Verizon buys a video startup for its tech, kills the service

Verizon announced today that they’d acquired former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar’s startup, Vessel, a subscription service for short-form video. Or to be more exact, they bought its technology and product but will be closing the service. Kilar won’t be coming along as part of the deal, but many of the startup’s employees and its cofounder and CTO Richard Tom will, to become CTO of Verizon’s digital entertainment efforts.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed and it is expected to close later this month. In an interview, a general manager for the telecom giant said they plan to merge social features Vessel was developing with Verizon’s extant content strategy, according to Recode. It could involve their free Go90 content service, which they aim to transition into a paid subscription model. Vessel’s annual subscribers will get a prorated refund to make up for its soon-to-be-shuttered service, and all customers will get October for free.

Kilar had left his position as CEO of Hulu in 2013 for unstated reasons, and took Tom with him. Both came out of stealth in June 2014 to talk about the startup they’d been working on: Vessel. They envisioned the service as an upstart rival to YouTube, offering both a free tier and a $3 per month subscription level for exclusive and ad-free content. But the startup never quite penetrated the market heavily dominated by YouTube’s vast library and viewership. With Tom at Verizon, it’s unclear where Kilar will go from here.

Via: Recode

Source: Verizon press blog

Pocket’s Explore tab adds more reading suggestions

Pocket is one of the slickest bookmarking services for reading on the web, but its strength was never discovering new things to read. Starting today, it’s hoping to fix that with a new Explore tab at the top of its homepage: type in what you’re looking to read about, and off you go. Trending stories will line up alongside articles that other users have substantially saved. Related topics are also included, if you really have some hours to kill. The feature is in beta at the moment, but Explore doesn’t require a login. You just… browse. Possibly forever.

Compared to Pocket’s existing recommendation service, you now don’t need to follow other users to get new stuff to read. For Explore, the team is synthesizing the recommendations from the entirety of its users. The bookmarking service has also tweaked its Chrome extension to add recommendations to similar articles and more trending stuff.

Source: Pocket

Giphy’s GIF service has over 100 million users every day

It won’t shock you to hear that GIF hosts like Giphy and Gfycat are thriving in an era where there’s a new meme every minute. But just how well are they doing? Supremely well, according to Giphy. It just posted its first “State of the GIF” report, revealing that it has over 100 million active daily users. Yes, that’s daily and not monthly. That amounts to over 1 billion GIFs served per day, and more than 2 million hours of viewing time. So what’s the trick to getting that many viewers?

The company attributes at least some of its success to being proactive. It’s not just waiting for you to upload a funny GIF yourself — it has “thousands” of partners (including big names like Saturday Night Live and South Park Studios) that contribute their own animations. Event partners like MTV (for the VMAs) and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert have racked up hundreds of millions of views by themselves, and there’s even a studio dedicated to producing original GIFs. Wide availability on phones helps, too.

Of course, it’s important to note that Giphy and its peers are helped by the nature of many internet discussions: the meme-happy cultures of sites like Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter can revolve around GIFs at times. It’s not certain that Giphy can ride that wave forever, but the stats suggest that it won’t have to worry about a lack of users for a long time.

Source: Giphy (Medium)

Science exonerates HIV’s ‘Patient 0’

For years, many have pinned HIV’s US outbreak on one man: a flight attendant, nicknamed Patient 0, whose travels and sexual activity allegedly helped spread the virus quickly. However, there’s now evidence to suggest that he was little more than a scapegoat. A team of American and British researchers has used genetic reconstruction to narrow down the American arrival of HIV to between 1970 and 1971, before Patient 0 was even having sex.

The scientists collected genetic samples from men infected during the late 1970s, and used RNA “jackhammering” to break apart the subjects’ HIV genomes and recombine them into usable RNA sequences. From there, the team used known mutation rates to determine the sequences’ common ancestor. Simply speaking, there was too much genetic diversity by the late 1970s for Patient 0 to be responsible — HIV had to have arrived earlier.

The findings may well clear the attendant’s name, but they should have a longer-lasting impact on our understanding of disease as a whole. The approach could help humanity understand how viruses spread and track their evolution. It won’t directly contribute to possible cures, but following the development of a disease might help illustrate the seriousness of a given threat.

Via: Discover

Source: Nature

EU and ESA sign deal to keep ahead of global space competition

The European Space Agency has lined up several projects in the next few years, from its wind satellite aiming to go up in 2017 to a 2020 ExoMars expedition to follow up on the missing Schiaparelli probe that likely botched its landing last week. The group pursues mostly neutral research and development missions with loose ties to the European Union, but both groups signed an agreement today outlining future ambitions and plans to protect and enrich mutual interests. The Space Strategy for Europe declaration is a mix of commercial coverage and deployment of defensive assets — aspirations to keep the continent’s governments and industry competitive in space technology.

The pro-business moves in the agreement’s outline include urging the continent’s private and public sector to use more space data generated by the EU’s Galileo satellite network, which started going up in 2011. This is the greatest resource generated by European space tech, along with the information generated by the array of Copernicus spacecraft, so it’s a no-brainer to push more native industry into using the data. To boost development of new marketable tech, the European Commission is also dedicating some EU funding to prop up cosmic entrepreneurs and work to secure private funding for them.

As for the existing space industry, the Commission sees their plan to deploy 30 satellites over the next 10-15 years as an opportunity to support the European-built Ariadne 6 and Vega C rockets. But the report notes that they will act as a “smart customer” and aggregate launches, suggesting that they’ll adhere to market offers.

The agreement’s defensive plans aim to ensure that assets launched by companies and governments are protected. This includes developing the EU Space Situational Awareness Service to protect orbital infrastructure from passive hazards like debris and cosmic weather, as well as shielding them from deliberate cyberattacks. As part of the upcoming European Defence Action Plan, the Commission will also begin a GovSatCom initiative to ensure reliable, secure and cheap satellite communication between EU members and national authorities.

While the declaration concludes that Europe’s space industry is strong, building a third of the world’s satellites and accounting for about 21% of the value of the global space sector, it makes no qualms about the reason the EU and ESA are signing: Competition. While ambitious American private sector luminaries like Elon Musk steal headlines, it’s other nations quietly revving up their space programs that concern Europe. China just launched its second experimental space station keeping it on track for a full one in 2020, while India just successfully tested its first tiny reusable space shuttle. For the EU and ESA, the clock is ticking.

Source: European Commission press room