Need to send a link to a website? Share an image or GIF? A lot of the time, people leave their messaging app to share this type of content. Google doesn’t think that’s intuitive.
Google’s solution is Gboard, a keyboard for iOS that lets users search directly through the keyboard. It’s similar to how third-party keyboards like Giphy Keys and Riffsy’s GIF Keyboard work, except rather than solely searching for GIFs, you can run normal Google searches.
We learned that Google was building such a tool earlier this year, and now the release comes less than a week before the search giant’s developer conference, Google I/O.
The keyboard almost looks exactly like the iOS 9 keyboard, except you’ll see a colorful G button at the top left. Tapping on it opens up a Google search bar within the keyboard, and results will show up below the search bar. So if you search for a business like The Meatball Shop, as shown in the video, you’ll be able to share the address directly from the search result without ever having to leave your messaging app.
Gboard, which supports Glide Typing, makes sharing YouTube videos, flight details, and more much simpler. According to Bri Connelly, assistant product manager at Google, multi-language support will arrive in a future update. Connelly made the comments on Product Hunt, where she also addressed a question regarding the lack of an Android version of the app.
“Working on the best way to bring the same functionality to Android right now,” Connelly said. It’s unclear if this means the Gboard app will launch on Android in the future, or if the Google search feature is being integrated into the stock Google Keyboard on Android.
Gboard works in any app, as it replaces your default keyboard. Once you run a search, you can choose whether you want to see web results, images, or GIFs. That’s right — you can easily search for GIFs to quickly share through Gboard, and you can also search through emojis. Voice search isn’t compatible with the keyboard.
If you’re worried about sending the very words you type out to Google, the Mountain View company says other than your searches, Gboard doesn’t send anything you type to Google.
“Gboard will remember words you type to help you with spelling or to predict searches you might be interested in, but this data is stored only on your device,” according to Gboard’s support page. “This data can’t be accessed by Google or by any apps other than Gboard.”
So only anything you search goes to Google’s servers, just like a regular Google search.
Gboard for iOS is available to download on iTunes.
Portrait smiling family on beach. Getty Images/Hero Images 10 Things to Remember When Buying Insurance
By Janet Hunt Insurance Company Reviews Expert About.com Money |
To be honest, most people only think about insurance when they need it, after a devastating loss or calamity has occurred. This is when you need your insurance company to come through for you and restore you or make you whole again. Unfortunately, if you don’t do your homework beforehand in getting the best insurance coverage available to protect your and your family’s health, assets and financial well-being; you may be left in a very bad situation without remedy. The time to find the best insurance for your needs is before such a loss occurs. Use these tips to make sure you are prepared for life’s unexpected events.
1. Find a Reputable Insurance Company: Protecting you and your family’s assets and financial well-being is something that you depend on your insurance company to do without question. However, you can’t trust your family’s future to just any company without checking it out first. Insurance rating organizations can help with this.
2. Shop and Compare: In the day of the worldwide web, insurance comparison shopping is not as difficult a task as it once was. You don’t have to physically go from agent to agent or even online from company to company to find the best value on an insurance policy. By using comparison websites, you can get five or more quote comparisons side-by-side so you can compare apples to apples. Many of these sites will also allow you to purchase coverage right from the comparison shopping website. There are many great insurance comparison shopping websites out there including NetQuote, CoverHound, Compare.com, 4freequotes.com, InsureMe and many more.
3. Take Advantage of Discounts: Raising a family and taking care of all your family’s financial needs is an expensive undertaking. No one wants to pay more for insurance than they have to. One way to make sure you are getting the best deal possible is to take advantage of all available discounts. There may even be hidden discounts not readily seen on a website or that your agent tells you about. Ask to see if you are getting all the available discounts you qualify to receive. Common discounts that can help you find the best value on an insurance policy include multi-policy discounts, safe driving discounts, home ownership discounts, discounts for safety devices installed and many more. There may even be some little known insurance discounts you qualify to receive.
4. Cheaper is not Always Better: Cut-rate insurance prices can unfortunately also mean cut-rate customer service and claims. The old adage you often get what pay for can sometimes be true. Of course, this is not to say that highly-rated insurance companies cannot also offer affordable insurance rates. If in doubt about how a company may satisfy customer complaints, check out its record with the Better Business Bureau. Other organizations that can help you determine an insurance companies performance include The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), J.D. Power & Associates, and customer satisfaction surveys from websites such as Insure.com.
