Syrian refugee sues Facebook for ‘defamatory’ posts after selfie with Angela Merkel
(Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A Syrian refugee whose selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel went viral is suing Facebook for defamation, his lawyer said, after the social networking site failed to take down a series of posts accusing him of being a militant and criminal.
Anas Modamani, a 19-year-old refugee from Damascus, was pictured in September 2015 taking a selfie with Merkel during her visit to a refugee shelter in Berlin’s Spandau district.
But in the following months Modamani’s image was shared on Facebook on a series of anonymous accounts, alongside posts claiming he was responsible for militant attacks and murder, including the Brussels Airport bombing of March 2016.
“Whenever something happens in the news related to refugees, his picture reappears,” Modamani’s lawyer, Chan-jo Jun, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
A Facebook spokesperson told Britain’s Guardian newspaper they had received a takedown request from Jun “alleging that a specific item of content on our platform violates Mr Modamani’s right of personality”.
One post falsely linked Modamani to an incident in Berlin last month, when a group set fire to a sleeping homeless man on a train station platform, Jun said.
Jun filed a preliminary injunction against Facebook Europe in December, and a court hearing is scheduled for Feb. 6 in Wurzburg, southern Germany, he said.
The case comes as Germany’s justice ministry considers new policies to crack down on fake news by making Facebook and other social media companies criminally liable for failing to remove hate speech.
Modamani now works in a fast-food restaurant in Berlin, his lawyer said.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, announced a series of measures in November to stem a flood of “fake news” articles in the wake of the U.S. presidential election.
Hearthstone’s Hunter class was was once in a different Mean Streets gang
Hearthstone’s Hunter class was was once in a different Mean Streets gang.
The Hunters weren’t always Grimy Goons.
Three of the game’s nine classes belong in one of three gangs: the Kabal, the Grimy Goons, and the Jade Lotus.
Paladin and Warrior made sense in the Goons up front, but the Goons were more the city guys.
Then the more wild, natural, mystical classes – the Hunters, the Druids, the Shamans – were in the Jade Lotus.
But as the Jade Lotus and the Grimy Goons evolved, it made more sense to bring the stealthy, sneaky — get a more assassin vibe for the Jade Lotus.
It made sense to bring Rogues into that group.
Putting Hunters into the Goons, we made them more about smuggling and weapons and manipulating your hand-buff stuff.
Flavor-wise, that smuggling vibe made a lot of sense for hunters, so they moved into the Goons.
So, yes, at one point, there was a Jade Hunter deck.
Otoy’s adds lightfield baking and other tools to its Unity integration
Otoy’s adds lightfield baking and other tools to its Unity integration.
The road to photorealistic VR is long, but Otoy is helping to shorten it with the integration of its technology into the free version of Unity.
The company announced last month that its Octane Renderer would be coming to the world’s most popular game development engine, allowing users to import its ORBX file format to view them within the engine.
You could import a simple item from the Unity asset store, apply the renderer, and have it look strikingly realistic.
ORBX files are also optimized for streaming to take much of the processing load off of the machine running them.
What that means is we could soon start seeing photorealistic VR worlds on hardware that’s not even remotely powerful enough to support this sort of graphical fidelity on its own processors.
Today, we have an exclusive look at more features Otoy’s Unity integration will enable.
He talks about the importance of scene baking, including the advances they’ve made in using the process but still offering 6 degrees of freedom within a scene, as well as adding real-time dynamic elements.
This covers Octane scene-baking at the simplest level, to more advanced light field rendering and streaming powered by Octane integrated tools and streamed to a full 6DOF MR stack on ODG’s R8 and R9 glasses.
These can be published to public URLs and played back on the Gear VR through Oculus Social framework, as well as additional mobile HMDs devices through the Samsung Internet WebVR browser.” This story originally appeared on Uploadvr.com.
Why IoT needs AI
Why IoT needs AI.
At one of my recent talks in New York about AI in the supply chain, one of the key questions that came up was ‘are you talking about robots?’ You see, AI has been romanticized to this abstract term that conjures images of walking robots doing your house chores while you just sit and relax.
But what does it really means and where did the term come from?
To get to true AI, you need to train large amounts of data sets (both historical and real-time), achieve some baseline, enable deep learning with incremental information and begin to uncover predictive value.
