Twitter tests custom profiles for customer service DMs

Twitter has truly fully embraced its role as a customer service platform for businesses around the globe. One of the features it’s testing in private beta, for instance, is designed to give companies a way to make direct messages a lot more personal. The feature allows businesses to add custom profiles for their CS reps, which display their names, profile photos and their job titles within the direct messaging window. Twitter says that knowing if a human is replying or not helps people manage their expectations on what kind of responses they’ll get.

According to Twitter’s research, 77 percent of people are more likely to recommend a brand when they experience a personalized customer service interaction on the website. Users are more likely to feel like they’ve reached a resolution for their issue, as well. In addition, since companies can use the feature to differentiate between a human and a bot, it also gives them an opportunity to conjure up chat bots with fun personalities.

Only T-Mobile has access to the feature for now. Twitter is accepting requests from interested parties, though, so we’ll likely see more companies take advantage of what it can do in the future.

Source: Twitter

YouView’s big UI update starts hitting retail set-top boxes

YouView announced a fairly comprehensive update to its set-top box UI last November, but it was actually TalkTalk customers that got almost immediate access to the new look. Today, it’s the turn of contract-free retail YouView boxes, starting with the Humax T2000 — the T1000 and T1010 models will receive it in due course. Several headline improvements have taken place behind the scenes. For one, YouView has completely rebuilt the platform in HTML5 for better responsiveness and faster navigation.

Furthermore, some parts of the new interface are processed in the cloud and not on the box, which YouView says allows it to iterate features quicker. It’s also the reason you can now schedule recordings remotely via the YouView mobile app. In terms of changes to the actual UI, it’s lighter on words and menus, and heavier on cards and thumbnails. In addition to being more visually engaging, the main menu and recordings library have been reorganised so you can do more in less clicks. There’s also a new miniguide you can invoke while you’re watching something that gives you easy access to other channels, your recordings, streaming apps and settings.

Now the fresh UI has begun reaching retail YouView boxes, only BT customers are left updateless, but that shouldn’t be the case for much longer. In fact, retail boxes were originally supposed to receive the update alongside BT boxes, so we don’t imagine any lengthly delay.

Source: YouView

Kobo is the next to offer an e-book subscription service

All-you-can-read e-book subscriptions are nothing new (just ask Amazon), but Kobo is just now joining the fray. It’s launching Kobo Plus, a service that offers unlimited reading of eligible books (currently 40,000 titles) for a flat monthly fee. While there aren’t any surprising attempts to shake up the basic subscription formula, you probably won’t complain if you prefer Kobo’s e-readers or mobile apps — you no longer have to buy every single title that piques your interest.

The catch: if you’re reading this, you probably can’t use Plus. It’s only available in Belgium and the Netherlands right now for €10 (about $10.50) per month. There’s no mention of launches in other countries, either. However, the decision makes sense when you look at the context. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited isn’t available in either country, so Kobo can start by cornering a couple of smaller markets before it thinks about taking on its main rival.

Via: The Digital Reader, Good E-Reader

Source: Kobo, Bol.com

Emails show new EPA chief is cozy with the fossil fuel industry

There’s no question that new Environmental Protection Agency leader Scott Pruitt has a conflict of interest when he previously declared himself the agency’s number one enemy. However, it’s now clearer just why he so fervently opposes eco-friendly regulation. The Center for Media and Democracy has used a court order to obtain emails from Pruitt’s time as Oklahoma’s attorney general, and they reveal an uncomfortably close relationship with the fossil fuel industry he’s now supposed to regulate.

Pruitt was particularly tight with Devon Energy, an oil and gas company operating from Oklahoma City. The emails show his office coordinating many meetings, dinners and speaking engagements with the company. In one instance, Pruitt met with both a coal industry lawyer and the conservative Federalist Society think tank to develop a “clearinghouse” that would fight federal regulation. In another, the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers lobbyist group coordinated with Pruitt when opposing the feds’ Renewable Fuel Standard Program (which requires that transportation fuel include some renewables) and ozone limits. These pro-fossil fuel groups even fed Pruitt language for letters and petitions, showing that they were effectively dictating some of his environmental policy.

