Say hello to Amazon Stream, a Pinterest-like endless shopping experience

It appears that Amazon has been working on a new shopping experience based on pinboards. Stream tempts you with an endless list of products for men, women and the home, in an easy-to-browse format.

The products shown are all sponsored, said to be updated daily and only list their prices. You do have an option to save items to your wishlist, but they stay separate from your standard Amazon wishlist.

That’s really all there is to it at this point. Amazon doesn’t seem to have shared additional info via a press release, as it usually does. The company also doesn’t yet mention Stream in its sponsored ad placement options.

Is it worth checking out? Well, at present, Stream doesn’t much more than clothing, home furnishing and household utilities. You can filter only by ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ and products don’t even display ratings or seller info.

If you’re used to Amazon’s traditional desktop shopping experience, you might find Stream to be lacking in most departments. However, it could make sense on smaller devices.

Shoppers might enjoy quickly going through hundreds of items just by scrolling through Stream’s daily offerings on their phones and tablets, and the minimalist interface is great for browsing on the couch.

We’ve contacted Amazon to find out more and will update this post when we hear back.

➤ Amazon Stream

Read next: Path’s social networking app has been acquired by South Korea’s Daum Kakao

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The psychology of simple

This post originally appeared on the Crew blog.

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For a concept that we all understand, ‘simple’ is deceivingly difficult to pin down.

We may ‘know it when we see it’, but there’s more to what makes a product or website feel simple than just gut reaction.

In the words of Steve Jobs:

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

If there’s so much power in creating things that are simple why do so many of us miss the mark?

Why is simple so, well, complex?

Like most things in life there’s more than just the surface appeal of simplicity. Here’s a look at how our brain comprehends new information, why some things feel more simple than others, and how you can use these ideas on your next project.

Cognitive fluency and the preference for prototypes

In his TED Talk Towards a science of simplicity, Harvard professor George Whitesides breaks ‘simple’ down into three characteristics:

• They are predictable
• They are accessible
• They serve as building blocks

The easiest place to start is with predictability. We love simple things because they’re easy on our brain—it doesn’t have to work as hard to understand them.

Which is good because our minds work at an insanely fast pace.

In a 2012 study from Google and the University of Basel, researchers found that users will judge a website’s aesthetic beauty and perceived functionality in 1/20th – 1/50th of a second. In less time than it takes to snap your fingers we pass judgement on something as complex as a website.

The judgments we make happen so quickly they often feel instinctual or emotional rather than a mental process.

But these judgements are being made by our brain. Just not in a way we’re overly aware of.

Humans are genetically hardwired to make snap decisions. What developed as part of our fight or flight response (to save us from predators in the wild, thanks evolution) continues to have a major influence on our first impressions of new stimuli.

To help make these quick decisions our brain creates shortcuts based on expectations or prototypical elements.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: If I asked you what color you associate with boys, most of you would instantly picture blue (and pink for girls). You don’t have to actively think about the answer. It’s just there. Your brain has made the connection so many times that it creates a shortcut. Boy=blue has become a prototype.

Psychologists call our brain’s preference for prototypes Cognitive fluency and it’s a huge part of what makes something seem ‘simple’.

Cognitive fluency is how we feel about taking in new information. It’s the subjective experience of the ease or difficulty of completing a mental task.

If something feels easy (like knowing blue is for boys), we assume that itis simple. It’s why Harmut Esslingen, the German designer who helped shape the iconic look of Apple products in the 1980s, followed the guiding principle that ‘form follows emotion’.

Let’s use a website as an example. When you first visit a site there are certain prototypical elements you expect to see: things like a navigation bar at the top or side for getting around, or a check-out in the top right corner for an e-commerce site. Every ‘type’ of site, from an online magazine to a fashion blog, has these prototypical elements.

When a site doesn’t conform to these expectations it’s harder for our brains to decode and we almost automatically judge it as either too complex or poorly designed.

Learning the language of simple

There are other factors at play other than just the preference for prototypical elements when it comes to how appealing a simple design is.

