Tag: small business news

These are the ways self-regulation could fix Big Tech’s worst problems

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Governments and observers across the world have repeatedly raised concerns about the monopoly power of Big Tech companies and the role the companies play in disseminating misinformation. In response, Big Tech companies have tried to preempt regulations by regulating themselves . With Facebook’s announcement that its Oversight Board will make a decision about whether former President Donald Trump can regain access to his account after the company suspended it, this and other high-profile moves by technology companies to address misinformation have reignited the debate about what responsible self-regulation by technology companies should look like. Read More …

This ideal résumé template to use if you’re looking for a job in tech

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Technology companies are booming despite the pandemic, and technology professionals have never been in higher demand. So now’s the time for software engineers to update their résumés to take advantage of this extraordinary hiring environment. At Leet Resumes , we’ve assessed the résumés of tech professionals from thousands of companies. Here are a few quick tips for making a more effective résumé for the New Year. Purpose : Remember that the purpose of your résumé is to generate interview requests. It’s not your bio, your academic CV, an exhaustive list of everything you’ve done, or even a good representation of the complete you. The purpose of a résumé is to get interviews, and everything that isn’t essential to that goal should be jettisoned. Scannable: Your résumé needs to be scannable. When it comes to your professional summary—the top ⅓ of the page of your résumé—it needs to be easy for the reader to digest in only a few seconds. As a first pass, they’re scanning it as quickly as possible to determine whether or not you belong in the “read more carefully” pile. That means they’re skimming through your résumé at top speed to decide whether to send you along to the next stage, whether that’s a quick Zoom screen or a full interview with the engineering manager. Paragraphs won’t cut it. When résumé readers lose their train of thought in your paragraph or are distracted by complex sentences, they move on. It’s essential that you keep their attention with short words and phrases that attract their interest. Headline: You’ll need a professional headline that sums up your role and level for easy comprehension. This concise statement encapsulates your professional standing in a few words. Great professional headlines include: Passionate Open Source Engineer Top-performing BI Analyst Innovative Machine Learning Expert Successful Front-end Engineer Dedicated DevOps Professional For the HR professional or engineering manager reviewing résumés, this clear professional headline grabs attention and serves as a ready shorthand summation of your career to date. After your professional headline, you’ll share four job titles you’d actually accept for your next role. Read More …

Spotify just unveiled “lossless” CD-quality music. Your move, Apple

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Given Apple’s long history in high-quality music technology, it’s strange to see the company get left behind in the sound quality of streaming music. On Monday, Spotify followed Amazon, Tidal, and Deezer in announcing a new, higher-fidelity streaming music service level, which it says will become available later this year. The new service, called Spotify HiFi , promises to stream content to smartphones and connected speakers in CD quality, with a wider dynamic frequency range (higher highs, lower lows) as well as more definition, sound placement, and clarity. The format is “lossless,” meaning that the music is not compressed but sounds exactly the way it does after mixing and mastering. Spotify says it’s now working with several manufacturers to design HiFi-ready speakers. There’s reason to believe that Apple will add lossless sound quality to Apple Music sooner or later. The company announced a whole line of 5G iPhones last fall ; 5G wireless service supports larger streams with higher reliability, which would come in handy for lossless audio. As 5G service becomes more widespread, a lossless version of Apple Music might be a natural upgrade. Apple continues to focus on audio hardware of high quality and high price. The company’s HomePod smart speakers are one example–the original HomePod costs $299, while even the new $99 HomePod Mini emphasizes sound quality more than rival entry-level smart speakers that cost less. Apple recently released a new pair of high-quality over-ear headphones called AirPods Max , which sell for $549. Spotify said both listeners and artists have said that higher music quality is a highly desired feature. “Adding a HiFi tier of streaming service to their platform . . . will enable more consumers, and a younger generation of listeners, to experience their music with more detail, dynamics, and realism,” says Jeff Poggi, Co-CEO of McIntosh Group, which makes audiophile-grade components and speakers. Spotify enlisted Billie Eilish to explain (in the video below) why it’s important to artists. “We want our music to be heard the way it was recorded,” she said. Spotify said earlier this month that its paid subscriber count had increased 24% to 155 million from the same time last year. Read More …

Watch the ‘Perseverance’ rover land on Mars in this just-released video

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Since we began sending probes to the surface of Mars, our experience of their landings was a nail-biting silence, punctured only by a NASA Mission Control engineer announcing milestones in the spacecraft progress. That all changed with the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover filming its February 18 landing . Six of the 23 onboard commercial cameras shot high-definition footage of the supersonic descent—dubbed the “ 7 minutes of terror “—and first surface movements. Three cameras trained on the parachute, while another three videoed the descent stage, rover, and approaching ground. Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Pasadena, California, facility that built the rover and manages the $2.7 billion mission, premiered its high-resolution video during today’s briefing . This marks the first time we’re able to watch a spacecraft land on another planet. “These images and videos are the stuff of our dreams,” said Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing (EDL) lead engineer Allen Chen. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes; the images were better than I could have imagined,” JPL’s Adam Nelessen told Fast Company about his initial reaction to the footage. An EDL lead systems engineer, Nelessen focused on the EDL camera technology. “There is a lot that we can learn from the imagery. One of the best engineering outcomes is going to be recording the inflation of the parachute at a high frame rate. We’re going to learn just how well this thin piece of fabric is actually performing.” This is also the first time EDL engineers have seen the landing process unfurl in its entirety, as they were only able to run tests in separate stages on Earth. The footage revealed that the EDL navigation system came to within 16 feet of its landing target. The video also gave a better sense of the debris that kicks up during landing, particularly as NASA looks to land increasingly heavier items on Mars. “We worry about dust and sand confounding radar sensors and making our landing more difficult,” he adds. “So seeing what the dust environment and hazards are like in the area have really good engineering uses for us.” Plus, observing the landing site on approach offers a head start on how to best navigate the area to achieve the science objectives. More raw images of Mars can be found here . High-resolution photo from the descent stage camera of Perseverance being lowered to the Martian surface via the sky-crane mechanism Read More …

What’s really at stake in Apple and Facebook’s war over user tracking

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While the PR and media layer of Apple’s dispute with Facebook over user tracking by apps may still be going, at a strategic level the drama’s pretty much over, and it’s looking like Apple won. In a nutshell, Apple will soon require apps that want to track user’s movements within other companies’ apps or websites to get explicit permission to do so from the user. Facebook’s apps have long done this without such explicit permission. When the new feature, which Apple calls App Tracking Transparency , was announced earlier this year, Facebook complained loudly that the loss of tracking data will hurt Facebook—and will hurt small businesses more by reducing Facebook’s ability to carefully target ads for them. Apple said it has a responsibility to its users to give them transparency and choice over the way their personal data is used. Neither of those statements is inaccurate, but they leave little room for compromise. This isn’t the first privacy row between the two companies, but this time it was more heated. Apple CEO Tim Cook condemned Facebook’s business model and implied that it’s designed to profit from misinformation . Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ( reportedly ) said Facebook must “inflict pain” on Apple. But the fact remains that Apple plans to release iOS 14.5, which contains a feature requiring iOS developers, including Facebook, to get permission from users if they want to track said user’s movements across third-party websites and apps. The Apple-Facebook dispute is important for two reasons Read More …