The disclosures are coming too late to make much of a difference, assuming they’d have made any difference at all. Senate Republicans successfully thwarted a Democrat attempt to delay Pruitt’s confirmation vote to look at these sorts of conversations with the fossil fuel business. And of course, the current White House has made a point of choosing leaders who have both close industry connections and an anti-regulatory bent. However, the emails at least give you a hint of what to expect from Pruitt’s tenure — don’t expect him to hold companies’ feet to the fire on issues like pollution.

Via: Washington Post

Source: Exposed by CMD

NASA: We found 7 Earth-sized planets just 40 light years away

During a news conference in Washington DC Wednesday, NASA revealed that, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, they’ve found seven new Earth-sized planets orbiting a star just 40 light years away from us. What’s more, three of those exist within the “Goldilocks zone” which could be habitable for life.

This is the first time that astronomers have discovered another solar system with seven planets roughly the same size as ours. Even more importantly, NASA figures that with the right atmospheric conditions, all seven could contain liquid surface water — though the chances of that are highest of that on the three Goldilocks.

“This discovery could be a significant piece in the puzzle of finding habitable environments, places that are conducive to life,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, said during the press conference.

This newly discovered Trappist-1 system lies in the Aquarius system just 40 light years from our own, or about 235 trillion miles). All seven planets are thought to be terrestrial planets like our own, rather than gas giants like Jupiter or icey dwarfs like Ceres.

These planets circle their host star — an ultra-cool dwarf that’s both smaller and dimmer than our own Sun — in orbits which are closer to their sun than Mercury is to ours. The innermost planets complete their orbits in just 1.5 and 2.4 days, respectively, with the outermost planet making the trip every 12 days. Their orbits are so close to one another that if one were to look up from the surface of one could likely see the geological features of its solar neighbors. Thankfully the Trappist star is rather weak so despite the planets’ proximity, there’s still a very good chance that liquid water could exist on on their surfaces.

“The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets,” Nikole Lewis, co-leader of the Hubble study and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in a statement.

The Trappist system is named after the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, which originally discovered three of the planets and announced their findings in May of last year. With the help of other ground-based telescopes such as the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of them and discovered another five.

This news comes at an exciting time in the search for planets beyond our own solar system. Since the start of just this year, researchers have discovered the presence of water on a planet just 50 light years away, the Keck Observatory’s exoplanet imager has come online and a team of researchers from a compendium of universities have released a trove of observational data from the Keck’s HiRES imager spanning more than two decades. This could just be the start. Last week, NASA launched a crowdsourcing effort enabling citizen scientists to help search for exoplanets as well.

You can follow along with the press conference live on NASA TV right now. If you still have questions about today’s announcement, the NASA team will be holding an AMA on Reddit at 3pm ET today.

Source: NASA

The next ‘Futurama’ mobile game has the show’s creators aboard

Futurama continues to be the animated franchise that just won’t die. Fox and developer TinyCo (a divison of Jam City) announced today that they’re working on another mobile game from the series — Futurama: Worlds of Tomorrow — which will notably have creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen involved. Even better, TinyCo is also working with the show’s original voice actors, animators (Rough Draft Studio) and some of its writers. We still don’t know what the game is actually about, but it’s expected to land this summer as a free title. The developers will also be revealing more during a Facebook Live chat this afternoon.

Worlds of Tomorrow follows 2015’s Futurama: Release the Drones, which was a fairly straightforward puzzle title. Given the amount of talent involved in this game, it’ll likely do a much better job of recreating the Futurama vibe. Let’s just hope it’s more like the show’s early seasons, and less like the disappointing later episodes.