Since the 1960s, psychologists have been studying the mere exposure effect—the idea that the number of times we’re exposed to a certain stimuli effects how positively we feel about it.

It’s one of those concepts that advertisers love to exploit (just think about the terrible product placements in the Back to the Future films), because you don’t necessarily have to consciously recognize that you’ve seen the stimuli before.

In one 2013 study, Italian psychologists Stefano Ruggieri and Stefano Boca divided 78 high school students into two groups and had them watch segments of popular movies. One group was shown versions with product names visible while the others watched a version that masked all product identifiers. After the study, the groups answered questions about the film and their preference for certain brands.

The group that were shown product placements reported a higher preference for the brands even if they hadn’t recognized them in the film, when compared to the control group.

However, it’s not just exposure to single elements that effects how we feel. Another phenomenon—the beauty-in-averageness effect—has shown that we’re also more attracted to stimuli that include a number of common elements.

Numerous studies has shown that  faces generally become more attractive when they are blended (morphed) with other faces, or when they are distorted towards the population average.

Average of 15 ‘attractive’ female faces.

The combination of familiar, prototypical elements is more attractive to our brain, and easier to understand, than something completely unique.

Simple—the combination of beauty and function

While making something simple may begin with cognitive fluency it ends with ease of use and accessibility.

When we actively manipulate information, like taking in a new website or learning how to use a new product, we use a part of our brain called the working memory. The only problem is that working memory is a finicky thing.

As anyone who easily loses focus can attest to, it’s hard to continually think about large amounts of information at once. In fact, psychologists have found that our working memory generally maxes out at around seven ‘items’ of information.

Working this knowledge into your design can be a powerful way to ensure that it is as simple as possible in its use.

Here’s an example:

When Apple was working on the first iPod, Steve Jobs applied a rigid test: If he wanted a song or a function, he should be able to get there in three clicks. And he insisted the clicks be intuitive.

Despite all of the complexity inside of the iPod, Jobs knew that for us as consumers to feel instantly comfortable with it, the device had to be insanely simple. That meant being both familiar in its look and use (even though we’d never seen it before). Not only did the clickwheel feel simple because the action is prototypical, but using the interface wasn’t at all tasking on our working memory.

Simple things have a low psychological barrier of entry. We’re able to use them without any training at all.

How to harness the power of simple

Understanding how the brain deems something simple is a great start, but how else can you ensure that what you’re doing comes across as simple?

1. Steal from the past

As it’s hopefully clear by now, prototypical elements are the basis of simplicity. This means having a deep understanding of what your users’s expectations are.

Look at your competitors’s products or website. What are the common elements? What do people expect to see (or read, or hear) when they come to you? Define those elements and leverage them to make your product feel instantly familiar and easy.

2. Create your own product placements

Everything you do, from your website to your logo or your Twitter background conveys a message about you and your brand. Each of these elements is also a unique opportunities to create visual familiarity around your company (remember the mere exposure effect?).

Use a mood board to create a design style guide. Use stock images from the same source on all of your posts and websites. Create a color story that you use across all mediums.

Whatever you do, keep in mind that the more familiarity you develop with your audience, the more simple and attractive they’ll find you.

3. Be ‘same same, but different’

This is one of my favorite phrases I picked up from the kids in Indonesia trying to sell you everything from bracelets to scooters.

‘Same same but different’ basically means something that is similar enough to what you want (or are used to), yet has its own unique selling point (that makes you want it more). In terms of simple this means using those prototypical elements that are so important, yet adding novelty and uniqueness so that your version will stand out in our memories. A little deviation can be a good thing.

The headline of Apple’s first marketing brochure in 1977 proclaimed: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

But I think they got it slightly wrong.

Simplicity isn’t necessarily sophistication, but rather comfort. It’s the only friend at the dinner party. It’s the pigs-in-blankets at the hors d’oeuvres table. It’s the little things that instantly put you at ease.

Find a way to use simple to your advantage and make your users or audience instantly comfortable. Think about what their expectations are and how you can leverage their mental shortcuts to create something that is simple, beautiful, and same same, but different.

