STN Video Launches Advanced Article Recirculation Tool
Driven by AI, but designed for people, the STN advanced recirculation tool offers tremendous flexibility for publishers to meet the requirements for their visitors’ voracious appetite for their compelling content.
STN Video announced today that their industry-leading video platform now contains an advanced AI-driven recirculation tool, giving publishers the ability to increase user engagement and monetization. Driven by AI, but designed for people, the STN advanced recirculation tool offers tremendous flexibility for publishers to meet the requirements for their visitors’ voracious appetite for their compelling content.
STN offers the most comprehensive premium video content portfolio in the world including all the heavy hitters in sports, news, entertainment and more. The advanced recirculation tool complements STN’s own video content offering with the publisher’s own editorial content to meet all the requirements of their readers. The STN platform allows publishers to configure the experience to match the publisher’s preferences and strategy by keeping readers informed and on-page by delivering a clickable preview of trending articles across their site. Publishers also generate revenue from video ads or drive subscriptions or ecommerce opportunities.
UVic students’ design recognized by two high-profile competitions
An assistive technology for users of powered wheelchairs designed by a team of UVic students has won both a provincial and a national award this year for adding a bit of practical independence to existing wheelchair designs
An assistive technology for users of powered wheelchairs designed by a team of UVic students has won both a provincial and a national award this year for adding a bit of practical independence to existing wheelchair designs. The Innovative Designs for Accessibility (IDeA) student competition challenges university students across Canada to use their creativity to develop innovative, cost-effective and practical solutions to accessibility barriers for people with disabilities, and the UVic team secured second place in one of the challenge’s four categories. Their MobilArm project also won first place in the BC-based Simon Cox student competition, which also taps into student creativity to improve accessibility.
Victoria’s Blockstream has raised $210 million in financing for future growth
Bitcoin infrastructure firm Blockstream, headquartered in Victoria, has announced it raised $210 million in a series B round of financing on a valuation of $3.2 billion.
Investors include U.K. based asset management and investment trust company Baillie Gifford and iFinex, which is dedicated to crytocurrency exchange.
Blockstream falls into the unicorn category, a term used to describe startups valued at more than $1 billion.
It has 70 to 80 employees based around the globe, with eight in Greater Victoria, and two each in Vancouver and Montreal, said Samson Mow, company chief strategy officer.
The company is in the “major leagues” working with cryptocurrency products, he said Tuesday. It describes itself as a global leader in Bitcoin, a type of cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology. “Our suite of technologies enhances the Bitcoin ecosystem, making it easier for individuals and businesses to secure and transact their digital assets,” the company said in a statement. New financing will support initiatives with the Liquid Network, a network designed to enable fast and confidential Bitcoin transactions and used to issue digital assets for traders and exchanges. It is operated by a federation of cryptocurrency companies. The network is led by a group of cryptocurrency companies around the globe. Blockstream has acquired Adamant Capital hedge fund with plans to release Bitcoin-based hedge-fund type investment products, and potentially Bitcoin mortgages and loans, Mow said. It also acquired the intellectual property of Spondoolies, a Bitcoin mining manufacturer, and its team to build a Blockstream ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) arm.
“Blockstream is bringing on board the Spondoolies core team and acquiring related IP (intellectual property) to launch the world’s first enterprise-class miner next year,” said Adam Back, Blockstream chief executive.
“The Spondoolies team’s pedigree in Bitcoin ASIC design and engineering complements our enterprise-class mining infrastructure, and will accelerate our continuing expansion and decentralization of the Bitcoin mining space.”
Mow said new capital will be used to build products on Bitcoin and to build an ASIC miner, which is a highly capital intensive business. “It does require a good deal of funding to do chip design and manufacture hardware.”
The goal is to bring the new ASIC miner online and launch it in 2022, he said. “This is a massive, massive, massive endeavour.”
‘A little too hot’? Lakeland, most overpriced Florida market, has one of the worst housing shortages
LAKELAND — The housing market in Lakeland is the most overpriced in Florida, according to a new study.