Source: Fox

New Instagram Update Lets You Share Up to Ten Photos and Videos in One Post

Instagram today announced that users will now be able to share multiple photos and videos within one post thanks to a carousel-like feature that allows up to ten pictures and videos to be uploaded simultaneously.

After the series is shared, followers will be able to swipe through in the order they were uploaded, creating a natural series of moments that can cover a friend’s birthday party or even a full how-to series on food recipes, according to Instagram.

Blue dots under a post provide a hint for users to swipe for more content
To upload multiple pieces of content at once, users will see a new icon in the photo upload area, and from there they can tap and hold to change the order, apply a filter at once to everything or go one by one to customize each picture or video.

Instagram said that these types of posts are still designated to a single caption and only support the square-style size “for now.” A similar carousel feature has been available to brands for advertising purposes within Instagram for the past few years.

Instagram is available to download on the iOS App Store for free [Direct Link]. The update will begin rolling out to users throughout the day.

Tag: Instagram
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Apple Releases Safari Technology Preview 24 With User Timing and Link Preload

Apple today released a new update for Safari Technology Preview, the experimental browser Apple first introduced in March of 2016. Apple designed the Safari Technology Preview to test features that may be introduced into future release versions of Safari.

Safari Technology Preview release 24 includes fixes and improvements for Web API, JavaScript, CSS, Web Inspector, Rendering, Accessibility, and more. Both User Timing and Link Preload are new experimental features in this version of Safari Technology Preview.

The Safari Technology Preview update is available through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store to anyone who has downloaded the browser. Full release notes for the update are available on the Safari Technology Preview website.

Apple’s aim with Safari Technology Preview is to gather feedback from developers and users on its browser development process. Safari Technology Preview can run side-by-side with the existing Safari browser and while designed for developers, it does not require a developer account to download.

Tag: Safari Technology Preview
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Best app deals of the day! 6 paid iPhone apps for free for a limited time

Everyone likes apps, but sometimes the best ones are a bit expensive. Now and then, developers make paid apps free for a limited time, but you have to snatch them up while you have the chance. Here are the latest and greatest apps on sale in the iOS App Store.

These apps normally cost money, and this sale lasts for a limited time only. If you go to the App Store and it says the app costs money, that means the deal has expired and you will be charged. 

More: 200 Awesome iPhone Apps | The best Android apps for almost any occasion

Stream

Stream was created to give you a seamless listening, managing, and syncing cloud music experience. It allows you to create a personal streaming service with cloud storage and have access to all of your music.

Available on:

iOS

Marble Camera

Create charming Marble-style photographs with real-time Marble effects. These effects work great on selfies and other portraits but also for many other subjects.

Available on:

iOS

Firstlight

Firstlight offers numerous professionally designed filters and effects. You can apply the effects before you take a photo, or after, as you like.

Available on:

iOS

Budget and Expense Tracking

Where did your money go? This app is perfect for tracking expenses quickly and completely.

Available on:

iOS

Coyn

Coyn is a simple, secure, and stylish way to manage your cash balance. Manage your money like it’s no one else’s business.

Available on:

iOS

Zen Sketch

Zen Sketch is a cross between a note-taking and a painting app. It’s an app with a balance between power and simplicity. See where your money goes and take control of where to spend it effectively using the simple and yet powerful money management App on iOS.

Available on:

iOS

AMD Ryzen: Our First Take

The wait for Ryzen is almost over. AMD will launch three chips in the Ryzen 7 line on March 2, with the least expensive starting at $329. Better still, the company says it has exceed its target of improving instructions per clock by 40 percent over previous AMD hardware. Instead, it claims to have hit an improvement of 52 percent. That’s massive, and a breath of fresh air in an era where hardware enthusiasts have come to expect a generational improvement of 10 to 15 percent, at most.

This is an exciting time, not only for AMD, but for any who’s a fan of PC hardware. A return to legitimate competition between AMD and Intel can only mean lower prices and faster chips for everyone.