Let’s make some examples from the insurance industry A couple of years ago, when I was at Humana around 2012, one of the projects we worked on was understanding seniors (65+) living in their homes to better reduce the incidence of falls and predict the likely use of emergency services in real-time so we can act beforehand, improve their health status and save costs.
Here is where IoT devices came to play with mobile sensors.
To facilitate deep learning (which is a form of AI), pre-existing data from previous insurance claims was analyzed along with the real time data.
Ultimately we needed to predict that a patient will seek to explore the procedure relative to alternative options, understand how effective such a procedure will be based on health status and know the provider pricing benchmarks for efficient contracting.
Armed with millions of claims data (historical) on such procedures, some of which included the data from wearables (pedometers, fitness trackers data), combined with real-time electronic adjudication (real time payments), and provider office visits observations we were able to begin to automate the recommendation process for alternatives to weight loss surgery Much of these advancements in AI comes from an Artificial Neural Network (or ANN).
There has to be an added intelligence, an AI, that seeks to solve problems and not just process data or provide a dashboard.
Enterprise IT trends for 2017: ‘Fog’ computing, Internet sensors, the second coming of silicon …
Enterprise IT trends for 2017: ‘Fog’ computing, Internet sensors, the second coming of silicon ….
But I think the coming year also will be marked by lesser-noticed tectonic shifts in enterprise-IT: Trends related to cloud computing, big data, and even basic computer chips, which are getting a makeover thanks to the new demands placed on them by the deluge of data and analytics now swamping many organizations.
But here are my predictions for seven B2B, enterprise-IT trends to watch in 2017 — trends that will drive billions in corporate IT spending and could eventually create billions in market value.
In 2017, however, I predict we’ll see the rise of “fog”, or “edge” computing, through which data thrown off by billions of smart, Web-enabled devices at the edge of computer networks (where they actually touch people) drives interesting applications.
The migration of $300 billion in datacenter spend to the core cloud is clearly a big deal, but the emergence of edge clouds driving new revenues in industries previously untouched by advanced cloud technologies may be a significantly larger opportunity, and I expect to see early signs of this in 2017.
(The deal will allow customers to use their existing VMware software to run some computing in Amazon’s cloud.)
This should help Microsoft Azure, another big cloud-computing player, since the company already has a big enterprise presence and a cloud program that CIOs can tap into.
Clouds run by Google and China’s Alibaba could similarly benefit.
While funding silicon companies is not for the faint of heart, because of the high costs, the companies that succeed in raising cash and delivering building blocks for this secular cloud/application shift will be rewarded handily, and some will becomes the next generation silicon powerhouses.
Those enterprise companies could include open-source juggernauts like data-management company Cloudera, database providers MongoDB and Datastax, and data-analytics company Elastic.
Why 2017 will be the year of enterprise bots
Millennials love to chat.
Their personal lives rotate around messaging and instant gratification.
From getting their pals’ views on a new t-shirt they are thinking of buying to sharing their new year resolutions publicly to make themselves more accountable.
The asynchronous nature of email makes it one of the most hated forms of office communication today.
The tools and software being used today needs to mimic this behavioral trend and supplement faster, better and more efficient collaboration.
Popular communication platforms like Slack, Hipchat and the new Microsoft Teams that facilitate instant messaging in the workplace have a pivotal role to play in the future of our workplaces.
By keeping conversations and discussions synchronous, the workforce is working in a way it loves to.
Apart from the general goodness that comes with an open communication system, these platforms provide the breeding grounds for integrations and automation.
Think of these platforms as powerful IFTTTs for enterprises where you can subscribe to alerts, create workflows, push information to other systems and basically create powerful and effective systems that aid in improving the collective productivity of a team.
The advantages of these platforms to enterprise vendors, from an economic standpoint, is also noteworthy.
505 Games unveils original Steam game Quarantine
505 Games unveils original Steam game Quarantine.
The single-player, turn-based strategy game was created by developer Sproing and will be published by 505 Games.
As the director of Pandemic Defense, an international biosecurity agency, your job is to respond quickly to stop the onslaught of a widespread deadly contagion.
A new pathogen is spreading and survival of the human race is in your hands.
You have to recruit a team of specialized operatives and deploy them on high-stakes missions across the globe.
