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Seedrs brings convertible note startup funding to European equity crowdfunding

Jul06
by on July 6, 2014 at 11:01 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider, Product Updates, UK

Cash money
Seedrs, a European platform where people can invest in seed-stage companies in exchange for equity, has launched its first ‘convertible note’ backing campaign today. Essentially, a convertible investment round means that investors get a discount on future shares without requiring the company to get a formal valuation. It’s like an extra little reward for believing in a company from the start. And for the companies involved, convertibles often act as bridging finance between rounds. “Convertibles are very popular among startups in Silicon Valley as a way to raise money now, while deferring the need to place a value on the company…

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Google Now gets a new ‘occasional’ reminder option for recurring tasks and events

Jul06
by on July 6, 2014 at 8:49 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Google, Google Now

Google Now has added a new reminder option which will persistently dog you about to-dos or tasks on a semi-ongoing basis. The addition of the ‘occasionally’ reminder option, which was first spotted by Android Police, may not seem significant at first, but it throws up a couple of interesting usage options. Rather than specifically setting up a task for a particular day, date or time — which is then dismissed and disappears from view forever — the new option keeps an ongoing reminder. At this early point, though, it isn’t clear how regularly that ‘occasional’ reminders will be shown to users. Nonetheless,…

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This app lets you discover your favorite artists’ least played songs on Spotify

Jul06
by on July 6, 2014 at 8:18 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, spotify

If you like the idea beyond Forgotify, a web app that surfaces music that has never been played on Spotify, but want more control on what you discover, then you may be interested to hear of The Long Tail — an app that pulls the 50 least played Spotify tracks of any artist into a playlist. “With million[s] of tracks available online, it’s always a challenge to find something new,” writes Alexandre Passant, who says that he whipped The Long Tail together in between watching World Cup football games. The nice thing about this app — which is built using the Polymer web platform and Spotify’s new web API — is…

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YouTube is now publicly shaming internet providers that make its videos slow

Jul06
by on July 6, 2014 at 7:13 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Google, youtube

Google began naming and shaming internet service providers when it expanded its ‘Video Quality Report’ beyond Canada in May, and now it is taking things further after links to the report began surfacing alongside videos for some visitors to the site. Quartz reports that — taking its cue from Netflix — the Google-owned company is dropping links to the report into videos that it believes are suffering at the hands of an ISP’s slow network, as the screenshot below shows. The report does not cover a large number of countries at this point, so the joys of shaming aren’t available to all of us worldwide — but with two of the biggest…

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Report: Most data captured by the NSA belongs to ordinary internet users

Jul06
by on July 6, 2014 at 6:33 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, prism

The vast majority of information collected by the NSA’s controversial surveillance programs belongs to ordinary internet users. That’s according to a four-month Washington Post investigation analyzing documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Post analyzed a ‘cache’ of information in which nine of the ten ‘account holders’ “were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else”. The paper also found that half of the individuals featured in the 160,000 intercepted email and instant message conversations that it reviewed were US citizens or residents — a far higher rate than the agency…

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