Yet there’s reason to be cynical. AMD released its Phenom processor line in 2007 with a value argument that’s not dissimilar to that we’re hearing with Ryzen; more cores, better pricing. Unfortunately, Phenom suffered lackluster per-core performance and a widely-publicized hardware bug, issues that let Intel sweep it aside.

Is Ryzen truly able to compete with Intel? Or is AMD’s again making a risky bet on processors that only outrun Intel in tasks that need many cores? Let’s take a closer look.

Targeting prosumer, and hitting gamers as collateral

While AMD says that Ryzen will eventually be a processor for everyone, its target market at launch is clear, and specific. The processor is going after “prosumer” users, as well as gamers, though the focus is heavily slanted towards the former. That isn’t a huge surprise. Gamers are certain to enjoy Ryzen more than any other recent AMD processor due to its overall performance, but the design of Ryzen is not entirely favorable to games.

That’s because it focuses on many cores, with many threads. The Ryzen 7 series, which is what’s launching on March 2 and available for pre-order now, consists entirely of processors with eight cores and sixteen threads, as you can see below.

Ryzen 7 1800X
Ryzen 7 1700X
Ryzen 7 1700
Cores
8
8
8
Threads
16
16
16
Base clock
3.6GHz
3.4GHz
3GHz
Boost clock
4GHz
3.8GHz
3.7GHz
TDP
95 watts
95 watts
65 watts
Price
$499
$399
$329

Clock speeds and features vary, but the core and thread counts do not. This kind of design is most important for high-demand applications which, of course, are the most likely to take advantage of many threads. PC games often don’t make great use of more than three or four threads, and as a result, they tend to run best on fast quad-core processors.

The focus on the prosumer is reflected in the Intel chips AMD is targeting. While the Core i7-7700K is mentioned in the company’s press information, AMD more often talks about the Core i7-6800K and 6900K. These elite Core processors are valued by prosumers for their high core counts; six and eight, respectively. They also have Intel’s Hyper-Threading, which gives them thread counts of 12 and 16.

Gamers, on the other hand, tend to go for the Core i5-7600K or i7-7700. These quad-cores hit higher clock speeds than their prosumer peers, and that often puts them at the top of game benchmarks.

Focusing on prosumer also helps AMD make a compelling price comparison. The Core i7-6800K goes for $424, and the Core i7-6900K sells for an incredible $1049 at most stores. Ryzen, meanwhile, starts at $329, and tops out at $499.

Nothing new to say about the platform, yet

While we had the chance to try Ryzen systems in-person, the bulk of the information we received is still embargoed. We can’t provide any new details about the architecture.

Luckily, there’s already a lot of information available. We covered Ryzen’s feature set last December, and the information found there remains as much as we can share with you today.  You can also read the work of David Kanter, an analyst known for his (relatively) approachable deep-dives into processor architectures.

If you were wondering about the features of the motherboards that will go along side Ryzen, we must disappoint you. That information is also being withheld for now. All we can say is that over 80 partners will be launching boards for Ryzen. Look for more information on them soon.

Time to start the show

AMD’s making big promises with Ryzen, but talk is talk. The real question is whether it can perform. There’s some reason to be skeptical, because AMD has not lived up to expectations with past processors.

This is not a review; that’s coming later. However, AMD did provide us hands-on experience with the demos that it has so eagerly boasted of. We were particularly interested in the Handbrake demo, because we use Handbrake in our own PC test suite.

AMD’s test system was set up to encode a one-minute 4K .MP4 clip to 1080p, using default Handbrake settings. The test pit a Ryzen 7 1700 against Intel’s Core i7-7700K. Both systems had an identical 16GB of RAM, and identical 240GB solid state drive.

More: Intel Core i7-7700k review

This is less demanding than the Handbrake test we use, which encodes a four minute, 20 seconds long 4K .MP4 to 4K HVEC, but the fine-grain settings in Handbrake are the same as what we would use in our own tests.

The results? AMD’s hardware cranked through the video encode in 62 seconds. Intel’s hardware needed 71 seconds.

