Facebook birthday fundraisers, a feature that allows users to raise funds for the causes they care about and donate it to nonprofit organisations, raked in more than $300 million (roughly Rs. 9,100 crores) in the first year, the company has said. To make it easier for users to pick one non-profit from a list of over 750,000 nonprofits on Facebook, the social networking giant also announced new tools for people using the feature. “…we will soon provide more information: when you click on a nonprofit in the list, you can learn more about the organisation, their mission, location and how many…
Author: Loknath Das
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In its bid to deliver better experiences for its users, Twitter has removed support for some outdated but key developer tools in third-party apps. In a blog post on Thursday, Twitter said it will remove access to application programme interfaces (APIs) needed to power push notifications and an auto-refreshing timeline. “We’ve chosen to stop investing in other products including two legacy developer tools used by about 1 percent of third-party developers. This means that some Twitter-like apps will not be able to function the exact same way as before,” said Rob Johnson, Director of Product at Twitter. The changes will affect third-party Twitter apps including Tweetbot, Twitterrific,…
Facebook will broadcast Champions League matches in Latin America through 2021, UEFA announced Wednesday, in the latest bid by online platforms to tap into the lucrative live sports market. The deal will make Facebook “the exclusive free-to-air home for certain UEFA Champions League live matches across Spanish-speaking territories during the 2018-21 cycle,” UEFA said in a statement. The social network giant will show 32 matches per year, including the final, on UEFA’s Champions League Facebook page. The first match featured in the pact is Wednesday’s UEFA Super Cup, which sees Real Madrid face rivals Atletico Madrid. “We look forward to the launch…
Micro-blogging platform Twitter has been asked by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to comply with its requests to block objectionable content or face a shutdown in the country, the media reported on Thursday. According to a report in Dawn, Twitter is in danger of being banned in Pakistan because of the government’s inability to force the tech giant to bend to its notions of what is suitable for public consumption or falls within the constitutional realm of legitimate free speech. The PTA on Wednesday informed the Senate Standing Committee on Cabinet Secretariat that while Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms complied with…
Facebook has added a new feature to its under-13 chat application Messenger Kids, which makes it easier for the children to add their friends on the platform. “Parents have to turn on a setting that creates a four-word passphrase that is used to generate these contact requests,” Tech Crunch reported on Tuesday. The connection requests will be sent directly to the parents, who have to still approve every contact before they can interact with their kids via the platform. “Both parents will receive a contact request from their child and both have to approve the request before the kids can begin chatting. “In other…
Charter Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:CHTR) announced the launch of Spectrum Internet Gig for residential customers and Spectrum Business Internet Gig for small and medium-sized business clients in its south-central Wisconsin mar-kets, featuring the deployment of DOCSIS 3.1 internet services delivering a 1 Gbps connection to the home or business. Additionally, Spectrum will boost minimum internet speeds in its south-central Wisconsin markets to 200 Mbps at no additional cost to new and existing Spectrum Internet customers. Spectrum is fully committed to bringing faster internet speeds to the communities it serves with no modem fees or data caps. Spectrum Internet Gig is now…
If you walk through Havana, you’ll usually see groups of people huddled around certain plazas, parks and side streets with their cellphones held up to their faces. These people are online. In order to post a picture to Facebook, send an email or read the news, Cubans must buy an internet access card for about a dollar from Etecsa, the state-run telecommunications company, and then find a public hot spot — but that all seems set to change. On Tuesday, the Cuban government tested wireless internet directly on mobile phones nationwide for nine hours. The internet was free for the…
Next week, scientists working on artificial intelligence (AI) and games will be watching the latest human-machine matchup. But instead of a single pensive player squaring off against a computer, a team of five top video game players will be furiously casting magic spells and lobbing (virtual) fireballs at a team of bots called OpenAI Five. They’ll be playing the real-time strategy game Dota 2 at The International in Vancouver, Canada, an annual e-sports tournament that draws professional gamers who compete for millions of dollars. In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue AI bested chess champion Garry Kasparov. In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI beat Lee…
Turkey’s lira continued its recovery on Thursday, ahead of a crucial conference call between the country’s finance minister and international investors. It rose 2.5% in early trading, with one dollar buying 5.8 lira. A diplomatic spat with the US helped send the lira into a tailspin last week and it hit a record low of 7.2 to the dollar on Monday, sending tremors through emerging markets. However, the lira remains about 20% below where it was a month ago. European stock markets pushed higher on Thursday, with the FTSE 100 index in London up 0.6%. China’s announcement that it would send a trade delegation to…
Virtual pedagogical agents and intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have been used for many years to deliver education, with comprehensive reviews available for each field (1, 2). The use of social robots has recently been explored in the educational domain, with the expectation of similarly positive benefits for learners (3–5). A recent survey of long-term human-robot interaction (HRI) highlighted the increasing popularity of using social robots in educational environments (6), and restricted surveys have previously been conducted in this domain (7, 8). In this paper, we present a review of social robots used in education. The scope was limited to robots that were…