You have to research the disease, upgrade your tech, and quarantine the outbreak before it infects and kills everybody.
You have to make tough choices and battle against three lethal pathogens — a virus, bacteria, and prion — each with unique behaviors and devastating effects.
You have to level them up and keep them alive in the face of escalating danger.
If you let cities fall into chaos, the work gets harder.
You have to set up field bases and raise crucial funding.
Panasonic envisions autonomous cars with bubble-like cabins
Panasonic envisions autonomous cars with bubble-like cabins.
Instead, Panasonic believes the future car will be like a spacious cabin, where passengers sit inside a round bubble.
The idea is not so different from Google’s prototype for a self-driving car.
You no longer need to have the driver facing the front all of the time, holding a steering wheel and operating a brake pedal and gas pedal.
Now you can regain a lot of space in the car, purely for comfort or adding more passengers.
There’s a 4K tablet screen in the middle of the cabin.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi The company is creating a connected highway in Denver.
Over 35,000 Americans died in car crashes last year, and Panasonic said it wants to put an end to that.
It’s going to take quite a while before I could be comfortable riding in a car like this one.
I don’t see how the human driver could recover in an emergency and take control of the car.
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Edition is more time behind the same ol’ wheel
Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Edition is more time behind the same ol’ wheel.
By reviving the Wii U era game with minimum additions, it seems Nintendo thinks that it was the Wii U console — not its software — that caused the system to sell so poorly, and it’s trying to bring the nearly 3-year-old game to what it hopes is a wider audience on its $300 hybrid console.
Initially released in 2014 for the Nintendo Wii U, Mario Kart 8 is being re-released on Nintendo Switch as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Edition, just missing the $300 console’s March 3 launch date and coming out on April 28.
An updated version of the original title, the Deluxe Edition is adding some new features, but doesn’t seem to be bringing that much more to the racetrack.
The Deluxe Edition includes all of the original Wii U game’s content — yes, even the DLC — as well as new characters (the Inklings from Splatoon), returning Mario-universe denizens (the giant ghost King Boo, Bowser Jr.), and a tweaked Battle Mode.
But even added together, it’s not a ton of new content, especially if it ends up that there aren’t any new racing tracks proper, just battle ones.
The new Joy-Con controllers do offer a unique way to play — players can remove both the left and the right Joy-Con from the Switch screen and immediately have two controllers for multiplayer on the go.
It also uses the new HD rumble, though in a weird and anemic — not really the deep rumble players might be used to — way, with it almost feeling like their were little balls inside of the controller itself.
New kart just like the old kart Now, Mario Kart 8 is far from my favorite Mario Kart game, but bringing it back — instead of developing a new entry in the series, as Nintendo traditionally does for new consoles — means that Wii U-owning Nintendo fans have already played the majority of what it has to offer already.
The new additions are mostly superficial, and they might not be enough to convince players who purchased the original title to double dip.
How to watch today’s SpaceX launch — and why it matters
How to watch today’s SpaceX launch — and why it matters.
Today SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket, for the first time since the September 1st accident that destroyed another vehicle during a test firing.
The launch, at California’s Vandenburg Air Force Base, is expected at 12:54 p.m. EST, and SpaceX will stream it live here starting a little before that.
A report Friday from the Wall Street Journal claimed that a previous accident and fleet grounding in 2015 led to a quarter-billion dollar annual loss that year.
The numbers for 2016 are probably just as bad, since, according to the Journal, the September accident pushed half of the company’s planned 2016 launches off its schedule.
SpaceX officials told the Journal that the company has more than $1 billion cash on hand and no debt, as well as a long line of customers waiting for future launches.
But we’ve already seen that accidents can push away customers.
Inmarsat officials said it was more an issue of scheduling than any mistrust of SpaceX’s reliability, though, and the company still has another launch order with SpaceX for the middle of this year.
The company plans to derive a much more of its future revenue—and, in turn, development funds—from a satellite internet service.
But reliable, affordable rockets would still be the company’s most fundamental asset.
Why I’m NOT a ‘B2B SaaS’ investor
Given the level of transparency and competition in the enterprise software market (and the VC activity willing to fund enterprise software companies), traditional SaaS businesses often don’t present significant enough moats to prevent competitors from replicating/underpricing their solution and competing away their profits.
