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Fiverr’s budget creative marketplace is now easier to navigate – but does it undermine professionals?

Aug11
by on August 11, 2014 at 4:31 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Design & Dev, Insider, Product Updates

Fiverr

Low-cost creative services marketplace Fiverr has launched new features today that make it easier to navigate its huge catalog of services. The news comes as it announces a $30 million Series C funding round. Fiverr has always offered a diverse mix of services from professional and amateur sellers alike. The new discovery tools let you drill down from any top level category to more easily find exactly what you need. This improved navigation helps Fiverr in its ambition to be an eBay or Amazon for creative services. CEO and co-founder Micha Kaufman says that this ‘Services-as-a-product’ vision will be enhanced by the…

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Kontakt.io’s Wi-Fi Cloud Beacon helps businesses track and engage with customers in-store

Aug11
by on August 11, 2014 at 4:07 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Gadgets, Product Launches

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Beacons have the potential to radically change how we interact with physical stores, and Kontakt.io believes it has the best products to lead the charge. The company today unveiled its latest device called the Cloud Beacon, which comes with a crucial new feature: Wi-Fi connectivity. Most Beacon-related technologies, such as Apple’s iBeacon, use Bluetooth Low Energy to trigger actions on a nearby device. So if you’re looking at a bicycle in your local store, standing near the handlebars could cause an expanded catalog to appear on your smartphone. Likewise, you might get a reminder from the PayPal app explaining that the retailer…

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Google is backing a new $300 million high-speed internet Trans-Pacific cable system between the US and Japan

Aug11
by on August 11, 2014 at 3:42 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Asia, Google, Insider

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Google has announced it is backing plans to build and operate a new high-speed internet Trans-Pacific cable system called “FASTER” by Q2 2016. In addition to Google, the $300 million project will be jointly managed by China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel, with NEC as the system supplier. FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies. The initial design capacity is expected to be 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs), connecting the US with two locations in Japan: The new cable system will be landed at Chikura and Shima…

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The danger of vanity metrics: Creating a reality distortion field

Aug11
by on August 11, 2014 at 3:13 pm
Posted In: Analysis and Opinion, Around the Web, Design & Dev, Entrepreneur

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Jo Johansson is the Content Strategist at Geckoboard where she plans, produces and publishes content. This post originally appeared on the Geckoboard blog. Everyone loves a big number. Startups as well as established businesses tend to boast with their growth metrics: pageviews, registered users, downloads, social following. The list goes on. Even though these metrics might be signs of traction, more often than not they’re just empty numbers. The danger that lies in vanity metrics is that they can skew your perception of reality. And with a skewed perception of your business, how are you supposed to make the right decisions that will enable…

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Gartner: Chromebook sales will grow 79% to 5.2 million units in 2014, but ‘will remain a niche market’

Aug11
by on August 11, 2014 at 2:22 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Gadgets, Google, Insider

chromebook

Chromebooks are expected to reach 5.2 million units in 2014, a 79 percent increase from 2013, according to Gartner. While the growth is certainly notable, the overall figures aren’t impressive just yet. The sales shouldn’t be too surprising, as more and more vendors are launching Chromebooks (in fact, Acer today unveiled the first to sport Nvidia’s Tegra K1 processor). Yet Chromebooks are still mainly an education sector affair. Gartner estimates nearly 85 percent of Chromebook sales in 2013 were sold to schools, with 82 percent overall being sold in North America. Samsung and Acer were the first vendors to sell…

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