Secret is coming back

David Byttow, chief executive officer and co-founder of Secret, stands for a photograph after a Bloomberg West Television interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, May 22, 2014. Secret offers an online platform that enables users to share their personal secrets with other users anonymously. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images Secret, the anonymous sharing app developed by David Byttow and Chrys Bader-Wechseler, looks to be on its way to resurrection. The app was part of a wave of anonymous apps like Whisper and YikYak but shut down April 2015 after facing a lot of criticism over privacy and cyberbullying. Secret allowed anyone to post snippets of text like a rumor or piece of gossip on an anonymous basis. Many… Read More

Facebook needs accountability to win back advertisers’ trust

Man standing with fingers crossed behind back The advertising industry let out a collective groan in September when Facebook admitted a “discrepancy” in its reporting that led it to overstate how much time, on average, viewers were watching video. Because the error was huge — numbers were inflated as much as 60-80 percent for two years — and in Facebook’s favor, some were quick to ascribe sinister motives. Read More

Data Ethics — The New Competitive Advantage

digitalocean We are living in an era defined and shaped by data. Data makes the world go round. It is politics, it is culture, it is everyday life and it is business. Our data-flooded era is one of technological progress, with tides rising at a never seen before pace. Roles, rights and responsibilities are reorganized and new ethical questions posed. Data ethics must and will be a new compass to guide us. Read More

Gillmor Gang: Optimizzle

Gillmor Gang Artcard The Gillmor Gang — Keith Teare, Frank Radice, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, November 11, 2016. McLuhan said the medium is the message. Our next President agreed, and decided Twitter is the medium. Plus the new G3 with Halley Suitt Tucker, Mary Hodder, Elisa Camahort Page, and Tina Chase Gillmor.
@stevegillmor, @kteare, @fradice
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor… Read More

Here’s where seed investors are scaling up

seedplus Seed investors are, by definition, the first ones to back startups and technologies that go on to become world-changing forces. So when they collectively raise their bets about something — whether it’s social media in the early 2000s or autonomous vehicles in the last few years — it’s a reasonable indication that thing is poised for explosive growth. With that in mind,… Read More

I refuse to review Snapchat Spectacles — but I’m glad to have my hands back

img_9076-e3 And I honestly don’t think these things should be reviewed at all — especially as a gadget. More of a hybrid marketing/consumer research experiment than an actual product launch, Snap, nee Snapchat, Spectacles are one of the coolest, most fun bits of hardware I’ve used lately and I just scored an NES Classic. Read More

Trump surveillance fears could lift privacy tech in Europe

STERLING HEIGHTS, MI - NOVEMBER 06: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump holds a campaign rally at the Freedom Hill Amphitheater November 6, 2016 in Sterling Heights, Michigan. With less than 48 hours until Election Day in the United States, Trump and his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, are campaigning in key battleground states that each must win to take the White House. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) The full ramifications of Donald Trump being the next president of the United States of America will not be known for months — perhaps years. Given he’s a man of many conflicting words it’s near impossible to know which of his pledges and pronouncements he will keep or act upon, likely until his administration is up and running and showing its true colors. Read More

Facebook wants to make you secure no matter how hard you make it

lex Stamos, CSO, Facebook at Web Summit in 2015. When you have a billion people using your service, you have an obligation to keep your users secure, even when they behave in unsafe ways. Alex Stamos, Chief Security Officer (CSO) at Facebook, speaking at Web Summit last week, told a quick story to show what his company was up against when it came to security. “The family car was not designed to be driven into a wall at 100 kilometers… Read More

Driving the Midwest

field Last September, in the depths of high summer, my wife and I wanted to see the Midwest again. We began in Brooklyn and drove across the Verrazano, a bridge so long and well-engineered that its makers took into consideration the curvature of the Earth when they designed it. This spit us out out onto Staten Island, once New York’s ash heap and now a bustling bedroom community surrounded on… Read More

Snapchat Spectacles vending machine page starts 24-hour countdown to next location

snapbot-sleeping Snapchat’s going to be selling Spectacles at another location in just under 24 hours as of Saturday morning, as the company’s Snapbot locator page started a 24 hour countdown timer as of 7 AM PT (10 AM ET). The sleeping bot on Snap’s Spectacles locator page will presumably be replaced by an updated map when the countdown runs out, showing you were the adorable vending… Read More

Trendspotting

trainsmain Brexit and Trump; applied CRISPR and the Gigafactory; the rise of self-driving vehicles, the fall of pollsters; the global saturation of smartphones, the first mass-market VR headsets; the first drone-delivered terror bomb, the first drone drug mule; Signal and the Secure Enclave; Ethereum and the DAO; AI and SpaceX — we can all agree, I hope, that this has been one hell of a year. Read More