But there is still hope for enterprise software founders — and possibly more opportunity than ever before.
As the next evolution of the software landscape evolves, we are seeing a pivotal factor unfold as one of the largest determinants of startup success: Distribution.
For a sales professional to get a meeting, they needed to come from a BIG company.
Quality of product wasn’t the defining factor for a software company’s success, it was the quality and scale of your distribution network.
This is a scary and exciting opportunity for startups and investors alike – “better mousetraps” simply aren’t good enough.
For these software companies, distribution is not only a customer acquisition strategy; its a method of acquiring data and its associated network effects.
To advance their distribution footprint as fast as possible, these v3 software companies often go to market very differently than traditional SaaS businesses.
As a result, these businesses often require significantly fewer sales resources then a traditional SaaS business at scale and rely heavily on customer acquisition through organic and/or referral channels (further amplifying the relevance of product quality and customer success).
These companies may deliver through API/SDKs, marketplaces, transactional/usage frameworks, or networked solutions, but in virtually all scenarios their models are centered on attaining network effects through a streamlined means of distribution.
The most common passwords of 2016
Looking at the list of 2016’s most common passwords, I can’t stop shaking my head.
Nearly 17 percent of users are safeguarding their accounts with “123456.” What really perplexes me is that so many website operators are not enforcing password security best practices.
A few things jumped out at us: The list of most-frequently used passwords has changed little over the past few years.
That means user education has limits.
While it’s important for users to be aware of risks, a sizable minority are never going to take the time or effort to protect themselves.
Website operators need to stop prioritizing convenience over security.
At best, it sets them back only a few seconds.
Email providers don’t appear to be working all that hard to prevent the use of their services for spam.
Without further ado, here are last year’s top 25 most common passwords: [A version of this story originally appeared on the Keeper Security blog.]
Darren Guccione is CEO of Keeper Security.
SpaceX launches first Falcon 9 since explosion and lands rocket stage on ocean platform
SpaceX launches first Falcon 9 since explosion and lands rocket stage on ocean platform.
Above: SpaceX Falcon rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, U.S., January 14, 2017.
A SpaceX Falcon rocket blasted off from California on Saturday, returning the company to flight for the first time since a fiery launchpad explosion in September.
The launch of the 230-foot (70-meter) rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 9:54 a.m. PST (1754 GMT) aimed to deliver 10 satellites into orbit for Iridium Communications Inc. SpaceX’s founder and entrepreneur Elon Musk’s ambitious flight plans had been grounded since the Sept. 1 explosion during fueling ahead of a pre-flight test in Florida.
About 10 minutes after Saturday’s launch, the first stage of the rocket, which had separated from the rest of craft, successfully touched down on a platform in the Pacific Ocean, a feat previously accomplished by four other returning Falcon rockets.
The mission will test changes implemented by Space Exploration Technologies Corp, known as SpaceX, since the launchpad explosion.
Accident investigators determined that a canister of helium burst inside the rocket’s second-stage liquid oxygen tank, triggering the explosion.
The canister is being redesigned, but until then SpaceX is addressing the issue by modifying its fueling procedures.
The explosion destroyed a $62 million SpaceX booster and a $200 million Israeli communications satellite that it was to put into orbit two days later.
The company’s 2017 agenda includes the debut launch of a heavy-lift booster, flying its first reused rocket and repairing the Florida launchpad damaged in the explosion.
10 Free Online Marketing Courses to Try Today (Infographic)
10 Free Online Marketing Courses to Try Today (Infographic).
An abundance of free resources are available online today, especially when it comes to marketing.
Although sometimes it can be tricky to weed through them and get to the good stuff.
Look no further, because marketing software company Be Found has compiled 10 of the most helpful — and free — online marketing courses out there.
Google’s Online Marketing Challenge is packed with digital content that will help with everything from video to search engine marketing and AdWords.
If you’re looking for data and SEO guidance, check out what online marketing resource center Moz has to offer.
And if your efforts are geared toward social media, Hootsuite provides a number of free resources for social media management and engagement.
From email marketing to mobile strategy, these 10 websites have got you covered.
Business Owners Need a ‘Plan B’ for Retirement
Business Owners Need a ‘Plan B’ for Retirement.