5. Ask the Agent for a Best Offer: If you are using an insurance agent instead of buying directly from an insurance company, he may be giving you what he thinks is a good deal on an insurance policy. However, it doesn’t hurt to ask if you can get a better price or perhaps a more comprehensive coverage package plan. Independent insurance agents often represent many different companies and would have more quotes for comparison than a “captive agent.” A captive agent is one who only represents one company and will only offer you the policy options from the company he represents. Once you are given a final price if that isn’t good enough, tell the agent so. Often the final price is not really the final price. Your agent may be able to go back to the insurance company and ask if a lower rate is available. Anyway, it doesn’t hurt to ask…
6. Your Agent is Not Always the Last Word: Insurance agents for the most part give good advice about the policy and coverage options you need. After all, most insurance agents receive insurance licensing and training that makes them qualified to give sound advice. However, there are abundant resources available to you if you feel you need to research your options further. It is best to make the best choice for coverage options now than to be sorry later when you have a claim and are underinsured and do not have the right coverage. Then it is too late to get the right policy. One great resource to check out when looking for insurance knowledge is the Insurance Information Institute.
7. You can Upgrade Later: There may be occasions when financial restraints may prevent you from getting the coverage options you want and need. In any case, at the minimum you should at least buy the minimum coverage required by law from your state’s Department of Insurance. Once you are more financially steady, you can upgrade your policy to include a more comprehensive coverage package. It doesn’t hurt to give your insurance agent a “target premium” which would be an ideal price you would be willing to pay for insurance coverage. Progressive Insurance offers a feature call the “name your price tool” which will allow you to get coverage at a price you can afford.
8. Tell the Truth: Did you realize that an insurance company is not legally obligated to honor your policy and pay claims if you knowingly misrepresented the truth on your application? This includes things such as lying about how many speeding tickets or accidents you’ve had in the past. Getting a cheaper premium is not worth the risk of the company cancelling your policy because you misrepresented the truth. Often, the company will not outright cancel your policy but will contact you for an additional premium required to maintain coverage once the rates are adjusted.
9. Coverage is not Always Automatic: If you buy a new vehicle or add additional structures to your property, they may be automatically covered for a time. However, there is a time limit to this coverage. Normally, you have a specific time frame, perhaps 30-days (this could be more or less depending on your company) to contact the insurance company and let them know of your purchase. The same goes with trading in a vehicle for another one. The coverage will transfer to your new vehicle, but only temporarily unless you notify your insurance company. Check with your insurance agent or company for the specific notification requirements of your policy.
10. Re-evaluate Your Coverage: Life changes come to all. When you have a significant life change, such as a major purchase, a move, getting married, getting divorced, having children, etc.; it is likely that this will affect your insurance coverage and you may need to update your coverage. Even if you’ve had no major life events, it is still a good idea to do an annual policy check-up with your insurance agent and make any necessary changes.
Finding the best coverage to protect you and your family from whatever life may throw at you doesn’t have to be a difficult or confusing process. Use all the tools and resources you can find to make finding the right coverage a smoother process. A little homework and research will go a long way to giving you and your family the peace and security you deserve.
The fuss over a social-networking site possibly manipulating its list of trending topics reached a predictably silly extreme Tuesday when the chair of Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation sent a sternly worded letter demanding answers.
While we wait to see how Facebook founder, chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg responds to the inquiry from Sen. John Thune (R.-S.D.) over Gizmodo’s report that Facebook staffers suppressed right-wing news sources in its Trending list, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Facebook’s Trending list needs help
Facebook’s Trending list—towards the top right of the News Feed in a desktop browser, shown in its mobile apps when you tap the search field—has historically functioned as a real-time display of the poor taste of other Facebook users.
As I type this, the list in a test account and the one visible in my real account feature such info-morsels as Justin Bieber’s new tattoo and the latest uttering by Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty” about who should use which bathrooms.
I am about as interested in Bieber’s tattoos and Robertson’s takes on gender identity as I am in their grasp of nuclear physics.
And yet Facebook drives an enormous amount of news readership among younger users: A 2015 Pew Research Centersurvey found that 61% of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 get political news via Facebook in a given week.
(Facebook also maintains a less-inane trends database called Signal, but only journalists can sign up for it. I should use it more often.)
Without some oversight, Trending would be worse
Facebook’s Trending list, however, looks like the Economist next to the stuff in my News Feed, where I routinely see people share “news” that is not just vapid but fake and deliberately so.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning PolitiFact has an entire category for “Facebook Posts.” That fact-check site has rated 36% of them “pants on fire” made-up, 18% entirely “false,” and 14 % “mostly false.”
The problem of hoaxes going viral on Facebook is bad enough that the Washington Post launched a weekly “What Was Fake” feature to debunk this nonsense. Less than two years later, my former employer gave up trying because people sharing these hoaxes ignored its help.
