Author: Staff Writer

Snap reportedly laying off around 100 new engineers

Staff Writer

Snap is about to undergo another round of layoffs, with this one seeing a cut of around 100 engineers, according to Cheddar and CNBC. While that’s a small portion of Snap’s total headcount — around 3,000 people — it reportedly represents about 10 percent of the company’s engineering team. The cuts are expected to come within a week and will be the first focused on engineering. Snap hasn’t commented on the report. This is the fourth round of layoffs at Snap in the past year, though the first three were…

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New Laundered Bitcoin worth Billions Linked to UK Company

Staff Writer

A UK company has been linked to the laundering of 650,000 stolen bitcoins worth £4.5bn.The coins were taken by hackers from Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, leaving tens of thousands of customers out of pocket. It’s not clear who is in control of the London-based firm Always Efficient LLP. Mt Gox operator Mark Karpeles apologised to investors and said he was co-operating with the investigation. The FBI has charged a Russian national with laundering the stolen bitcoins. Mt Gox matched up those who wanted to buy the crypto-currency with dollars,…

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Q&A: New Leti Arts bringing authentic Africa to the world through games & digital comics

Staff Writer

Caption: (inset) Leti Arts Co-founders, Eyram Tawia (Ghana) and Wesley Kirinya (Kenya) Africa is at the verge of global stardom, with the latest box office stunner movie featuring African superheroes in their fictional Kingdom of Wakanda. There is no doubt that Africa is starting to create its own imagery and endearing the world. It is through such that companies like Let Arts are focusing on. The IBCA caught up with Leti Arts to find out just what the founders are working on to bring an authentic Africa to a worldwide…

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Amazon acquires New Ring for $1 billion.

Staff Writer

Amazon has acquired Ring, a Santa Monica, California-based maker of connected video doorbells and security cameras, for $1 billion. That will see the E-Commerce giant push further into the home security business: it previously acquired Blink, which makes similar products. Plus, it already offers a Cloud Cam that’s designed for use inside your house, and to allow couriers into your home to drop off parcels as part of its Key program. GeekWire notes that while neither firm has shared details on the way forward, it’s expected that the Ring brand…

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New: How Much Screen Time is Too Much?

Staff Writer

Concerns about the harm caused by too much screen time – particularly when it is spent on social media – are widespread. But working out what a healthy amount might be is far from easy. Apple’s Tim Cook recently said he would not want his nephew on a social network, while child health experts wrote to Facebook warning excessive use of digital devices and social media “is harmful to children and teens”. Some negative experiences on social media – like bullying, or becoming worried about how your appearance compares to…

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Mobile Commerce enabler DOCOMO Partners with Safaricom to Launch first App Store Integration with M-PESA.

Staff Writer
M-Gas Mpesa Central Bank of Kenya

Global mobile commerce enabler, DOCOMO Digital has partnered with Safaricom to give customers the option to pay for content on the Google Play Store using M-PESA. The integration, which is powered by DOCOMO Digital’s mobile commerce enabling platform using Google Play’s payment API, allows M-PESA customers to use the mobile money service to pay for goods and services from the app store. The service is available to more than 27 million M-PESA customers in Kenya with an Android smartphone or tablet. From today, customers matching this criteria can purchase content…

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Latest: No More Bulk Tweeting and Duplicate Accounts on Twitter

Staff Writer

Twitter is announcing major limits on how users and apps can automate tweets, in order to curb spam and political propaganda bots. Developers are now banned from using any system that simultaneously posts “identical or substantially similar” tweets from multiple accounts at once, or makes actions like liking, retweeting, and following across multiple accounts at once. Twitter will remove these options from its own TweetDeck app, and third-party developers have until March 23rd to comply. Twitter says these actions are “an important step in ensuring we stay ahead of malicious…

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Vatican organizes new first ever hackathon in history dubbed VHacks

Staff Writer

The Vatican alias the holy city is organizing its first ever hackathon in history dubbed VHacks.”I did not have to pitch the idea to the Pope,” laughs Jakub Florkiewicz, the co-initiator of the event. “But the participants of the event hopefully will,” he adds. So how did this unlikely event come to be? “It’s a story about a student arriving in Rome with an idea, and finding people who got excited about that idea,” Florkiewicz explains. “Passionate myself about hackathons, I had the luck of meeting people – Vatican insiders –…

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Experts New thoughts That AI Might Mess with us in the Next Five Years

Staff Writer

When we talk about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, the emphasis is usually on the unintended side effects. We worry that we might accidentally create a super-intelligent AI and forget to program it with a conscience; or that we’ll deploy criminal sentencing algorithms that have soaked up the racist biases of their training data. What about the people who actively want to use AI for immoral, criminal, or malicious purposes? Aren’t they more likely to cause trouble — and sooner? The answer is yes, according to more than two…

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WhatsApp Users can now Call Without Internet.

Staff Writer

It is easier for a WhatsApp user in diaspora to audio or video call or chat with his or her counterpart in Africa who has the same application than traditional telephone calls and text messages. The situation is the same for people who use Skype, Facebook Messenger, Viber and WeChat, to mention a few. But at the moment, the number of smartphone holders is very small in many developing countries especially in Africa. For instance, the number of smartphone holders in Rwanda is below 1.2 million. This challenges service providers…

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