Are small business owners too busy to think about retirement?
For instance, 75 percent have saved less than $100,000 in retirement funds.
There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to sell your business for anything even close to what you think it’s worth — and you might not even be able to sell it at all.
Business owner type 2.
Some may hold conventional retirement accounts such as a 401(k), IRA or profit sharing, college savings, real estate investments or cash stashed in a savings or money market account for fast access to capital.
Both types of business owners face risks associated with conventional investments and the risks of not being able to sell their business for what they expected.
Start by asking what your retirement account be worth on the day you plan to tap into it?
So, let’s pause for a stock market reality check.
Many investors had moved their money into NASDAQ technology stocks, which plunged 78 percent between March 2000 and October 2002.
4 Ways to Overcome Post-Holiday Blues
After the holidays, which are full of fun and joy, returning back to a regular routine can be difficult.
While almost everyone doesn’t like going back to work especially after the joy of the holidays, you should face the reality and do your best to adjust and be productive again.
In order to prevent the post-holiday blues, you have to do a little bit of planning and accept that it is over so that you can get back to the right mindset.
You can run some errands such as buying groceries, unpacking your luggage and doing laundry.
If you return on Sunday, you can also take Monday off so you only work for four days during your first week after the holidays.
Take care of your eating habits During holidays, you generally overeat so preparing a healthy meal for your lunch will help you feel that you are actually returning back to your normal life.
A healthy meal will also be good for your diet and prevent you from gaining weight.
Some people gain weight during holidays due to the food they eat at parties so paying attention to what you eat in the office after the holidays will help you go back to your regular weight.
Remember your experiences Instead of whining that the holidays are over, choose some of your favorite holiday photos and print them out.
Having new things to look forward to will keep you motivated and busy.
Buddy Investors: Bringing a Cocktail of Ideas, Money, Knowledge & More!
Buddy Investors: Bringing a Cocktail of Ideas, Money, Knowledge & More!.
Another interesting facet of funding that one got to see this year was the coming together of multiple investors for a single round.
Fund A may have more in-depth experience and understanding of a particular sector, while Fund B may be trying to spread the risk across many companies and bringing more capital to this sector, that in turn will improve the success and valuations,”said Jaspal Sarai, Co-founder of Jaarvis Group.
“Collaborating with a fund is similar to collaborating with an entrepreneur.
In order to build a business in a constructive manner it is important that everyone around the table be aligned on the vision and objectives of the company.
If there is alignment on the long-term objectives, then everyone can work together to navigate the short-term bumps on the road,” Sandeep Murthy, Partner at Lightbox, said.
However, sometimes many believe that it is a practice of the past that has become more prominent today.
Pankaj Jain of 500 Startups said that most investors like to collaborate with other investors regularly because it is a great way to bring additional experts, opinions and networks into a deal.
Talking about the benefits, Pranav Pai, Founding Partner at 3one4 Capital, said “The funds might recognize that there are complementary effects of having each other on the cap table, such as potential client connections, a track record in the category, portfolio synergies, strategic interests, and so on.
With investors gradually becoming choosy about whom they wish to fund, money will not come easy to those big and small in 2017.
Startup Fundings Of The Week
In what could be termed one of the most spoken-about announcements in the real estate sector (and the most inevitable), Softbank-backed Housing.com announced to be merging with rival PropTiger.
(Funding amount is based on startups that disclosed their funding) SecureAX: Bengaluru-based biometric and surveillance solutions provider SecurAX raised an undisclosed funding round.
It is now targeting double-digit market share in Indian real estate distribution and is planning to expand to 25+ countries on the ground advising on global real estate.
Four other undisclosed angel investors also participated in the funding round.
This is Flipkart’s fifth investment in the healthcare space.
Ltd raised around $5 Mn (INR 35 Cr) from Trifecta Capital.
Existing investor Mayfield India also participated in the current funding round.
Mumbai-based fashion recommerce platform CoutLoot acquired Bengaluru-based competitor ‘Once Again Store’ for an undisclosed amount in an all-stock deal.
With this fund, IDFC is looking to invest in approximately 10 startups with a ticket size of around $30-50 Mn.
A State Innovation Fund with a corpus of $29.3 Mn (INR 200 Cr) will be provided to the students during the next five years.