The NBA announced today that it was bringing natural language queries to its online stats pages on NBA.com. The feature enables fans to type a question in a natural way and the site should come back with your answer without having to dig for it. The feature is launching in Beta starting tomorrow. The technology underlying this new functionality is supplied by a partnership with SAP using… Read More
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Facebook says it’s testing a way for users to receive, read and respond to their SMS-based conversations in its Messenger application for mobile devices. The feature, which would be optional if broadly rolled out, could help to shift users away from their default texting application and see them increasing their time spent Facebook Messenger instead. Also new is added support for… Read More
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No one wants to go to a car dealership. We’re in the era where everything can be done online, so it’s crazy you can’t buy a new car straight from the web. Every site and startup that claims to help you do that just dumps you on a contact form to request more info or a meeting with a car dealer. But Drive Motors does exactly what you imagine should already happen. It’s… Read More
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PayPal’s first acquisition after it separated from eBay in 2015 was of a young startup called Modest, which had built a platform for small businesses to integrate buy buttons across third-party apps. Now, PayPal is taking the wraps off a new product that will integrate Modest’s technology. PayPal Commerce — as the new service is called — launches today in closed… Read More
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Twitch, the Amazon-owned video game streaming site, has been growing in popularity as more of today’s younger users look to online video instead of traditional television for entertainment. Today, the company released figures that paint of picture of its user base and how deeply they engage with Twitch’s content. Though the company didn’t disclose how many total users it has,… Read More
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Video is booming on Instagram with watch time up 40% in 6 months, so now it’s trying to lure the best video makers and marketers from competitors like Vine and YouTube. Over the next few weeks, Instagram will begin showing view counts on videos where the Like number used to be, though you can still click through to see the heart count. As on Facebook, 3 seconds counts as a view. With… Read More
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Millions of people in Southeast Asia are going online for the first time through their smartphones. The region’s “mobile-first” approach makes it especially attractive for e-commerce, social network, and gaming companies—when their apps work, that is. Unfortunately, users are often frustrated by slow connection speeds. Neumob, a service that decreases load times for… Read More
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Twitter had a terrible, horrible, no good very bad earnings day, and unfortunately, the only thing that might save it is a time machine. The company announced that it saw zero growth in its total user count. Excluding SMS-only users, it actually declined from 307 million to 305 million users. That’s despite it launching and buying expensive TV commercials promoting Moments, which was… Read More
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Twitter can be an incredibly confusing service for new and existing users, and Twitter says it’s now planning to address some rules that might make it unwieldy. In the company’s letter to shareholders, the company said that changes were coming to rules like the @reply and the .@name syntax. We don’t know what that looks like just yet, but that the company plans to address… Read More
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After a short hiatus, Bullish has returned. The talk show is exactly how you remember it, except with a new host (that’s me, MRD!) and way better music. Sorry I’m not sorry, Alex!
Anyway, this week we brought in Matthew Schwab, president of on-demand flower delivery BloomThat, to shed some light on the on-demand economy, expectations around liability and delivery logistics. Read More
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