Read next: The psychology behind colors

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10 secrets that will make your life easier as a social media manager

This article originally appeared on the Twitter Counter blog.

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There’s a common misconception that managing social media on a professional level is as easy and breezy as uploading an image on Facebook with a simple caption to go with it. But, you and I both know that there’s much more to it.

Managing social media effectively is about posting the right content on the right platform, establishing your brand’s authority, thinking ahead, building relations, measuring and monitoring your performance, and the list goes on and on.

Basically, social media management can be a full-time job but it can become even more of a challenge if managing your brand’s social media presence is only part of your daily tasks.

So where to begin? Take a big breath and master these ten secrets that will help you save a ton of time and turn social media management into a piece of cake.

1. Planning an audit

As dreadful as it may sound, a social media audit is something that you should do on a frequent basis. If you’ve never done a social media audit for your brand, now is a good time as we’re heading towards the end of the first half of the year.

Social media audits help you get a grasp of how you’ve been doing so far in terms of meeting your social media marketing goals, if everything you had planned at the beginning of the year are working and whether you need to reconsider certain tactics of your social media plan.

But where to begin? Basically from the top down, going into as much depth as you need, in order to gain a better overview of your social media activity so far.

Take a look at a few basic steps for a super quick social media audit you can do on a frequent basis.

Step 1: List all the platforms you are active on with links to your social media profiles.
Step 2: Update any imagery and profile description that needs to be updated.
Step 3: Check some key metrics such as audience growth, reach, engagement and traffic generated from this platform.
Step 4: Evaluate your presence on each social media platform by checking your KPIs. This process will help you gain some perspective and assess where you should focus your efforts from now on.

2. Creating a content firehose

Many of the social media managers I speak to face the same challenge: Content curation. The truth is that finding high quality, relevant content to share on social media can be time-consuming. But fear not! What you need to make it easier is to create a content curation system that works for you.

A few tools that can help you build up your own system:

Feedly: Gather all your favorite news resources on Feedly and browse them every morning to find relevant, useful content to share and of course use it as an inspiration to for creating your own content. One of its helpful features is that it immediately gives you an idea on what’s most shared on a given day with the number of shares being shown next to each headline.

Unroll.me: You probably hate email as much as everyone else but email and newsletters can deliver some hidden gems ready to be tweeted, pinned, instagrammed, you name it. Unroll.me might come in handy in this case. What it does is gather all your newsletters in one place delivering all-in-one emails you can easily browse.

Smart content recommendation tools:

Answering to social media managers’ need of curating content, there are quite a few brilliant tools that recommend you content you can share on your social media platforms. Content that is relevant to you and your audience.

Swayy, and Groupiest are both tools that can recommend you relevant content to tweet, based on your community and the topics you are interested in.

3. Going all visual

Once you find the amazing content to share on social media, it is time to make it shareable. Research has shown that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text which basically explains the superpowers of visual content when it comes to social media marketing.

But you don’t necessarily need to be a pro in video editing or designing to create engaging, compelling visual content for your social media posts. There’s the easy way to go for it.

Social media platforms like Vine and Instagram allow you to create fun, short videos that can also be easily shared on Facebook and Twitter. Oreo is a great example of a brand that has made the most out of Vine on its Twitter feed, with great results on engagement.

Canva is must-use tool for every social media manager. It allows you to create professional looking images for social media in less than three minutes. The best part is that you don’t have to worry about the size of your images since Canva offers templates of visuals for all major platforms.

Infographics are a great way to turn boring data into insightful, engaging visuals that can easily be shared across different social media platforms. Piktochart is just the right tool for creating infographics in a few minutes. What is helpful is the wide range of themes to choose from and the freedom the tool offers in customizing templates to fit your style and needs.

4. Making time for engagement 

This is something that some social media managers neglect as they spend so much time and effort on the content they will post and on measuring how this content is distributed and received. But social media is not just a distribution channel for your brand and are definitely not to be treated as the platform for sharing your press releases.

