos within are presented in a card-like interface and are shortened to just the 15-25 seconds determined to be the most relevant and interesting part. Using various metrics, Minute’s data analysis algorithm is capable of identifying the best snippet of a video to present to you allowing you to breeze through a selection of videos in a fraction of the time it would take you in order to watch them all fully or skipping around to find that important moment. If a video strikes you as particularly interesting, you have the option to watch it in full at the tap of a button or bookmark it for viewing later.
The algorithm is excellent for shortening the viewing experience, allowing you to get a gist of more content in less time, and quickly decide if a clip is for you or not. Generally, it did find the best part of a video, cutting out a lot of the filler, but a couple of times I found the provided snippet to be just slightly off the mark. When watching highlights from this month’s CONCACAF Gold Cup, for example, the clips occasionally cut off footage of goals awkwardly. While I understand 25 seconds is restrictive, and the option to watch the full video is there, the experience was jarring when it happened (however infrequently it was).
Minute also learns from the videos you like (and dislike). That card-like interface, akin to Tinder in many ways, also operates a bit like the dating app in terms of its functionality — swipe right to like and left to register your dislike. Future video recommendations are tailored to your tastes and over time I found that my feed began to reflect my interests more and more.
As well as being great for some light entertainment, I actually found Minute to be a really useful way to quickly catch up on the day’s news. The ‘Your Daily News’ section was always up to date and most days has brought me a good cross-section of news I am interested in. The same can’t always be said for the other curated sections which sometimes managed to surface videos that were over a year old.
The overall user experience of Minute is superb. The app is fluid, easy to pick up and very polished. Being video-heavy by nature, the video loading speed can determine how great your experience feels but on a fast Wi-Fi or LTE connection you shouldn’t run into any problems. One small qualm I had with the app was when sharing a link to a video or playlist which requires the recipient to then open the video in Minute’s web view (from which it is difficult to open the video at its original source). Not a deal breaker by any means, but worth noting.
Minute is a unique, fun and easy to use way to consume video. While there are some areas for improvement, for the most part Minute achieves its aim of streamlining the video watching experience and allows you to indulge in multiple video highlights from different topics without spending hours trawling the web and social media. The app is well put together and the experience is of a high quality.
Just a few hours ago we showed you a couple of live images portraying the Samsung Galaxy Note 5. These were then followed by a few details about the handset's specs, and now we're back with some more pictures.
Again, they're of the live, hands-on variety, clearly being provided by someone with access to a Note 5 prototype. Since we're quite late in its development, the final version of the phone will probably look exactly like this.
Just take into account that the Note 5 is inside a transparent case, because these images are from Chinese case maker Nillkin. Even so, it's pretty obvious that Samsung is going with the glass-metal design that it made famous with the S6 and S6 edge earlier this year.
Both the front and the back of the Galaxy Note 5 are made out of glass, whereas the frame is all metal. Once again we see the S Pen stylus locked into its special slot.
The camera and the LED flash are arranged in a similar fashion to what we've seen in the S6 siblings too. So it looks like the Note 5 will basically just be a bigger Galaxy S6 (though with an S Pen and all the added functionality and software for that), while the much-rumored and leaked Galaxy S6 edge+ will be a blown up version of the S6 edge (sans S Pen, which is probably why it lacks Note branding).
Both the Note 5 and the S6 edge+ should become official on August 12 or August 13. They might even share most, if not all of their hardware specs, according to the latest rumors on the matter.
Businesses and exec leaders strive to seek out their internal subject matter experts for advice but are they the ones you need to talk to when it’s time to change ?
Dentro de unas cuantas horas tenemos un evento importante que atender. Se trata de la presentación oficial del esperadísimo OnePlus 2, un terminal que muchos esperan que de un nuevo revolcón a la industria, ofreciendo grandes prestaciones a precio de…
It looks like Google and all Android manufacturers have a very serious issue on their hands. A new security flaw was discovered in Stagefright, the media playback tool that Android uses, that allows an MMS message to seriously compromise your device. And worst of all, it affects almost all Android devices since Android 2.2.
The way it works is an attacker only needs to know your phone number. They send you an infected MMS message, which often doesn’t need to be opened to be activated. Many SMS apps auto-retrieve MMS messages for quick viewing, meaning you’ll be infected in the background. This allows access to photos stored on SD cards, Bluetooth, and even activating recording of audio and video.
Google is aware of the bugs and the guys who found the exploits have submitted patches that Google will be pushing out. Nexus devices will likely be getting the fixes first, though it’s known that the Nexus 6 isn’t even safe at the moment. When it comes to other devices… good luck. An update might not be available for a while.
I don’t know if it’ll help, but set auto-retrieve MMS to off in your messaging app of choice, and don’t open MMS messages from strange numbers. Stay safe and hope the next update fixes what may be the worst Android security flaw ever found.
El experto en seguridad Joshua Drake, de Zimperium, ha sido el encargado de encontrar la vulnerabilidad y aportar más información al respecto, una información que desde luego, no es nada alentadora. Desde la versión Android 2.2 Froyo hasta la más reciente, Android 5.1.1, es susceptible a sucumbir al ataque del hacker, o lo que es lo mismo, el 95% de los terminales Android actualmente activos.
Hangouts es la puerta de entrada del malware
Al parecer, el fallo de seguridad se encuentra en la librería Stagefright, que puede dar vía libre a un tercero para controlar al 100% el terminal después de que este haya sido infectado con software malintencionado a través de un vídeo. Es decir, cualquier aplicación de comunicación que permita el envío de archivos multimedia, como las de mensajería, sería una vía de entrada para el hacker.
Sin embargo, el mayor problema se encuentra en Google Hangouts, de la que ya hemos oído hace no mucho otro problema importante de seguridad reconocido por la propia Google. Si la tenemos seleccionada como aplicación de SMS por defecto, basta solamente con recibir el vídeo para infectarnos. Ni es necesario abrir el mensaje, ni reproducir el vídeo, ni hacer nada. Nuestro dispositivo puede estar en manos de otro sin que tengamos la menor idea, y puede ocurrir incluso antes de que escuchemos el sonido de la llegada del mensaje.
¿Podemos estar tranquilos?
La respuesta corta es no. Al menos yo no lo estaría, y cuanto más antigua sea nuestra versión del sistema, aún menos. Google ya ha admitido el problema, que curiosamente existe desde el pasado mes de abril, aunque ha sido ahora cuando ha salido a la luz. La solución pasaría por actualizar con un parche de seguridad todos esos terminales en peligro –recordemos, el 95%–, cosa en la que los de Mountain View ya han empezado a trabajar, y de hecho ya ha contactado con las empresas fabricantes para que se pongan manos a la obra para combatir este problema.
Pero dese luego, sería muy inocente creer que todos estos terminales podrían recibir algún tipo de actualización, sobre todo los más antiguos. El propio Drake ha asegurado que solamente el 20% de los actuales smartphones en activo podrán recibir la “cura”, una cifra que con suerte podría aumentar, como mucho hasta el 50%. Esto depende ni más ni menos que de los fabricantes, y de las ganas que tengan estos de proteger a los usuarios.
Aunque claro está, la primera que debería aplicarse el cuento en esto de la seguridad es Google, al menos esforzarse más de lo que ya lo hace. De momento, lo más sensato es quitar a Hangouts como aplicación de SMS, y por supuesto, alejarse como podamos de cualquier vídeo que nos llegue y del que desconozcamos su origen o dudemos de su intención.