BizVentor

Today is Samsung day. The company is about to unveil its new big phone — the Samsung Galaxy Note 8. While there has been leaks of the new device, the company could surprise everyone with new software features and new components. KEY SPECS                      Display                   6.30-inch                      Processor                1.6GHz octa-core                      Front Camera         8-megapixel                      Rear Camera          12-meg...

Instagram inception, here we come. If somebody sends you a photo or video in a private conversation on Instagram, the app will now let you play around with the original photo so that you can reply in a creative way and keep the context of the conversation. If you receive a photo or video, there’s now a reply button in the conversation thread. If you tap on this button, the original photo is instantly turned into a sticker in the top right corner. You can leave it there and reply with some context But you can also move it around, tilt it and draw around it. If you’re replying to a video, it looks like Instagram only keeps a screenshot of the first frame. If you tap on it, the original photo fills the top half of the screen. You can then take a selfie for the bottom half of the photo. It reminds me of frontback, a photo-sharing app that lets you take a photo of what you have in front of you, and a photo of your reaction with a selfie. Instagram works the same way as ...

Facebook earlier today began rolling out a series of design updates to its app and website. It says the tweaked look will make your News Feed easier to navigate, but the first thing you'll probably notice are your friends' circular display pictures. Goodbye squares, we hardly knew ye. In a Tuesday blog post, Facebook said the goal of the updates is to make Facebook "more conversational and easier to read and navigate." To do that, the company will be updating the comment layout in posts, making link previews on your News Feed bigger and adding new Like, Comment and Share buttons. You can read about all of the changes -- many of which you might not even notice -- here. The move to circular display pictures is bold, considering how much Twitter was mocked for doing the same back in April. This update appears to be fairly incremental, though the company does have some grand plans. It last week announced Facebook Watch, a streaming service to compete with YouTube...

These are unequivocally the best Android games on the planet and some of the best games on any system right now.       1. Hearthstone              Trailer             Google Play link            Price: Free   2. Rayman: Legends       Trailer      Google Play link        Price: Free       3. Battleheart          Trailer              Google Play link                Price: Free  4. Ingress Android         Trailer       Google Play link         Price: Free      5. The Room series ...

Interest in blockchains is at an all-time high, but there are still plenty of technical issues to solve, especially for enterprises that want to adopt this technology for smart contracts and other use cases. For them, issues like throughput, latency, governance and confidentiality are still major stumbling blocks for using blockchains. With its new Coco Framework, Microsoft wants to solve these issues and make blockchains more suitable for the enterprise. In an interview earlier this week, Microsoft’s CTO for Azure (and occasional novelist) Mark Russinovich told me the company is seeing a lot of interest in blockchain technology among its users. They like the general idea of a distributed ledger, but a system that can only handle a handful of transactions a second doesn’t work for them — what they want is a technology that can handle a thousand or more transactions per second. The Coco Framework solves these fundamental issues with blockchains by introducing a trusted execution envir...

Facebook Messenger bots are used for everything from ordering food to reading news to booking flights. In the hands of crisis-mapping platform Ushahidi, they're also monitoring election-related violence. The use of Facebook Messenger is just the latest example of the social networking titan's increased role in elections. Facebook's presence in the political process runs the gamut, from the flak it has taken for spreading lies that helped sway the US election to the tools it has shared before the UK and Kenya elections to combat fake news. One of the manifestations of the company's investment in artificial intelligence is Messenger. "The Messenger bot makes it easy for citizens to answer the multiple questions in a report through the automated dialogue with the bot," Nat Manning, Ushahidi's interim executive director, said in a blog post. "Importantly, the bot includes the ability to easily send and receive text and images and interaction with struct...

Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito ft. Daddy Yankee” is not only the most-streamed song of all time, it also is the most-watched YouTube video ever, surpassing more than 3 billion views on the Alphabet-owned video site. The previously most-watched video, Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” held the crown for just over three weeks, though Despacito’s reign will likely be much longer given just how quickly it has managed to dominate the service. The Spanish-language music video has managed to rack up this mind-boggling amount of views in less than seven months, much quicker than the 26 months it took Wiz Khalifa’s song to overtake Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” Since its release on January 12, it has been watched nearly 15 million times every day, or 170 times per second. A remixed version of “Despacito” featuring Justin Bieber has nearly 500 million views as well. The significance of the top video of all-time being Spanish-language shows just how global YouTube’s reach has managed to...

  YouTube Music will now allow the YouTube Red members to download music for offline  access for up to 30 days by downloading their favorite songs. With this, users can now keep listening to their favorite artists even when they are nor connected to the internet or want to save on data. After the latest update, users will find a new 'Save Offline' option under the Menu icon,after which they are given the choice to save just the audio, SD video or HD video.  "The number of songs you can download depends on how much free space is available on your device. It is also impacted by the length and quality of the audio or video files that you wish to save." said the company in its official blog. Offline access to music was earlier enabled through "Offline Mixtape" feature. This feature automatically  generates songs based on users listening habits and what Google thought they will like to listen to.

  It’s the end of an era as Microsoft is planning to remove the legendary Paint software from the upcoming Windows 10 update. This could mean Paint will be removed entirely in a future update. MS Paint has been in existence for over 32 years – ever since the company released the first Windows operating system in 1985. The company has announced a list of applications that will be either “removed” or “deprecated” from the Windows 10 Fall Creators update, which is due to release later this year. Not just Microsoft Paint, the software giant is planning to kill Outlook Express, Reader app and Reading list in a future update.

Facebook abandoned an experiment after two artificially intelligent programs appeared to be chatting to each other in a strange language only they understood. The two chatbots came to create their own changes to English that made it easier for them to work – but which remained mysterious to the humans that supposedly look after them. The bizarre discussions came as Facebook challenged its chatbots to try and negotiate with each other over a trade, attempting to swap hats, balls and books, each of which were given a certain value. But they quickly broke down as the robots appeared to chant at each other in a language that they each understood but which appears mostly incomprehensible to humans. The robots had been instructed to work out how to negotiate between themselves, and improve their bartering as they went along. But they were not told to use comprehensible English, allowing them to create their own "shorthand", according to researchers. The actual ...