Google’s new Who’s Down app is aimed at teens

After a not-so-successful stint with Google+, search giant Google is apparently dipping its toes into the social media waters again – the company has just launched a new app, dubbed Who’s Down, that’s specifically aimed at teenagers.

As you can see in the image above, the app lets you broadcast your availability for whatever you’re interested in (for example, lunch, movie, and workout), effectively helping you connect with similarly inclined people.

The app, which is available for both iOS and Android, is currently invite-only, and the reason we say it’s aimed at teenagers is when you try to sign up for it, you are asked to provide the name of your school alongside your email address.

“We’re not down to share more details just yet, but check out this page for more info in the meantime,” a Google spokesperson said when asked about the app.

Google Play link | App Store link |…

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Facebook Testing Craigslist-Threatening Marketplace For Selling To Online Friends

I’m cheap. Like, really cheap. I’m a journalist, we’re supposed to be like that. Thus I do a lot of my shopping online, but Amazon doesn’t get all of my money. No, sometimes I like to keep it local, and I’ve had some great success finding things I want-and-or-need on Craigslist. But Craigslist has its problems – you don’t know your buyer or seller, it can be hard to organize a sale or pick-up, and, well, it can be downright sketchy. One thing that would help would be a referral or ranking system, yet Craigslist has nothing of the type – once a deal is done then it’s done, no ratings or feedback involved.

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Specs of alleged Galaxy A5 successor show up in a GFXBench listing

Just days after it received Bluetooth certification from the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the Samsung smartphone carrying model number SM-510F – alleged to be the successor to last year’s Galaxy A5 smartphone – has now shown up on GFXBench.

The GFXBench listing of the handset reveals that it is powered by Samsung’s Exynos 7 Octa SoC with four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores that are clocked at 1.6 GHz, and sports a 5.2-inch screen with 1080 x 1920 pixels resolution.

It has 2GB RAM, and internal memory should be 16GB. In terms of camera, the SM-510F features a 13MP rear unit and a 5MP front shooter. It runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, while connectivity options include Bluetooth, GPS, WiFi, and NFC.

Via…

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Are Share Buybacks Bad For Energy Innovation?

The most recent issue of the McKinsey Quarterly includes an interesting analysis of the impact of share buybacks and dividends on long-term economic growth.

Returning cash to shareholders is on the rise for large US-based companies. By McKinsey’s calculations, share buybacks alone have increased to about 47 percent of the market’s income since 2011, from about 23 percent in the early 1990s and less than 10 percent in the early 1980s. Some investors and legislators have wondered whether that increase is tantamount to underinvestment in assets and projects that represent future growth.

McKinsey’s answer: “It isn’t.”

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New Diabetes Study Shows How Big Data Might Drive Precision Medicine

To this point, it’s largely been an article of faith that such rich integrated datasets would be useful and clinically important. The hope this paper represents is that perhaps we’re finally closing in on a tipping point, or a coalescence point, when we’ll at last see a compelling return on all the upfront effort involved in creating such a rich datasets, and also start to see which sorts of data collisions generate the most impactful results.

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