Mark Zuckerberg used to be extremely awkward during presentations. He’s still no Steve Jobs, but he’s gotten way better. In fact, he’s gotten so good, that he’s conducting interviews in Chinese. Post by Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO surprised the audience at Tsinghua University in Beijing when he answered questions in Mandarin. Clearly if you want to connect on a global stage, you need to know more than just a few pleasantries.

Jerry Cao is a content strategist at UXPin, where he develops in-app and online content for the wireframing and prototyping platform. He recently co-authored The Guide to Minimum Viable Products. “Minimum” is a strong word… and not one usually associated with a good product. Yet lately, the term “Minimum Viable Product” is thrown around as widely accepted advice for startups. Is there truth to this, or is it just another fly-by-night trend? That all depends on who you ask. The idea is this: a company without the resources to fully realize their vision should release their product prematurely with only…
This story continues at The Next Web

Google today released an update to its Google Earth Android app that brings the service’s first major improvement to its 3D rendering technology since launch. Built from scratch, the renderer offers “faster, smoother and crisper transitions.” Google also plans to use it as a foundation for updates to 3D technology in other products. Here’s what the renderer looked like before: And this is the new look: Other additions to Google Earth for Android include faster basemap updates so that the app will get new data at the same time as Google Maps. You can also use Google Drive to open…
This story continues at The Next Web

The new year came early to 1776 last night. The D.C. incubator – which launched in February 2013 – hosted the first regional pitch of its 2015 Challenge Cup. Founders from four categories – health, education, energy, and cities – competed to represent D.C. at the Challenge Festival in May 2015. After a series of 60-second pitches, judges invited two finalists per category to pitch for five minutes before taking audience questions. In the end, four startups – one per category – will represent the District at the Festival: Edbacker, a crowdfunder for educators; BaseTrace, which provides DNA-based tracers that…
This story continues at The Next Web

At its first developer conference Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced Twitter’s new modular SDK, Fabric, to the assembled developers. But more importantly it may have introduced a way to do away with the broken password system. The new SDK is actually three kits. One for Twitter, one for MoPub, Twitter’s ad network, and the last one for Crashlytics, Twitter’s crash reporting solution. Developers can drag and drop whichever portion of Fabric SDK they want to use into their IDE (Integrated Development Environment) without having to bloat their workflow with features they don’t need. The plugins are available for Xcode for…
This story continues at The Next Web