The idea is to be conversational and interact with your community. Spending as much as a few minutes a day asking questions, replying to comments, engaging with your community and sharing their content can really make a difference.

Twitter chats are another way to engage in your niche, build authority for your brand and expand your reach. They provide you with the chance to be useful and relevant, offer your help and communicate your brand’s voice and identity in a constructive way.

5. Twitter listing everyone

Twitter lists are a powerful tool with endless possibilities to make your life as a social media manager much, much easier simply because they can help you:

1. Listen

Having a good monitoring system in place is one of the most important elements of a good social media strategy and Twitter lists can make Twitter monitoring much easier by adding them to your Twitter dashboard.

2. Build relationships

Twitter lists is what Monica Geller would refer to as ‘organized fun’. You can use them to build Twitter relationships with influencers in your field and reach out to new people in your niche.

This way, you can build authority and a strong community around your brand in a more efficient way.

3. Curate content

Twitter lists are a great way to keep up with all that’s happening in real time and curate content you can share with your followers. For example, you can keep up to date with all the latest from social media influencers or influencers in your industry.

In addition to this, since lists can be public, you can create your own custom feed for people to subscribe. This way you can increase your account’s visibility and build credibility.

Creating a Twitter list that adds value on a specific topic can increase the chances of your account popping up in search results both on Twitter and Google.

6. Planning ahead

When you have a social media content calendar, managing your accounts becomes a lot less daunting. Organizing the way you create and curate content helps you save a lot of time in managing social media but also allows you to have a clear overview of what type of content you post across different platforms, allows you to better plan your social media marketing campaigns and of course gives you a solution when you get to the “What should I post now” point.

The easiest way to organize a content calendar is by using a separate sheet for each month, with activities further broken down by month or day, depending on the volume of content you plan to publish.

How to create your social media content plan

Step 1: Decide how often you should post across platforms

Although there are some general rules of thumb on the posting frequency for each social media platform, the ultimate posting recipe is different for every account as it often depends on the industry and audience, the type of content you post and of course the platform itself.

For example, for Twitter Counter’s Twitter account, we found out that shifting to a once-an-hour, round the clock posting strategy had a positive effect on the overall engagement of our account.

In general, according to a recent Buffer research a good starting point for posting across platforms is this:

Note: it is important to experiment with different frequencies for each platform. Timing is equally important to maximize the exposure of your posts depending on where your audience is.

For Twitter, Followerwonk can tell you when your Twitter followers are online and Twitter Counter calculates the most successful times and days in a week based on your engagement metrics.

Facebook insights offers information on the best times to post for maximum reach whereas for Google+, social media science concludes that weekdays from 09:00 am to 11:00 am are the best.

Step 2: Decide what to post and where

Once you have decided on the best frequency and timing recipe for each platform it is time to decide on the type of content to post on each platform. If you have marketing campaigns planned through out the year, you can already start thinking your message, the visuals and the platforms you will want to use.

It is important to keep in mind that even though you could essentially post the same content on every medium, its structure and copy need to be adjusted to the specifics of each platform.

For example, on LinkedIn link posts with linger copy work better than on Facebook. On Twitter, the 80/20 rule is a rule to tweet by. This means that a good content tactic is sharing 20 percent your own content and 80 percent third party content from trustworthy, reliable sources.

Twitter suggests images or video as the best option to accompany your tweets and boost your reach.

Step 3: Write your copy and create your visuals

When writing your social media copy, keep in mind that length matters. Social media scientist, Dan Zarrella suggests  that tweets that are 100 to 115 characters long are more likely to be retweeted.

On Facebook, posts that are maximum 40 characters long do perform better in terms of engagement, whereas Google+ and LinkedIn call for longer updates. For a quick checklist of what you should keep in mind when writing social media copy take a look at this amazing infographicfrom Quick Sprout.

Step 4: Fill up your social media content calendar

The last step of your social media content strategy is creating a content calendar. This way, you gain an overview of what you are posting on each platform and it is much easier to plan relevant content around important dates such as product releases, holidays and so on.

Oh, and of course you’ll never need to ask yourself ‘What do I post now?’

