The Features That Would Actually Improve the iPhone 6

Apple lovers will finally get their hands on the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus on Friday, and the reviews have been glowing.

But if you preordered one or plan on waiting in massive lines, you should know: There are a few things missing from the new devices.

CollegeHumor took note of the new features, or lack thereof, and made this bittersweet parody expressing how everybody feels about the new phones (you know, the things nobody actually wants to admit).

Apple lovers will finally get their hands on the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus on Friday, and the reviews have been glowing.

But if you preordered one or plan on waiting in massive lines, you should know: There are a few things missing from the new devices.

CollegeHumor took note of the new features, or lack thereof, and made this bittersweet parody expressing how everybody feels about the new phones [Mashable]

Based on Statistics Only 11% of Silicon Valley Executives are Women

Gender inequality in Silicon Valley is no secret. The tech scene is often criticized for its gender gap in pay — research shows that men with graduate or professional degrees earn 73% more than women with the same credentials.

But it extends beyond salary — women are drastically underrepresented in Silicon Valley leadership positions, too.

According to the recent Gender Diversity in Silicon Valley [PDF] report, published by law firm Fenwick & West, women make up a measly 11% of executives within the Silicon Valley 150, the Bay Area's top tech companies. That's compared to 16% in the S&P 100, the leading U.S. companies across various industries.

In Silicon Valley, women also make up only 10% of directors, 10% of committee members and 8% of committee chairs — all less than half of what's seen in the S&P 100. A dismal 9% of women are named executive officers in both the Silicon Valley 150 and the S&P 100.

"We hope this survey of gender diversity in Silicon Valley will stimulate more discussion and serve as a resource for measuring how well women are faring at the senior levels of leadership in the Silicon Valley workplace," the report states.

The following chart, created by statistics portal Statista, compares the percentages of women in leadership positions in Silicon Valley and the leading U.S. companies [Mashable].

Mark zuckerberg say facebook is thinking about a dislike button

Facebook is considering ways users can express their feelings beyond the Like button, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a Q&A at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park Thursday. "We're thinking about it," Zuckerberg said when asked whether the social network would ever add the long-requested dislike button.

He quickly clarified that such a button likely wouldn't say "dislike" on it. Instead, he said, people often want to react to posts they see on Facebook with sentiments other than "like."

"Everyone feels like they can just push the Like button, and that's an important way to sympathize or empathize with someone," Zuckerberg told the audience. But there are times when you may want the simplicity of a one-click response but a "like" doesn't feel appropriate, he added.

"We need to figure out the right way to do it so it ends up being a force for good, not a force for bad," he said — because a "dislike" or other negative sentiment could easily be used for the wrong reasons. It's worth noting this isn't the first time Zuckerberg has claimed to be "thinking about" a dislike button— he's made similar comments as far back as 2010.

The Facebook CEO also defended the social network's recent controversial real names policy, which requires Facebook users to identify themselves by their legal names, saying it encourages accountability among users.

"It's part of building a safe community," he said. "On Facebook, most people refer to themselves by their real name and that's a very important part of our culture." "On Facebook, most people refer to themselves by their real name and that's a very important part of our culture."

The goal, Zuckerberg added, is to make the social network a "reflection of real world relationships" and that the real name policy "grounds everyone in that reality." He also addressed another recent controversy: Facebook's experiments. Specifically, the highly cited emotional manipulation study that experimented with hiding various posts on users' news feeds to see whether it would affect their mood.

"Testing is a really important part of how Facebook works overall," Zukerberg explained. He initially defended the test saying the company thought it "had a responsibility to the community" to investigate issues that could affect the "emotional or psychological wellbeing" of users. "We could have done it a lot better," he said.

Zuckerberg was also asked about his New Year's resolutions, which included becoming fluent in Mandarin. He revealed his goal for 2014 was to send one thank-you note a day, and said he's still not sure about his 2015 goal [Mashable].

This App Answear if Your Hidden Facebook Photos Were Never Really Hidden

Hiding photos on Facebook may not actually work as well as you think it does. Picturebook, a browser extension now available in the Chrome web store, claims to allow you to "view hidden photos of anyone on Facebook"— even if you aren't friends with them.

Sounds like a Facebook creeper's dream, right? But though Picturebook's description is technically true, it is also misleading. No app or browser extension — this one included — is able to change the privacy settings of someone else's photo. What Picturebook is really doing: surfacing photos that you could have seen anyway, even if a user tagged in them hid them from their timeline.

Say a friend tags you in an unflattering photo. You can make it go away by selecting "hide from my timeline." But this only prevents people from viewing the photo within your timeline; it doesn't actually remove or block the photo in any way. If the photo's privacy setting was set to "public", anyone could have found it anyway.