Do you want that kind of popular garbage in Trending? Facebook apparently thinks you don’t, most likely because you’d recoil in horror from such an honest mirror.
Filtering demands human judgment. But whose?
Gizmodo’s story, citing testimony from two former Facebook contractors, reports that the social network “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers.”
Gizmodo technology editor Michael Nunez added that more of these “news curators”—which he described in an earlier post as overworked and prone to burnout—said they’d injected other topics into the list and kept stories about Facebook itself out of this spotlight.
Facebook’s response, less than a day later: We do no such things. Search vice president Tom Stocky posted that Trending starts with an algorithmically-generated list of stories that human curators then filter to remove “junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources.”
Stocky added: “Our reviewers’ actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense.” He did not share any of those logs.
Filtering for truth can set back sites that publish things that are false
Here’s where the Gizmodo report and Stocky’s rebuttal could overlap. Nunez’s post cites Breitbart.com and Drudge Report as news sources that suffer from Facebook’s filtering—but they also often publish untruths.
Well before its recent turn as Donald Trump’s cheering section, Breitbart was notorious for running nonsense like a reportthat former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R.-Neb.) had spoken before the nonexistent group “Friends of Hamas.”
Drudge, meanwhile, uncritically links to conspiracy-theory sites like Infowars and has been known to use a photo of Palestinians with a headline about Mexican illegal immigration because… they’re all brown anyway?
But now that the Republican Party is set to nominate Donald Trump, a man with a habit of making stuff up and recycling other people’s lies, Facebook’s ambition to keep Trending a truth-first zone may be unsustainable.
A little transparency could have spared us much of this angst
Facebook’s documentation of Trending captures none of this nuance. That help page blandly states that “topics you see are based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you’ve liked and your location.”
This falls into a larger pattern of Facebook being intentionally obscure about its basic workings. The popularity of any one thing we share and the makeup of our News Feeds remain mysteries.
That represents a striking contrast to the situation at Twitter and Google, which face the same problems of spam and abuse but have been able to provide a little more clarity about their systems.
With that history at Facebook, it’s not much of a surprise that people now see a conspiracy afoot in a place where nobody may have any time to conduct one.
Soon millions of high school seniors will be opening their college acceptance letters and deciding where they’ll spend the next four years. And with the average cost of a four-year (public) college degree now topping $36,000, there’s more pressure than ever for families to come up with smart ways to lower those costs.
Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, a longtime financial coach and author of “College Secrets: How to Save Money, Cut College Costs and Graduate Debt Free”, is something of an expert in this area. When her daughter Aziza, 18, was accepted to seven universities last spring, they knew they would have to be creative in finding ways to cover her tuition. Not only did Aziza have her sights set on out-of-state schools, which would mean paying much higher tuition rates than locals, but like many other middle-class families in the U.S. today, their household income would likely be too high to qualify for need-based financial aid.
Using some clever scholarship strategies, they were able to wrangle nearly $500,000 in scholarship, grant and award money offers from all of the schools combined. In the end, Aziza accepted her offer from the University of Texas at Austin. With tuition and room and board combined, UT would have cost her family over $42,000 per year. But with a mix of institutional scholarships and local scholarships, the family was able to reduce their costs to just $5200 per year.
Khalfani-Cox recently launched an online course where she teaches families how to win college scholarships.
“It's about empowering yourself and knowing the resources that are out there,” Khalfani-Cox told Yahoo Finance. “And there's a ton of them, not only to help you get free tuition but a whole bunch of other college freebies, too.”
We asked Khalfani-Cox to share her best tips:
View photo
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Photo: Lynnette Khalfani-Cox
Scholarship committees are looking for two things: leadership and charity work.
“College scholarship committees love to reward students who have gone like one step above and beyond,” she says. Her daughter was not only president of her school’s French club, but she decided to launch a new multicultural club to help foster racial and cultural harmony in her New Jersey school. The scholarship committee at notoriously tightfisted New York University was so impressed, it awarded her daughter a coveted $50,000-a-year scholarship through their Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholars Program.
Committees also love to see students who are engaged in their communities. “Don't feel like you have to cure cancer or anything,” she says. “Make it whatever it is that the student likes to do.” If they’re into the outdoors, get them engaged in a community garden group. If they love literature, maybe they could tutor younger or disadvantaged kids in your community.
Merit-based aid is your friend.
