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How pay-as-you-go solar solutions can electrify Africa — and generate profits for you

Jul20
by on July 20, 2018 at 11:43 am
Posted In: Around the Web


Over 1.1 billion people have no access to electricity worldwide. Instead, they rely on kerosene lamps, candles, and inefficient cookstoves, which by themselves cause health and environmental problems. In Africa, alone, around 600 million people are left in the dark. Yet, for many people where basic amenities are hard to come by, how can services reach them to provide the electricity they need? Thankfully, Africa has an abundant resource that can be taken advantage of: sunlight. As a result, companies are stepping up to give millions of people something that so many of us take for granted. Through pay-as-you-go (PAYG)…

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Join TNW’s Highly Subjective Game Show and win great prizes and eternal glory

Jul20
by on July 20, 2018 at 10:01 am
Posted In: Around the Web, distract


Next week, we’re hosting an event… but not just any event. We’re putting together the BEST ONLINE QUIZ THAT HAS EVER BEEN CREATED, and it’s called: Wow. Whats that? Why, it’s exactly what it sounds like! We’ve set forth 10 carefully crafted questions which have no objectively correct answers. Here’s where you come in. We want to hear your most creative and disturbing answers. Answer a few, or all, of the questions, and vote on other people’s answers you like. On Friday July 27th, our expert panel of judges will vote on their favorites. Their votes, combined with yours, will…

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Alexa needs better training to understand non-American accents

Jul20
by on July 20, 2018 at 9:17 am
Posted In: Around the Web, Gadgets


A team of researchers working with The Washington Post found that Alexa comprehends certain non-American accents and dialects poorly in the US, and that there was a pattern to this weakness. The team had more than 100 people from nearly 20 US cities dictate thousands of voice commands to Alexa. From the exercise, it found that Amazon’s Alexa-based voice-activated speaker was 30 percent less likely to comprehend commands issued by people with non-American accents. The Washington Post also reported that people with Spanish as their first language were understood 6 percent less often than people who grew up around California or Washington…

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Google is reportedly building Fuchsia OS to replace Android on all its devices

Jul20
by on July 20, 2018 at 8:21 am
Posted In: Around the Web, Google


Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen and Mark Gurman have a juicy scoop on Google’s secretive Fuchsia OS project, which we’ve been hearing about for the past couple of years. The company is reportedly working to flesh out the platform to eventually run on a wide range of devices, and perhaps even replace Android on Google-branded hardware someday. The project now has more than 100 engineers on board, as well as Matias Duarte, the brains behind Google’s Material Design language for the Android interface. Unlike Android, which presently only powers phones and tablets, Fuchsia OS is being designed to run on a larger…

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Investment fund CEOs: XRP is digital fiat, not real cryptocurrency

Jul20
by on July 20, 2018 at 7:46 am
Posted In: Around the Web, cryptocurrency, Hard Fork, Insider


In the lead-up to the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) critical decision on whether digital tokens are securities, CEOs of digital asset investment firms are really giving it to Ripple’s native cryptocurrency, XRP – claiming it’s really just digital fiat. Most of the criticism centers on the role the centralized nature of the XRP tokens distribution model plays in its eventual classification. The collective pooling of investments – with an intention of monetary gain from the efforts of others – is central to the definition of a security, and the SEC has already deemed that ‘initial coin offerings’ (ICOs)…

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