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Tuesday, December 10, 2013
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Today, Twitter has announced an update to its apps for iOS and Android that bring a renewed focus on direct messaging. The app now features a direct link to Direct Messages in the tab bar and allows you to send photos inside DMs for the first time.


This design has been in the works for a while, and today marks the first time we’ve seen most of these elements all in one place. Twitter has been testing a variety of these features over the past few weeks, but now they’re all packaged together. You may have seen the DM icon in the tab bar or heard of some users getting a swipeable timeline design as a part of Twitter’s ongoing experiments which see just a small percentage of users getting each permutation of the design. Those experiments are then used to determine which features hit the app itself.


We had heard this release was coming and now we know which features made the cut. There is a bunch of new stuff in this update, but the addition of photo support to DMs and the enhanced placement of the icon right in the tab bar indicated a renewed interest in the private messaging portion of Twitter — which has been long neglected.


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By putting an emphasis on direct messaging, Twitter is performing its own sort of subtweet towards other messaging apps like Line, WhatsApp, Snapchat and soon Instagram. The DM function of Twitter is heavily used by a lot of users, but my guess is that some of the changes here will spur mainstream adoption of DMs as a ‘private comms channel’.


The addition of Messages to the tab bar also bumps Discover from the main view. That’s now tucked under Timelines as a whole. You now swipe between those timelines in the main view. Timeline, Activity and Discover are all under the single tab now. One one hand, this is a great space saver and feels like a welcome move. As we noted previously, this also makes way for even more timelines:



The idea behind a swipeable interface is fairly easy to divine, as it could make the app friendly to multiple timelines. If these feeds could be treated as discreet items, Twitter could move beyond its ‘Home,’ ‘Connect’ and ‘Discover’ feeds to offer more specific feeds focused on things like TV. And, judging from how #Music went, that seems to be the way that it’s headed.



More to follow


Image Credit: Christopher Schmidt







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Today, Twitter has announced an update to its apps for iOS and Android that bring a renewed focus on direct messaging. The app now features...

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Originally based in Berlin, Deutsche Telekom’s startup accelerator Hub:raum has opened offices in Krakow, Poland. What’s more, fifteen teams from ten different European countries gathered in Poland’s second largest city last weekend to attend workshops in hopes of joining Europe’s newest accelerator.


During the intensive workshops, called Hub:raum Warp, teams received much-needed mentoring and got the opportunity to work alongside fifty prominent international experts with backgrounds in financing, customer acquisition, product management and more.


“The mentoring turned out to be a great success since we got the chance to work with some of the Europe’s freshest startups coming from Central and Eastern Europe. During the past week, startups have received a great deal of knowledge which we hope they will spread onto their local communities and further fire up CEE’s entrepreneurial spirit,” said Jakub Probola, Head of Hub:raum Krakow.


At the end of the week startups pitched their ideas at Demo Day hoping to get accepted into hub:arum’s first batch of startups. From fifteen teams which attended WARP, four finalists were selected with Montenegrian TourVia.Me winning the competition and securing the best pitch award. Alongside Omnipaste from Romania, Collar Pocket from Poland and Excalibur from Slovakia, TourVia.Me was invited to join DT’s Krakow-based accelerator.


Only Excalibur – a startup developing authentication for web services – publicly accepted the offer with others hoping to join in the following weeks.


Hub:raum’s offices in Krakow are lead by a team of experienced serial entrepreneurs who’s goal is to further engage and help CEE startups develop and scale their ideas. “Our doors are always open. We can support different teams in developing their ideas and launching various products on the market,” said Probola.


Hub:raum is offering seed funding, co-working space, mentors, and DT’s assets which include access to a massive 170 million user base (both in Europe and US) as well an access to T-Venture, a 720 million euro fund run by the company.







1:53 PM

Originally based in Berlin, Deutsche Telekom’s startup accelerator Hub:raum has opened offices in Krakow, Poland. What’s more, fifteen team...

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Whisper, the secret sharing startup backed by Sequoia and others, has just pushed a new version of its app into the app store that’s designed to help users search and browse through various topics. The update also adds a new “create flow” that will simplify the process of making and sharing Whispers anonymously with other members of the social network.


Whisper was built around the idea of helping people to combine images and text of their secrets, and then share them with others. Sort of like a mobile version of long-running site PostSecret, Whisper allows users to express themselves freely, without having to worry about being judged or what others might think about them.


Since being launched earlier this year, Whisper has grown pretty rapidly. It now has more than 3 billion page views per month, up from 1.5 billion in May. And users typically spend upwards of 30 minutes a day getting sucked into reading other people’s secrets.


But the latest version is designed to make it not only easier to create Whispers, but also to find those on topics that interest you. The new Whisper create flow simplifies the process, allowing you to type in whatever you want to share, and then it’ll suggest a relevant photo for you that it has found. If you don’t like it, you can search for others or add one from your own image library.