As college costs rise, competition for need-based grants and scholarships has never been tougher. Khalfani-Cox, whose middle-income household earnings edged her daughter out of those opportunities, recommends harnessing the power of the student’s academic performance for merit-based aid and scholarships. The best source of merit aid can be the universities or colleges themselves, which are eager to attract top talent.
All of Aziza's scholarship awards were based on merit. The largest of them all — a special waiver offered by UT that reduced her tuition from the out-of-state rate to the in-state tuition rate — saved her over $27,000 alone.
“If a kid is in the top 25% of the incoming student population, you can be sure he or she is going to get some merit-based aid,” Khalfani-Cox says.
Start building your resume in your early teens.
Yes, teenagers should have resumes, Khalfani-Cox says. It can be difficult to reach back in time and try to recall a decade’s worth of activities and extracurriculars your child has been involved in. Khalfani-Cox recommends keeping a file on your computer at home with a running list of all their achievements and activities, much like a professional resume. “Even my 10-year-old has a resume,” she adds. “Schools themselves and private scholarship committees...they all like to know what you've been doing.”
They key activities scholarship committees and schools will look for are sports, volunteer work, part-time jobs, and community engagement.
Don’t wait till senior year to apply for scholarships.
“People think they have to wait until a kid is a senior in high school to start applying. And nothing could be further from the truth,” Khalfani-Cox says. “There are scholarships out there that are available to kindergartners.” The prime time to start sussing out scholarship opportunities is when kids are in middle school.
Forget Google — your friends and family can be a great source for scholarships.
“So often when students are applying for a scholarships, they’re thinking about themselves, what they've done,” Khalfani-Cox says. “Think about your parents. Think about your grandparents.” Aziza won a $2,000 annual scholarship ($8,000 in total) through, of all places, her grandmother’s insurance company. She qualified because her grandmother was a policyholder, but many major employers have scholarships and grants available to children of employees.
“You don't know, maybe [you have a family member] in a sorority or a local business club or a community-based organization. Write down the names of all of them and then go approach those organizations.”
Get colleges to pay you to visit.
Khalfani-Cox spent hundreds of dollars taking Aziza on campus visits across the country before she realized some schools have special “fly-in” programs. The programs vary depending on the school, but two universities (Emory University in Atlanta and The University of Texas at Austin) offered Aziza all-expenses paid campus visits. Other schools offer to reimburse families for travel expenses or offer academic credits in exchange for a student’s visit.
“Families are spending hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands of dollars, and they don't even know that they could be recouping those costs or not paying them at all,” she says.
Mandi Woodruff is a reporter for Yahoo Finance and host of Brown Ambition, a weekly podcast about career, life and money.
Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang said that his company’s graphics chips are “further ahead [of the competition] than at any other time in our history.” Nvidia announced its newest graphics chips for PCs last week, with the high-end products aimed at gamers and virtual reality fans at the outset.
“Our PC gaming platform, GeForce, is strong and it’s getting stronger than ever,” he said. “Our GPU architecture is just superior. We dedicated an enormous amount of effort to advancing our GPU architecture. The engineering of Nvidia is exquisite. Our craftsmanship is unrivaled anywhere.” Nvidia has new chips coming out this summer that it hopes will cement its grip on the high-end PC gaming market.
He said the scale of Nvidia’s efforts in designing GPUs is the biggest in the world, because, “This is the one thing that we do.”
Earlier today, the graphics chip maker reported earnings for its fIrst fiscal quarter ended April 30 that beat Wall Street’s expectations. Nvidia’s results are a bellwether for the PC industry, as the company is one of the largest makers of graphics chips. Its results are also indicators of the health of sectors such as PC gaming hardware, graphics-enhanced data center computing, deep learning, and car computing. The PC market isn’t growing like it once did, but Nvidia still did well.
The Santa Clara, California-based company reported non-GAAP earnings of 46 cents a share (up 39 percent from a year ago) on revenue of $1.30 billion, up 13 percent from a year ago.
Above: Tim Sweeney of Epic Games with Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia.
Image Credit: Nvidia
Analysts had expected non-GAAP earnings of 31 cents a share on revenue of $1.27 billion. Nvidia has an estimated 81 percent share of the discrete graphics card market, according to Jon Peddie Research. Nvidia’s stock is up 4.8 percent to $37.30 a share in after-hours trading. Nvidia’s outlook for the second fiscal quarter is revenue of $1.35 billion and gross profit margins of 58 percent.
Gaming revenue was $687 million, up from $587 million a year ago, thanks in part to interest in virtual reality headsets. Huang said that Nvidia’s advantage goes beyond chips, as the company has created a hardware-software platform.
“It’s about evolving all of the algorithms that sit on top of our GPUs,” Huang said. “It’s about making sure the experience just works.”