Depending how much of a visual type you are, you can either use a template or use your scheduling tool to plan your content ahead.

Remember that on social media, it is OK to repeat content as long as you present it in a fresh way using a different visual or copy for example. In fact, repeating content on social is key to boosting traffic and expanding your reach.

7. Loving thy automation 

Managing several social media platforms without some help from automation tools would be impossible. Otherwise, implementing your social media editorial calendar and following through your plan would be much harder. Take a look at three tools that make social media automation a piece of cake.

Buffer is the ultimate tool for scheduling your social media content across platforms. What’s even more time saving about Buffer is that you can quickly schedule content from anywhere on the Web using their browser plugin. Buffer supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and most recently Pinterest.

IFTTT has endless possibilities for automation in general but when it comes to social media management it can really make things easy breezy. It is basically a tool that connects two services together to help you perform specific actions based on certain criteria. For example, “If I post a photo on Instagram, upload it to my Flickr account.

You can either create the recipe that fits best for you of find the recipe that best fits your needs. For example:

Edgar is a great tool for automating your evergreen content. Edgar is a social media automation app that allows you to share and re-share links to your best content automatically. keeping track of your updates after they’ve been shared, and posting them again at a later date.

8. Setting some budget

Social media ad spending in US is expected to grow to nearly $14 billion by 2018 which is an indication that the days when social media were free are over. Social media marketers are realizing more and more the importance of setting some budget aside for social media campaigns throughout the year to gear up on their marketing goals.

For example, if your company is launching a major product, if your account needs an extra boost in audience before a major event or if you need to increase your Facebook reach, having a social media budget you can invest based on your needs can get you out of the difficult position and improve your results.

9. Making an action plan for yourself

Visualizing your daily tasks always helps. This way, you see how you spend your time juggling social media management and other tasks and distribute your time in a better way.

There are many tools to help you out but what I’ve found the handiest is Google Calendar since I can have meetings and tasks all in one place for a better overview and more importantly, I can easily modify my tasks and events to better plan my week.

10. Analyzing and testing

Every social media manager knows that analyzing and testing your social media activity can make things much easier in the long run.

In this process, it is important to clearly define your KPIs and the how you are going to measure them, but also set a time frame for analysis and for testing new things. For example, have you chosen the right posting frequency? Does video on Twitter work for your audience? Is a certain copy format on Facebook outperforming others?

Having the right analytics tools in your tool belt will help you evaluate your social media presence and see what works or doesn’t, through testing and analyzing your tactics every step of the way.

Got any tips for an easier, breezier life managing social media? Share them with us in comments right below!

Read next: What $5 per day will buy you on Facebook ads

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Woman unknowingly tosses a first-gen Apple computer worth $200,000 at a recycling center

A recycling center in Silicon Valley is looking for a mystery woman who unknowingly dropped off a rare, first-generation Apple computer that fetched $200,000 at a private auction.

The woman was reportedly cleaning her late husband’s garage when she came across the Apple I, Apple’s first computer that was hand-assembled by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne in 1976. The computer came with just 4KB of memory, and originally sold for $600. Only about 200 of this model was ever made.

Clean Bay Area recycling center vice president Victor Gichun said the woman dropped off several boxes of electronics, and did not want a tax receipt nor did she leave her contact information. It was only a few weeks after that the recycling team found the Apple I inside.

Clean Bay Area intends to give 50 percent of its auction sale back to the woman, that is, if they can ever find her. “To prove who she is,” Gichun said, “I just need to look at her.”

That’s some 21st century Cinderella game.

➤ Woman donates an old Apple computer that turns out to be a collectible item worth $200,000 [US News]

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Tech news in Eastern Europe: What happened in May

Tech news stories originating from Central and Eastern Europe have become more of a mad torrent than a shallow stream. This month alone, we’ve tracked funding and M&A deals worth more than $300 million, as well as dozens of new laws and software developer you’ve got to check out. Here are the highlights you may have missed from this month.

If you think something is missing, or would like to draw our attention to an important story, feel free to ping the author on Twitter (@shlema) or by e-mail at shlema@gmail.com.

