Eric David
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Placemeter uses computer vision to help build smarter cities
Computer vision startup Placemeter Inc. launched a new set of tools today that could change the way cities are built, affecting everything from where crosswalks are placed to the locations businesses choose to set up shop. Placemeter’s “urban intelligence platform” uses computer vision to extract data from video of public places, tracking the movement patterns of pedestrian and ...
Sony announces slimmer PlayStation 4 model with 1TB of storage
Sony Corp has announced that a new PlayStation 4 model called the “Ultimate Player Edition” will be hitting the market by the end of next month, first arriving in Japan at the end of June and then reaching Europe and North America later in July. The new model will feature a slimmer design, as well as ...
Amazon uses machine learning to improve reviews and weed out fakes
Product reviews on sites like Amazon.com can have a huge impact on what consumers buy, and improving the quality of those reviews is in the best interests of just about everyone involved. That is why Amazon Inc is revitalizing its review system by using machine learning to highlight good reviews and weed out bad ones. ...
Indie dev on why he doesn’t believe in Steam Sales
One of the reasons Valve Corp’s Steam client is so popular is the frequent discounts the platform gives to games, especially the massive winter and summer sales that last for nearly half a month. But not everyone is a fan of big discounts or game bundles. Alain Puget, Creative Director of French indie studio Alkemi Games, ...
Amazon will start paying some Kindle authors for each page read
Amazon Inc is introducing a new payment model for certain Kindle authors that will pay them by pages read, rewarding the people who write books that have more than catchy titles. The new pay feature will specifically affect authors who are part of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program, which allows authors to easily self-publish ...
PlayStation has no plans to follow Xbox’s example with backwards compatibility
Microsoft Corp surprised Xbox fans at this year’s E3 by announcing that it would be introducing backwards compatibility to Xbox One. Meanwhile, fans of the PlayStation 4 eagerly awaited for Sony Corp to announce that it intended to follow suit, but it does not look like that will be happening anytime soon—or ever. It seems ...
Steam Spy creator sheds light on how Steam users buy and play games
Valve Corp does not give out much information regarding the millions of people who use its digital game platform, Steam, and that makes it difficult for developers and marketers to get a handle on the way people buy and play their games through it. A few third-party tools have popped up in the last few months ...
WhatsApp gets a failing grade on EFF privacy scorecard
Privacy is a growing concern in the digital age, and few companies find themselves being criticised for how they handle user privacy more than Facebook Inc. Apparently some of those problems also extend to the social network’s other properties, including its popular messaging service WhatsApp. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) recent “Who has your back?” privacy ...
Facebook tests out “See First” feature for more personalized News Feed
Over the last few years, Facebook Inc has been slowly tweaking the way News Feed works to make it easier for users to see the content that actually interests them. That can be hard when some users have hundreds of “friends,” many of whom they probably wouldn’t even recognize if they passed them on the ...
YouTube launches ‘Newswire’ service for eyewitness videos
Google Inc announced today that it has partnered with social news agency Storyful to create a new video hub called the YouTube Newswire, which Google describes as “a curated feed of the most newsworthy eyewitness videos of the day.” “Today, more than 5 million hours of news video is watched on YouTube every day, and the role of the ...