Huang said the company works closely with game developers to make the games work properly. Nvidia creates the GeForce Experience software to enable gamers to do things like record their gaming experiences. AMD does this too. But Huang believes “it’s not just about chips anymore.”
Nvidia grew up as a PC graphics chip company, and it is the last stand-alone maker of such chips, in competition with microprocessor makers Intel and AMD. But Huang has dedicated most of the time in Nvidia’s recent press conferences to Nvidia’s attempts to create supercomputers for cars, which could fuel innovations such as dashboard electronics, infotainment systems, and self-driving cars. He also recently announced its new consumer PC graphics chipsbased on its Pascal architecture.
The company unveiled the graphics processing units (GPUs) at a live event in Austin, Texas, on Friday night. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs represent the newest generation of graphics for consumer computers, and they come at a time when 3D graphics is being pushed to its limit by virtual reality headsets.
The consumer GPUs come a month after Nvidia unveiled the very first Pascal-based GPU, the P100, which was targeted at deep learning neural networks. Pascal is a new master design, dubbed an architecture, for a whole generation of chips that also come with a new manufacturing process. The process, based on the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing’s 16 nanometer FinFET node technology, represents a new spin of Moore’s Law, or the prediction that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every couple of years. This process will enable chips that are faster, smaller, and cheaper than previous generations.
The previous generation of chips used the 28-nanometer TSMC process that has been available to Nvidia and rival Advanced Micro Devices since 2012. With the new process, Nvidia was able to create the P100 with 15 billion transistors on a single chip. The GTX 1080 and 1070 are slimmed-down versions of the P100. The GPUs have about 3,584 CUDA cores. Gamers will use that hardware to push their games to the limit, Huang said.
“Regarding Pascal, we are expecting a lot,” Huang said. “It’s in full production. Yields are good. Building these semiconductors are very hard, but we are very good at it. We wouldn’t have announced it if we didn’t have manufacturing under control.”
The possible future of transit zipped along a short track in the desert outside Las Vegas on Wednesday before sliding to a stop in a bed of sand, sending up a tan wave.
Hyperloop One, a start-up hoping to revolutionize transport systems, held its first public test of engine components being designed to rocket pods carrying people or cargo through tubes at speeds of 700 miles per hour (1,125 kilometers) or more.
The company hopes to realize a futuristic vision laid out three years ago by billionaire Elon Musk, the entrepreneur behind electric car company Tesla and private space exploration endeavor Space X.
“This is a significant moment for us as a team,” Hyperloop co-founder Shervin Pishevar said to an invitation-only crowd seated in grandstand seats set up opposite the length of electrified track.
“We are standing on hallowed ground for us; the team has worked incredibly hard to get to what we call our Kitty Hawk preview.”
The US town of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina went down in history as the locale where the Wright brothers made the first successful flight of a powered plane in 1903.
The test under the Nevada desert sun was a step in developing a propulsion system that would give super high-speed motion to passenger or cargo pods gliding above magnetically charged rails enclosed in tubes.
A sled bracketed to the rail was slung into motion using magnetic force generated by engines referred to as “stators” set in a line at the start of the track.
Eventually the sled, which will evolve into a chassis of sorts for a pod, will accelerate to more than 400 miles an hour in a few seconds, according to Hyperloop One co-founder Brogan BamBrogan.
The long-term vision for Hyperloop One – which is competing with another firm to be the first to bring the system to life – is to have something that moves at near-supersonic speeds.
“When you think about passengers traveling on this, you will feel no more acceleration than you would on an airplane taking off,” BamBrogan said after the successful test.
After accelerating, the pods will essentially glide for long distances, making for smooth rides and low power consumption, according to BamBrogan.
“The goal of this test isn’t just to move this sled,” he said. “It is to engineer an acceleration system that is scalable for passengers and freight and to bring the cost down.”
Hyperloop One promised a full-scale, full-speed test involving two kilometers of tube-enclosed track at the desert site by the end of this year.
“Today, we are one step closer to making Hyperloop real,” said the start-up’s chief executive Rob Lloyd.
“We will be moving cargo in 2019, and we think we will have passengers safely transported by Hyperloop in 2021.”
Hyperloop super-fast rail to hit milestone
Elon Musk’s vision of a Hyperloop transport system that carries passengers in pressurized tubes at near-supersonic speeds is on track to hit a milestone on Tuesday.
Musk outlined his futuristic idea in a paper released in 2013, challenging innovators to bring the dream to life.
