Technology and Body

Facebook Launches “Live” Streaming Video Feature, But Only For Celebrities Before Periscope and Meerkat jumpstarted the mobile live-streaming craze, Facebook was already quietly working on its own way to let public figures broadcast live videos to their fans. Today, Facebook is launching “Live” as a feature in its Mentions app that’s only available to celebrities with a verified Page. VIPs can start a Live broadcast that’s posted to the News Feed, watch comments overlaid in real-time on their stream, and then make the recording permanently available for viewing. Stars like The Rock and Serena Williams will stream today. As for when the average user might get broadcast abilities, Live product manager Vadim Lavrusik wouldn’t say, but told me “We think this will be an awesome experience for both public figures and also users. We want to get feedback from both public figures and viewers as we evolve the product.” Why should celebrities use Facebook Live instead of Pe...

When OneLogin Platform Engineer Isis Wenger agreed to participate in the company’s recruiting campaign, she felt pretty apathetic about it. She also didn’t anticipate the backlash that has come from it. “As a genuine introvert I have never cared much about gaining public attention and I really wasn’t prepared for how much everything blew up,” Wenger told me in an email. “Honestly when I see ads, I don’t think much of them and I certainly don’t try to read deeply into them. It was surprising to me to see that other people did.” The ad, pictured above, is part of OneLogin’s efforts to recruit more engineers. The recruiting campaign featured several of OneLogin’s engineers along with statements about why they like working at the company. For ultimate visibility, OneLogin put up the ads in both BART and MUNI stations at Embarcadero in San Francisco, OneLogin Director of Design and Brand Experience Chloë Bregman, who was in charge of t...

If you followed the Google Glass saga, you remember that everything started out pretty hunky dory. There was an exciting demo that included people jumping out of a plane. Then there were developers in line to pay $1,500 to have a play with them and build apps for the hardware. It was a developer-only program. What could go wrong? In the early days of Glass, numerous folks close to the project complained openly to me about one thing over and over again. Why would someone give a pair of Glass to well-known technology evangelist and former Microsoft employee Robert Scoble? I knew exactly what they were talking about. The “shower” incident. The BuzzFeed headline? “This Photo Of A Man Showering With Google Glass Will Haunt You For The Rest Of Your Life” And the photo. Oh, the horrible horrible photo: There are many who still work at Google who shudder at the thought of Glass in the shower with Scoble. In a way, it stalled all of the goodwill momentum the company had...