Two professors at Florida Atlantic University and Florida International University primarily used Zillow to analyze the 100 largest metro areas in the nation and determine the effects of the pandemic-fueled surge in home prices across the country. According to that study, Lakeland is the most exposed of nine analyzed Florida markets, with Tampa Bay following closely behind.
“As of July 31, homes in Lakeland were selling for 31.39 percent above their long-term pricing trend. Tampa Bay was just a notch behind, with homes selling for a 31.35 percent premium,” a press release for the study reads.
This 12-year-old coder is set to earn over $400,000 after about 2 months selling NFTs
Benyamin Ahmed isn’t your average 12-year-old. When he’s not at school, he enjoys swimming, taekwondo — and learning how to code. At just 5 years old, Ahmed began programming after watching his father, Imran, work as a web developer. He started with HTML and CSS, and continued to advance his coding skills, later learning JavaScript and other programs.
But lately, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and the smart contracts, or collections of code, that power them, have caught Ahmed’s attention.
“I first learned about NFTs earlier this year,” Ahmed, who is based in London, tells CNBC Make It. “I got fascinated with NFTs because you can easily transfer the ownership of an NFT by the blockchain.”
EU citizens who applied to stay in Britain facing threat of deportation
European citizens who have applied for settled status are being detained and threatened with deportation, a development that contradicts assurances from ministers and appears to contravene the Brexit withdrawal agreement. The Home Office has served EU nationals with removal directions even though they could prove they had applied for settled status, which should protect their rights to remain in the UK. Ministers have repeatedly promised that anyone who had applied by the 30 June deadline would have their existing rights protected while their case was heard.
UK scientists believe it is ‘almost certain’ a coronavirus variant will emerge that beats current vaccines
London (CNN)An analysis by British academics, published by the UK Government’s official scientific advisory group, says that they believe it is “almost certain” that a SARS-Cov-2 variant will emerge that “leads to current vaccine failure.” SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes Covid-19.The analysis has not been peer-reviewed, the early research is theoretical, and does not provide any proof that such a variant is in circulation now. Documents like it are released “as pre-print publications that have provided the government with rapid evidence during an emergency.”The paper is dated July 26, and was published by the British government on Friday. The scientists write that because eradication of the virus is “unlikely,” they have “high confidence” that variants will continue to emerge. They say it is “almost certain” that there will be “a gradual or punctuated accumulation of antigenic variation that eventually leads to current vaccine failure.”
The World Wide Web’s inventor is selling its original code as an NFT
Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, is auctioning off his invention’s source code as an NFT. Although the groundbreaking code has long been in the public domain, the British computer scientist has now authorized the sale of a single edition of his original time-stamped files. Comprising over 9.500 lines of code, the files contain the basis of the languages and protocols underpinning the internet as we know it: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Universal Document Identified (URI).
2021 NVBC Competition Round 2.5 and Round 3 ventures announced
The results are in! Our esteemed panel of 83 judges have evaluated the Round 2 submissions. This year our 21st annual Competition, presented by Innovate BC, was extremely competitive, leaving us with 15 ventures moving directly into Round 3, and 27 ventures pitching in Round 2.5. The results are in! Our esteemed panel of 83 judgeshave evaluated the Round 2 submissions. This year our 21st annual Competition, presented by Innovate BC, was extremely competitive, leaving us with 15 ventures moving directly into Round 3, and 27 ventures pitching in Round 2.5. All scores were analyzed by Octothorpe software.
Congratulations to all.
SCOTT GALLOWAY: The US is a country that rewards genius, but our misplaced admiration and lack of empathy for others is vulgar. It’s time we do better.
While the fires of COVID-19 continue to rage around the world, here in the US we’ve turned a corner. The intensity of an emergency doesn’t register until after it’s over, and many of us are still trying to wrap our heads around the events of the past year. Inevitably, our pause turns to curiosity … what happens next? What will be different, what will be the same? I took some time this week to look back at where we were a year ago: reeling from the initial shock of the pandemic; facing the long grind of a summer in isolation; and dreading winter’s second wave. In the post we’re revisiting below, from May 22, 2020, I was in an optimistic mood, though with less justification than today. Many crises have birthed periods of exceptional progress — our strength gets buttressed and our vision broadens. First, we need to envision the self we hope to be coming out of this plague.