Hyperloop Technologies, one of the startups that picked up the gauntlet thrown by Musk, is hosting a “sneak preview of the future of transportation technology” during a two-day event billed as involving a demonstration at a test site outside Las Vegas.
A series of tweets fired from the Twitter account @HyperloopTech teased “big announcements you don’t want to miss” and included a video snippet of construction in the desert.
A caption in the video clip heralded a “milestone event” that would be live-tweeted from Las Vegas beginning Tuesday evening there.
Kitty Hawk moment
Late last year, Hyperloop chief executive Rob Lloyd said in an online post that the team was working toward a “Kitty Hawk” moment in 2016.
The post came with word of an agreement to use an industrial park in the city of North Las Vegas to conduct a Propulsion Open Air Test of the blazingly-fast rail system.
Lloyd described it at the time as a very important step on the way to realizing the full potential of Hyperloop Tech.
“Our ‘Kitty Hawk’ moment refers to our first full system, full scale, full speed test,” Lloyd said.
“This will be over two miles of tube with a controlled environment and inside that tube we will levitate a pod and accelerate it to over 700 miles (1,125 kilometers) per hour.”
He indicated in the post that a full-scale test might not take place until late this year.
Hyperloop did not reveal what components of the system would be shown in a demonstration slated to take place Wednesday at the test site.
The Hyperloop project went live in 2013 on crowdfunding platform JumpStart Fund, which marries crowdsourcing expertise with crowdfunding.
That year, Musk unveiled a design for a super-fast transport system dubbed “Hyperloop” that could carry passengers in low-pressure tubes at near-supersonic speeds.
Iron Man
The project could connect Los Angeles and San Francisco in 35 minutes in a low-cost alternative to a high-speed rail network planned for California.
Musk has said he has no plans to build the system but offered the “open source design” to allow others to pursue a venture. He’s called the system a cross between a “Concorde, a rail gun and an air hockey table.”
Jon Favreau, director of “Iron Man,” has referred to Musk as a modern-day “Renaissance man.”
In an article for Time, Favreau said he and actor Robert Downey Jr. modeled the main character in the movie – “genius billionaire Tony Stark” – after the Silicon Valley star.
Musk told Time that his goal was to be “involved in things that are going to make a significant difference to the future of humanity.”
South Africa-born Musk has become one of America’s best-known innovators, having launched a payments company, electric carmaker Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity, which makes solar panels for homes and businesses.
He also operates his own foundation focusing on education, clean energy and children’s health.
Another approach
Meanwhile, another startup that has picked up the Hyperloop gauntlet announced that its design is incorporating passive magnetic levitation originally conceived by a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“Utilizing a passive levitation system will eliminate the need for power stations along the Hyperloop track, which makes this system the most suitable for the application and will keep construction costs low,” Hyperloop Transportation Technologies chief operating officer Bibop Gresta said in a statement.
“From a safety aspect, the system has huge advantages, levitation occurs purely through movement, therefore if any type of power failure occurs, Hyperloop pods would continue to levitate and only after reaching minimal speeds touch the ground.”
After Musk published a white paper describing a futuristic mode of super high-speed rail transit, Hyperloop Transportation “rose to the challenge,” it said.
Even if you haven’t seen Captain America: Civil Waryet, if you’ve seen the trailers, then you’ve seen the moment where Steve Rogers tries to stop a helicopter with his bare hands. He grabs the helicopter skid with one hand, anchors himself to the ground with the other, and pulls. Then, he adjusts his grip, so he can look slightly more badass while doing it. He’s successfully able to keep the chopper from taking off. It’s an impressive feat of strength, to say the least. The science team over atNerdist has now reviewed the scene and done the math on what it would take for Captain America to pull this off. The helicopter in question is believed to be an Airbus AS350, with 3,000 pounds of lifting capacity. That means Cap would have to exceed that in order to keep the helicopter stationary. World records for bicep curls are in the hundreds of pounds, not the thousands. Apparently, the super soldier serum didn’t just increase Steve Rogers strength, it did it by an order of magnitude.
So...yeah, that dude is freaking strong. While we’ve seen Captain America do all sorts of things to show off his physical prowess, this may be the single greatest example of his capabilities. Honestly, this probably means that the guy has to pull his punches every time he gets in a fight with somebody. If he’s capable of this kind of strength, Steve Rogers could literally kill people with a punch if he really wanted to. Still, the helicopter thing is just damned impressive.
What did you think of Captain America’s feat of strength? Was it your favorite moment of Cap awesomeness in the MCU, or is there something else that you liked better? Let us know in the comments.
