Technology and Body

Facebook wants to become your favorite Internet TV by tracking what a television never could. Today it announced a News Feed algorithm change that will show you more videos similar to ones you expand to full-screen, un-mute or opt to watch in HD, even if you don’t Like, share or comment. Those same signals will tell Facebook that a video is enjoyable so the News Feed shows it to more people. The more Facebook understands which videos are great and which are boring to which people, the faster it will grow its view count, which has already reached 4 billion per day — astounding considering it was at 1 billion per day in September. Just a few weeks ago, Facebook’s algorithm started factoring in how long you linger looking at posts and videos. Together with the new change, just pumping video content into Facebook won’t get you very far. Clips must be visually tantalizing from their first second, and vivid even when silent as that’s how they play unless you click. To g...

OnePlus 2 sketch, screen size details leak out One month to go We do know the OnePlus 2 is going to be unveiled on 27 July; we don't know exactly what to expect when it gets here. Fortunately, there are a few people willing to give us a preview. Take @KJuma on Weibo (the Chinese Twitter), for example - he's provided what he calls a "spy sketch" of what the phone's going to look like. It's not particularly revealing but it's better than nothing. The tipster also claims the OnePlus 2 is going to feature a screen between 5.5 and 5.7 inches, so it sounds like it might be slightly larger than the 5.5" OnePlus One released to widespread acclaim last year. Set your watches We already know from OnePlus itself that the phone is going to feature a USB Type-C connector and will have the Snapdragon 810 processor running everything under the bonnet. It's not the first early glimpse we've had of the incoming 2015 flagship from OnePlus...

Amazon Will Expand Its AWS Cloud Services To India In 2016 Amazon is continuing to push its AWS business in Asia after it announced plans to expand its cloud computing platform to India next year. The AWS foray into India follows the service’s localization in China last year, and it comes at a time when India’s startup scene is growing at speed. The country’s biggest players — which include billion dollar e-commerce platforms Snapdeal and Flipkart, Alibaba-backed mobile wallet Paytm and Uber rival Ola — are scaling at rapid clip, and with that comes increasingly complicated server and infrastructure demands which Amazon hopes a localized AWS service can cover. It isn’t just new companies that AWS is aiming to serve, though, more traditional businesses are a core part of its target base, too. On that note, Amazon said its initial launch partners will include automobile giant Tata Motors, media firm NDTV, and national flower retail chain Ferns N Petals...

Looking for a roommate can be a soul-crushing experience, especially if you are new to a city or on a tight budget. Flatchat wants to make the process a little less tedious for renters in India. The mobile-based platform recently picked up $2.5 million in seed funding from CommonFloor , one of India’s leading real-estate listing sites. Flatchat, which currently has about 40 employees, will use the funds to hire more people for its product and engineering teams, as well as expand into cities where there are high concentrations of students, young professionals, and other people who need roommates. The platform is available on mobile only and claims to have racked up 50,000 users since launching six months ago. About 350,000 messages were exchanged through its Android and iOS apps in May. Gaurav Munjal, who founded Flatchat along with Hemesh Singh, says the startup wants to save renters from combing through dozens of listings on multiple sites and paying broker fees. ...

How to Quickly Share Photos and Files Between iPhone and Android Over Wi-Fi Ads by Google Direct file sharing between iPhone and Android is still tricky to figure out. How do you quickly transfer a bunch of photos and videos to your friend’s Android without uploading them to an online tool (which requires consuming your mobile data) like WhatsApp or Dropbox? Uploading them to a cloud based storage service requires a good data plan, internet speed, patience and putting up with the disadvantages that come with some of these services (Whatsapp, for instance, resizes the images and videos before uploading). While all it would have taken is a simple Bluetooth file transfer, Apple loves to set restrictions for what goes in and out of their devices. But we work really hard to find some amazing workarounds to make file sharing simple for you guys. I am going to show you how you can transfer photos from iPhone to Android and vice versa using Wi-Fi, even when you don’t...

How to Upload All Your Photos from Everywhere to Google Photos Ads by Google Google Photos is free and awesome. As we’ve decided before, it’s not going to hurt you to try it out. But trying it out means uploading hundreds or thousands of your pictures to Google Photos. And because Google Photos didn’t exist till now, your photo collection is messed up. Your iPhone photos might be in iCloud Photo Library/Dropbox, DSLR photos might be in the iPhoto/Lightroom library and years old photos might be stashed in a folder somewhere. Sadly, there’s no 1-click way to automatically upload all photos from Dropbox to Google Photos (there’s no API yet). So we’ll need to do this manually. But once it’s done, you can start to reap the many, many benefits of Google Photos. Step Zero: Install Google Photos Backup First thing you need to do, even before we start gathering photos from the 63 different services you’ve signed up for, is to install Google Photos Backup . It’s just ...