Other users will still be able to see the photo by visiting your friend's timeline, or simply by searching for it.Picturebook takes advantage of this loophole and surfaces photos you've been tagged in, regardless of whether you've hidden them.

In short, Picturebook makes it just a little easier to find what you could have found anyway. It's worth pointing out that Facebook reminds users every time they hide a photo that it is still viewable from others' news feed, from search, and from other places on Facebook.

The only way to really hide your hidden photos from this tool is by untagging yourself. First, select "hidden from timeline" from the drop down menu under the photo's date. From there, select "Report/remove tag" from the popup window that appears, then select "remove tag."

This removes the tag, which will prevent photos from appearing on your timeline, or on the Picturebook extension. The photo itself will still appear elsewhere on Facebook; only the person who posted it can remove it.

If you're still worried about old photos showing up, now may be a good time to revisit your privacy settings, to make sure you're only sharing what you want. The social network recently made privacy settings more accessible with a new Privacy Basics page, intended to make this process easier [Mashable].

Google Planning a new Nexus Phone with new Design and Prices

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This is an example of a Blogger post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with your readers what is on your mind.

This is an example of a Blogger post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with your readers what is on your mind.

This is an example of a Blogger post, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many posts as you like in order to share with your readers what is on your mind.

Google X’s Astro Teller Says Wearables Still Need A Killer App

Back in November, I had a chance to visit Google’s Mountain View headquarters to chat with Astro Teller, the head of Google X’s so-called “moonshot” projects, about the past, present, and future of wearables.

I opened the interview with a blunt question: “Which do you want to talk about first, the wrist or glasses?” He immediately called me out: “That presupposes that the only interesting things we’re working on are watches and glasses.”

Teller made it clear that just because Android Wear and Google Glass are prominent in Google’s public efforts, they’re not the only thing the search giant is looking at when it thinks of putting gadgets on our bodies.

“[Humans] have spent that last several thousand years working on wearbles. We’ve got rings, glasses, we wear things for armor, for protection from the elements, to signal our status to other people. And we’re going to co-opt a lot of those things, where wearables are going to end up being the interface between us in the world,” he told me during our 30 minute chat. One interesting line of research Google has looked at includes using rings to “train” our brains for things like navigation using slight vibrations whenever you face a certain direction.

I see the current wearables ecosystem as a spectrum. At one end, there’s single-purpose gadgets that are essentially pedometers, heart rate trackers, and blood-oxygen sensors that have existed for decades — only now, they’re sending all that data to the cloud via Bluetooth connections to our smartphones. At the other end, there’s Google Glass, Android Wear, the Apple Watch, and their ilk: general-purpose devices that Google has said could one day replace the metal and glass slabs we keep in our pockets.

When I asked Teller where he thinks the successful wearables of the future will fall on that spectrum, he said that there’s likely going to be an evolution in the space from one use case that initially takes off to more general-purpose devices in the years to come.


He compared the process to the decades-long adoption of desktop computing. “VisiCalc and WordPerfect were the killer apps of their day, but Google and Facebook make them look small in comparison.” The way Teller sees it, those applications were what made computers a reasonable purchase for the first tens of millions of customers — but you couldn’t look at them and predict the applications valuable to billions today.

So what are the Visicalc and Wordperfect of wearables? Teller says that there’s a few uses that seem like they could bring in the mass of users necessary for wearables to become a meaningful platform. In the very near term, there’s fitness and health: from fitness trackers to the fashion-focuses bands, every major player in wearables has at the very least included things like step-tracking or heart-rate measurement (with varying degrees of accuracy).

Fitness has the advantage of being something that becomes habitual: if exercise is a big portion of your life, you’ll keep using that smart band with some regularity. The biggest hurdle for this category is the tendency for people to try out gadgets like the Nike FuelBand or a Fitbit and one day decide to just leave it on the desk or in a drawer — it’s a category that’s in a constant struggle against human laziness.

Another option is information security and environmental personalization — in terms of both our physical and digital spaces.

“I think wearables in general have as their best calling, to better understand our current state and needs and to express those back to the world. It’s crazy that you have to tell your phone or your computer or your house or your car “It’s me!” hundreds of times a day. Wearables will solve that problem. They haven’t yet, but they will.”

Regarding the current appreciation (or, more accurately, lack thereof) of Google Glass in popular culture, Teller isn’t phased by the haters. “There’s about a 0% chance that in 10-20 years we don’t access our digital world through our glasses, but I would be shocked if we don’t also have watches,” he says, though he acknowledges that the consumer market might not be where Google finds the killer app for its eye wear [TechCrunch].