All of that should encourage users to create more Whispers of their own. But like most apps, the vast majority of Whisper users are consuming content rather than creating it. For them, the whisper’s appeal lies in the ability to read other people’s secrets.


Before, they were stuck with just three options: The most recent Whispers, the most popular Whispers, and those posted nearby. But now users will be able to access a lot more.


“Before, [Whisper] was a big river of content coming through, but it was a lot of noise,” Whisper CEO Michael Heyward told me in a phone conversation. “It was challenging to give different types of people different types of content.”


The updated app now has the ability to search and browse Whispers based on topics, allowing users to dig deep into the things they most care about. To do that, Whisper had to do a bunch of work on the back end to break Whispers down into the relevant topics that they talk about.


There are more than 1 million different topics to choose from, and those topics are displayed at the bottom of each Whisper that you view. So if you searched for or stumbled on a Whisper about death, then you could follow that topic and see other related Whispers.


“We’re adding this whole other dimension to the product,” Heyward said. He asked us to imagine, for instance, what YouTube would be like if it were just a stream of the newest or most trending videos. Now Whisper will no longer be operating under similar constraints.


The addition of topics, and the fact that now every Whisper will have them, could also make those secrets available to outside developers as well. Heyward said that the introduction of new features could have major implications for a potential API, if Whisper wanted to make one available.


Whisper, which is based in L.A., now has 30 employees. The company has raised a total of $24 million from investors that include Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, and Flixster’s Joe Greenstein.







12:54 PM

Whisper , the secret sharing startup backed by Sequoia and others, has just pushed a new version of its app into the app store that’s design...

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There have been a few Bitcoin wallets available for Chrome and other browsers but how about one that searches for Bitcoin addresses on the pages you visit and allows for one-click payment from your BTC stash? KryptoKit, launched today at the Inside Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, lets you do just that.


First, KryptoKit allows you to create a Bitcoin wallet that you can use to store your BTC using your browser. It is ostensibly secure – you can set a password that you must enter before the wallet can send out any Bitcoins. It also lets you backup your wallet to a file.


Founded by Anthony Di Iorio and Steven Dakh, the Toronto-based company is trying to make it fast and easy to use BTC with almost any web page. Di Iorio is a member of the Bitcoin Alliance of Canada where he spreads the BTC good news hither and yon.


“There are many Bitcoin wallet services and many vendors who now accept Bitcoin, but very few services marry those two,” said Di Iorio. “KryptoKit is a one-click solution to transferring BTC from your wallet to a vendor. To our knowledge, no one has to this date brought the simplicity of Amazon’s one-click system to shopping online with Bitcoin, and certainly not in the form of a browser extension (and the desktop browser is still a popular destination for people to do their shopping, especially for the holidays).”


Interestingly, the plugin also supports PGP and lets you create a key pair for sending and receiving encrypted messages. Finally, the system can scan a webpage (any of these would show up in the app and presumably this would too [NSFW]). It’s not quite as easy as PayPal but it’s a start.


“This could be the ‘Amazon.com’ moment for Bitcoin,” said Di Iorio. With a little more uptake and a little less volatility, he could be right.


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12:54 PM

There have been a few Bitcoin wallets available for Chrome and other browsers but how about one that searches for Bitcoin addresses on the ...

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Google has just released a white version of the Nexus 7 tablet, in white and packing 32GB of storage, available now for $269 on the Google Play Devices store, so long as you’re in the U.S., U.K. or Japan. There’s no LTE version and no 16GB model, unlike with the black Nexus 7, but if you’re looking for a color match tablet for your white Nexus 5 you’re now in luck.


The bezel retains the same black paint scheme, and there’s no change beyond the back panel color job in terms of performance or specs. The Nexus 7 is a fairly capable Android tablet, however, and most likely the best deal available at that particular price point depending on your needs. If you’re looking to grab one, it’s probably a good idea to pull the trigger on that order, quickly, since these are probably going to be in fairly limited supply at launch.


You do have a little more choice, however, as LG has just announced a Google Play edition of the G Pad Android tablet, which has an 8.3-inch screen and costs just a little more at $349.







11:39 AM

Google has just released a white version of the Nexus 7 tablet , in white and packing 32GB of storage, available now for $269 on the Google ...

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11:23 AM

Well, that was fast. LG inadvertently outed a G-Pad tablet that would be getting the Play Edition treatment earlier today, and Google has ju...

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More than 5 million students in 167 countries are getting at least one hour of computer coding instruction this week as part of Code.org's Hour of Code initiative, an event designed to promote computer science in educational curricula worldwide. Code.org is providing educators with the resources they need to give students an introductory computer science lesson. One tutorial video, featuring lectures by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, walks students through basic algorithms, repeat-loops and conditionals using popular games as examples.


11:09 AM

More than 5 million students in 167 countries are getting at least one hour of computer coding instruction this week as part of Code.org...

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