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Crowdsourced school homework: How Brainly plans to teach the US after success in Europe

Mar17
by on March 17, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider, Profiles and Interviews

Brainly
A great thing about education is that it’s not only a field ripe for disruption, but there are seemingly infinite ways to approach that disruption. While massive open online courses (MOOCs) are bringing education to literally anyone with the Internet (themselves being disrupted by mentor-driven training initiatives) some players take to “socialize” the learning process and essentially crowdsource homework. One of the startups of the latter type is Brainly, a 5-year-old Poland-based company, which also happened to win the The Next Web’s Polish Startup of the Year 2013 award. It has already reached more than 23 million unique users per month and recently launched 12 new…

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Google Play Games gets gifts, multiplayer invites, cross-platform Android and iOS multiplayer support

Mar17
by on March 17, 2014 at 1:18 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Gadgets, Google, Mobile

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At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) today, Google announced a slew of improvements for Google Play Games, its cross-platform game service and SDK for Android, iOS, and the Web. New features include game gifts, multiplayer invites, and cross-platform multiplayer with newly added support for iOS. Game gifts are exactly what you’d expect: a new service that lets players send virtual in-game objects to anyone in their circles or through player search. Multiplayer invites is also quite straightforward: the Play Games app allows players to add each other to their game. As for Google Play Game services, multiplayer support has been…

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Asphalt 8: Airborne for iOS will be the first mobile game to offer built-in Twitch streaming

Mar17
by on March 17, 2014 at 1:00 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Product Updates

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After announcing its mobile software development kit (SDK) earlier this month, Twitch today revealed one of the first smartphone and tablet games that will be taking advantage of it. Asphalt 8: Airborne, the arcade racing title developed by Gameloft, will be the first game to support built-in Twitch streaming. Without any additional hardware or software, players will be able to stream gameplay live to their Twitch channel, alongside audio and video sourced from their iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. The latter means players can easily narrate what’s happening on stream, explain complex techniques and quickly respond to viewer questions. In addition,…

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Mozilla Science Lab, GitHub and Figshare team up to fix the citation of code in academia

Mar17
by on March 17, 2014 at 12:50 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Design & Dev

Hackathon Held In Miami With Goal Of Improving Communications And Information Access In Cuba
Academia has a problem. Research is becoming increasingly computational and data-driven, but the traditional paper and scientific journal has barely changed to accommodate this growing form of analysis. The current referencing structure makes it difficult for anyone to reproduce the results in a paper, either to check findings or build upon their results. In addition, scientists that generate code for middle-author contributions struggle to get the credit they deserve. The Mozilla Science Lab, GitHub and Figshare – a repository where academics can upload, share and cite their research materials – is starting to tackle the problem. The trio have developed a system so…

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EE offers heat-maps, in-store WiFi and tablets to help shops compete with online retailers

Mar17
by on March 17, 2014 at 12:20 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Mobile, Product Launches, UK

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UK mobile operator EE is offering a service called Connected Retail to shops in the UK in a bid to help them compete with online rivals and cut down on queueing time in-store. According to research that the company carried out this month on 2,000 UK consumers, British retailers stand to lose around £1.04 billion a year because of long queues at the check-out – 73 percent of shoppers say they will abandon their purchase if they have to queue for more than five minutes, 29 percent of which will only wait two minutes in a queue before abandoning their purchase. To combat…

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