A difference of nine seconds doesn’t seem like much, but it does matter. Imagine if the clip were an hour long, instead of a minute. If that were true, the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 would complete the encode about nine minutes sooner than Intel’s Core i7-7700K. That’s a difference you’d notice if you encode video on a regular basis. And remember, the R7 1700 is the entry-level version of what’ll be available come March 2.

Good for gaming, though not setting records

Despite the focus on prosumer, AMD has certainly been speaking about Ryzen’s game performance as well. It’s easy to see why given the reputation that AMD has from its Radeon line, but at the same time, processor performance often isn’t the biggest factor in game performance – at least not when comparing chips that are supposed to be fighting in the same price point.

Still, AMD thinks it has an edge over Intel here, thanks to its delivery of high core counts and competitive performance per clock at lower prices. To demonstrate this, AMD rolled out Battlefield 1. We played it on two systems, one with a Core i7-6800K, the other with a Ryzen 7 1800X. Both systems had 32GB of RAM, and both had a 512GB solid state drive. The game ran at 4K resolution, with the Ultra preset enabled, in DirectX 11 mode.

The test system did not allow us to capture frame data as we usually would, so we had to go with the real-time frame counter. Having said that, we saw the AMD chip swing between 5 to 10 frames per second faster, with a few exceptions, where for brief periods of time the two would swing into direct competition. Both systems were producing an average of more than 80 FPS, so this win wasn’t visible in gameplay. The game looked butter-smooth on both.

That’s good, but we’re still a bit skeptical, for two reasons. One is that the Core i7-6800K sells for around $425 on Newegg, while the Ryzen 7 1800X will debut at $500. That muddies the value a bit.

Another issue is the choice of Core i7-6800K for this comparison, as it isn’t the best of the best to begin with. Testing has often shown the Core i7-7700K is just as quick, or quicker, in games due to its higher clock speed, which of course makes us wonder how the Ryzen 7 1800X (or any Ryzen) would compare to the Core i7-7700K in Battlefield 1.

More: How to optimize performance for Battlefield 1

AMD did not provide a game demo that pits the i7-7700K directly against any Ryzen 7, and that makes us a bit suspicious. The other game available to test, Sniper Elite 4, pit a Core i7-6900K against a Ryzen R7 1800X. Again, that’s not an Intel chip gamers frequently buy, so using it as a point of comparison seems odd.

Of course, AMD says there’s no reason to worry, and provided graphs that show exactly that. AMD hasn’t provided hands-on time to go with them, though, and we’d like to see the proof. It’s clear that Ryzen will make AMD a reasonable choice for even the most hardcore gamers, but it’s equally clear that Ryzen’s not pushing game performance well beyond what’s possible with current Intel hardware.

Conclusion

Ryzen will be available for pre-order by the time you read this, on February 22, but the launch doesn’t happen until March 2. It’s strange for a CPU to go up for pre-order, but we’re sure many fans are ready to pull the trigger.

What we’ve seen of Ryzen so far has been favorable, and the in-person tests worked exactly as AMD promised they would on stage. The performance we saw looks extremely price competitive if you want a processor to handle the most demanding, heavily multi-threaded tasks.

Gamers, on the other hand, should temper their enthusiasm. The story here is unlikely to be one of complete victory for AMD, but instead one of competition with Intel. That’s a kind of victory, given how far behind the company has fallen in game performance, but we don’t expect Ryzen to completely shut out the Core i7-7700K.

We always encourage our readers to wait for the full review. There’s still a lot we can’t say, and a lot we don’t know. You can expect that information when the processor ships on March 2. Our initial impressions are favorable, however, and indicate that Ryzen is likely the return to competition between AMD and Intel that enthusiasts have desperately hoped for.

Highs

• Reasonable pricing
• All Ryzen 7 chips have eight cores, 16 threads
• Excellent performance in heavy compute workloads

Lows

• Gaming performance may not exceed Intel’s best quad-cores
• Motherboard details still cloudy