There’s a lot that’s confusing in the world of consumer tech — and there’s no handy handbook to explain it. Welcome to “Now I Get It: Tech,” a new series from David Pogue that explains some of the most baffling mysteries in the tech world.
I don’t use Snapchat. And no wonder: Most people who use it are under 25, and 70 percent of them are female. I’m neither.
At the same time, I’ve been dying to understand Snapchat. I mean, it’s a major cultural force: 200 million people are using it. They send 20,000 photos a second and watch 8 to 10 billion videos a day. The company has yet to turn a profit, but it turned down Facebook’s offer of $3 billion; today, it’s valued at $20 billion.
So I decided to dive in, to talk to people, to pound on this app until I finally understood it. Here, for the benefit of people who don’t understand Snapchat, is what I discovered.
First, you need to know that Snapchat is really three apps crammed in one.
Function 1: Self-destructing messages
Snapchat’s primary (and most famous) feature is that it lets you send self-erasing photos to people. To be more precise, it lets you snap a picture or record a 10-second video, dress it up with funny overlays, type and format a caption, draw on it with your finger if you like, and then send it to specified friends. Once they’ve seen your snap, it disappears forever. Not even the company can get it back.
You can also post snaps publicly to all of your followers on a timeline (here called your Story), à la Facebook or Instagram; the difference is that whatever you post on Snapchat vanishes after 24 hours.
For nonteenagers, the whole concept is a little bizarre. Why would you take photos and videos knowing that they’ll disappear after one viewing? Isn’t the whole purpose of photos and videos to capture cherished memories to be viewed years from now?
Here’s my theory: Deep down, Snapchat’s appeal has to do with teenage insecurity.
Usually, what you post online is there forever. It can come back to haunt you. Everything on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the Web, text messages, email — it will always be there for people to judge you. Your parents might see it. A college admissions officer. A prospective employer.
But Snapchat takes the pressure off. If your snap is goofy or badly framed or embarrassing or incriminating — you don’t care! Post it anyway. No employer or principal or parent will ever find it and disapprove.
Furthermore, there are no comments, no Like buttons, no counts of how many friends you have. No judgment.
All of this gives Snapchat an honesty, an authenticity, an immediacy that the other social media apps lack — and that millennials love.
The screenshot loophole
It is true, by the way, that if someone sends you a snap, you can take a screenshot of it before it disappears, thereby preserving it forever and, presumably, defeating the whole purpose of Snapchat. (To take a screenshot on the iPhone, you press the sleep and Home buttons at the same time; on most Android phones, you press the volume-down and Home buttons.)
The app does notify you when an image has been screenshotted before it disappears. But even that function can be defeated using little hacks that are easy to find online.
So I couldn’t help wondering: Why would anyone risk sending naughty or risky stuff, knowing that it could be captured forever?
One good answer came from a respondent on Quora: “If you don’t trust someone to not take advantage of you, don’t send them that snap; it’s really that easy.”
Another came from a high schooler I interviewed: “Nobody really thinks that the point of Snapchat is to send messages that will delete … unless it’s something secret or embarrassing, I guess. Anyway, I don’t think people care if you screenshot something.”
Either way, the screenshot loophole doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
One more exception: Once a day, you can watch one snap one more time in case you missed it. Incredibly, you can also pay to view snaps again (three replays for a dollar). Mostly, nobody bothers. (“I did not even know that was a feature. Neither did my cousins — noted avid Snapchat users,” said my high school source.)
Function 2: Standard chat program
Many teenagers use Snapchat constantly. They send many, many snaps. They live in the app.
The Snapchat folks have fanned that flame by adding text, voice, and video chat capabilities to the app. You can have a conversation by typing, by talking, or by video calling, and you can slap in cute cartoony “stickers.”
These communications, too, disappear, once both parties have read them.
Function 3: A news app
The third face of Snapchat’s personality is its recent incarnation as a news app. Online publications can post their own stuff for you to read: ESPN, Comedy Central, BuzzFeed,People, National Geographic, CNN, and others are already on board.
What does any of this publishing stuff have to do with chatting with friends or sending self-destructing photos?
Beats the heck out of me, but I’d guess it has something to do with Snapchat trying to make money.
(Most of my teenage sources say they don’t even look at these articles.)
Snapchat the Unknowable
Snapchat wins no awards for ease of use. In fact, it’s incredibly hard to figure out, filled with unlabeled icons and confusingly arrayed screens. Many functions don’t have buttons at all; you get to them by swiping across the screen in various directions [as shown by the arrows here], which is something you kind of have to stumble on.
