no more cubes

Author: Andreas

  • Behavioral advertising efficiency

    Researchers from U Minnesota, UC Irvine and CMU took a look into “behavioural based advertisement”, a segment that requires heavy tracking of users across websites through cookies. A report of their findings is here: Online Tracking and Publishers’ Revenues: An Empirical Analysis. Money quote:

    Empirical analysis of behavioral advertising finds that surveillance makes ads only 4% more profitable for media companies

    They found that despite the 40% “ad-tech” premium charged by behavioral ad companies, the ads only added about 4% the media companies that published them, meaning that behavioral advertising is a losing proposition.

    Source: Boing Boing

  • Leap Motion acquired by Ultrahaptics

    The 2010 founded AR and VR company, that was leading in hand tracking devices for VR usage had a few moments that made the tech-headlines. According to many sources, Apple tried to acquire the company twice, with the second attempt as recently as 2018. Past week, the company sold for $30 million.

    Today, we’re announcing a strategic deal with Ultrahaptics that combines the two companies and solidifies our collective role as the world’s leading spatial interaction company.

    Source: Leap Motion and Ultrahaptics Join Forces – Leap Motion Blog

  • Twitter comes back to the Mac

    The new Twitter app will be created using Apple’s Project Catalyst, that lets developers port apps from iOS to the recently announced macOS Version “Catalina”.

  • notepad.exe

    Until recently, notepad.exe was considered safe in terms of security vulnerability, mostly for its lack of features and therefore lack of attack surface. Until Vulnerability researcher at Google, Tavis Ormandy, took a closer look and popped a shell from notepad.exe.

    Awesome.

  • McDonalds safes bees.

    O_O.

    McDonalds safes bees. With the McHive. To give some tribute to the stereotype, we need to hope not all bees become bumblebees now.

    The McHive is keeping bees safe.

    Source: McDonald’s unveils tiniest replica ‘restaurant’ for bees

  • Apple’s 2019 WWDC announcements

    Good & Quick summary of everything announced at this years WWDC edition. A little bit of everything for everyone.

    Apple kicked off its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose this morning with a two-and-a-half hour keynote, showing off everything the company has been working on for the past many months. Want to know everything they announced, but don’t have time to watch the whole thing yourself? We’ve wrapped it all up for you […]

    Source: TechCrunch

  • Google Cloud Is Down

    Apparently Google was down the other day. Unfortunately, I was on a train in a really remote location and couldn’t verify what I picked up from Hacker News and tweeted.

    Meanwhile, there is a bit of broader coverage on Slashdot and The Verge, that hint at the size of the outage.

    Again, an outage like this reminds of the issues that remain with the Cloud, the difference to traditional infrastructure is merely scale at which an outage hits.

    Source: Google Cloud Is Down | Hacker News

  • Tech Days 2019

    Tech Days Munich 2019 just started.

  • LinkedIn Snaps Up Drawbridge

    Drawbridge, a company that provides Marketing Tooling to understand customers better, is LinkedIn’s second known acquisition in 8 Months. The volume of the deal is unknown.

    LinkedIn snaps up Drawbridge

    LinkedIn just acquired its 22nd-known company: Drawbridge. The smaller company will integrate with LinkedIn’s marketing services. The move jumps off of LinkedIn’s own growth in providing marketing tooling, according to the company’s blog post. LinkedIn claims that its “Marketing Solutions” business “accelerated” […]

    Source: LinkedIn Snaps Up Drawbridge, Its Second Known Acquisition In 8 Months