(Maybe this, too, is part of the appeal to teenagers. Every generation of teens has its secret, proprietary culture — slang, music, rituals — deliberately designed to shut out or mystify their parents. Maybe mastering Snapchat’s bizarre layout makes its fans feel like insiders in an exclusive club.)
Over time, Snapchat has become burdened by an almost absurd assortment of features. My impression is that it’s popular despite this feature-itis, not because of it.
How to use Snapchat
All that said, here’s a quick guide to get you started:
Functions 2 and 3 (chatting and reading articles) are relatively easy. To read the articles posted by media organizations, tap the lower-right button (labeled Discover in the right-hand screenshot above) to see the names of magazines and websites, and tap your way in to start reading.
For chat, you swipe to the right from the camera screen to see your list of contacts, and then tap one to start typing or calling.
That leaves us with the Big One, the primary Snapchat feature, the really fun one: Sending self-deleting photos and videos.
When you first open the app, its camera screen appears. It works just like your phone’s regular camera app. Tap the upper-right camera button to use the phone’s front-facing camera to take a selfie (which is usually the point). Touch the big round shutter button to take the photo. (Or hold it down for up to 10 seconds to record a video.)
All Snapchat photos and videos are vertical, by the way; nobody turns the phone 90 degrees to take or view them in landscape mode.
Once you’ve snapped a shot, the real fun begins: Dressing it up.
Apply a filter: Swipe horizontally across your photo to apply a filter — to add a blue or green tint to the whole thing, for example. If you keep swiping, you’ll see some really interesting ones: One adds the name of your city with a cool graphic treatment, another stamps the current time or temperature, yet another stamps your current speed in miles per hour (best if you’re not doing the driving).
Stamp some stickers: At the top of the screen, the tilted square icon shown here [below, left] opens a page of emoji icons. Tap to stamp one on your photo. At that point, you can drag the “sticker” around to move it, or pinch/spread with two fingers to enlarge it or shrink it.
Type some text: When you tap the T button at the top right of your photo screen, the keyboard opens [below, left]. Type a caption and then Done. Now you can drag with your finger to slide the caption up or down the photo.
Or maybe you’d prefer giant lettering. To do that, tap the T to make the text huge [below, middle]. Tap a third time to center the text. Once it’s huge, tap the text itself to open a page with a color slider, so you can change the color [right].
Draw on the photo: Tap the pencil icon to draw or write on the shot with your finger. Once again, a slider appears so you can specify the color.
Put on a virtual mask: You’d never in a million years stumble onto this feature without being told about it, but it’s hilarious and fun: Snapchat can turn you into a gorilla or a Viking or a bobblehead, either as a still or a video, by superimposing an animated mask or costume on your live image.
To see these software “masks” (or Lenses, as Snapchat calls them), the trick is to hold your finger down on your own face in the live camera view before taking the photo. After a moment, a grid out of a sci-fi movie appears on your face, and icons for virtual masks fill the bottom of the screen. Tap one to try it out. (They change all the time, for variety.) Some come with instructions, like Open your mouth, which triggers a funny animation.
When you’ve got a look you like, snap it as a photo or video just as you normally would, by touching or holding your finger down on the round button on the screen. (Snapchat charges $1 apiece to install new Lenses of this type.)
(I would have written that these virtual masks are so witty, new, and interesting that it’s worth installing Snapchat just to try them out — except that MSQRD is a free app that does exactly the same thing, with even better animations and smarts, and without all the extra clutter of Snapchat. If you have a child and an upcoming car ride, you mustdownload MSQRD.)
Finally, you’re ready to post your masterpiece. For this, you use the icons at the bottom of the screen:
Seconds: The lower-left icon specifies how many seconds your recipients will have to view your masterpiece before it disappears. (They’ll see a countdown.)
Save: Your friends aren’t supposed to keep a copy of your photo, but it’s OK for you to keep one. Tap Save to preserve it in your phone’s Photos collection.
Post to your Story: Again, Story is Snapchat’s name for your timeline or newsfeed. It’s a way for you to make your snaps viewable to your entire social circle (which you specify in Settings) — for 24 hours.
Choose recipients. When everything’s ready to go, tap here to view your friends list, so you can specify who gets your masterpiece.
Now you get it?
As you now know, the first Snapchat mystery — How do you use it? — is easily solved, once you have a cheat sheet.
As for the second mystery — Why do you use it? — it helps to be a teenager. But Snapchat also rocketed up the ranks because of its convenience, silliness and fun, immediacy — and above all, because whatever you do with it, you won’t someday regret it.
David Pogue is the founder of Yahoo Tech; here’s how to get his columns by email. On the Web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s poguester@yahoo.com. He welcomes nontoxic comments in the Comments below.