Startups, funds, accelerators

• Lithuanian startup Widerfi has joined MassChallenge, the world’s largest accelerator
• Czech startup Skypicker developed an algorithm that finds discount flight tickets ‘hidden’ on airline websites
• Ukrainian software developer Readdle released its Spark email client
• Ukraine-born startup CheckiO announced a new “coding game,” Empire of Code
• Russian Venture Company launched GenerationS 2015 accelerator, with the program taking place in Moscow from July to November
• MVP Academy Demo Day showcased a wide variety of Romanian startups
• Russian startup developed a GPS dog tracker that spots your pet’s location and monitors obesity
• Estonia’s Bold Gadgets launched keychain phone charger on Indiegogo
• Ukrainian startup Ecois.me has launched a $50,000 Indiegogo campaign for its intelligent home energy monitoring system
• Russian-Canadian biomedical startup Darta Systems launched the Emvio Watch, a gadget that “measures stress and makes everyday stress management easier”
• Russian online language learning startup LinguaLeo has fired 30 percent of its staff due to the tough situation in the country’s economy
• Messenger Telegram created by VK.com founder Pavel Durov has hit 62 million monthly active users
• Estonian startup Taxify has introduced mobile carrier billing for cabs
• Ukrainian-born private jet hire startup JetMe released a new tool called “Name Your Price” to allow users to choose how much they’re willing to spend on a flight
• Russian Venture Company will pour some $20 million in a new space-focused fund
• Russian-born venture fund Flint Capital has raised further $50 million and entered the US market
• Bulgarian Kanbanize has developed a management platform where teams can collaborate and visualize their progress

Funding deals and M&A

• Qiwi Venture has invested $150,000 in mobile payment app AnyBalance
• Slovenian startup ULU has attracted €500,000 from Chinese Fang Group
• Estonian farm management startup VitalFields raised an additional $1.2 million in funding
• Russian-Israeli startup Medviser received $500,000 in funding from Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich
• Russian startup LinguaLeo has attracted $500,000 in funding from Social Discovery Ventures and Runa Capital
• Croatian startup Oradian raised seed funding for its microfinance platform
• Russian-Israeli appointment scheduling service Gbooking has attracted $425,000 in funding at a valuation of $3.4 million
• Ukrainian e-commerce service Skidka.ua has landed $250,000 in exchange for a 10 percent stake in the company
• Russian online loan service MoneyMan has attracted $6 million in funding
• Controversial Russian-made fitness tracker HealBe GoBe has attracted $3.5 million in funding
• Warsaw-based medical booking platform DocPlanner announced a $10 million Series B funding round
• Russian travel startup Level.Travel raised about $610,000 in funding
• Estonian-born Pipedrive raised $9 million in Series A funding
• Russian social media monitoring system Kribrum received a $960,000 grant from the Skolkovo foundation and InfoWatch
• Polish SaaS startup Sugester raised €250,000 in funding from Inovo at a valuation of over €1 million
• Ukrainian startup AdTena landed $60,000 in funding from local angel investors
• Ukrainian startup Chargies, which combines the ideas of Yo and Tamagotchi in its mobile app, raised $100,000 from Noosphere Ventures to enter the US market
• Ukrainian mobile marketing startup Clickky has attracted $2 million for global expansion from Moscow-based venture fund iTech Capital
• Romania-based travel technology firm dcs plus landed an undisclosed amount in funding from Earlybird VC
• Russian fund RBV Capital invested $5.2 million in MRI visualization company Image Analysis
• Lithuanian Practica Capital invested €200,000 in local space technology startup NanoAvionics
• Russian venture fund Vaizra Investments participated in a $50 million round in Robinhood and poured some $500,000 in Israeli startup Optishell
• Russian security specialist Group-IB has reportedly secured $4 million in funding from FRII
• Russian payment operator Qiwi has acquired two local players, money transfer system Contact and payment processing system Rapida, for $167 million in stock
• Russian retail analytics solution provider RetailNext has secured a $125 million funding round for global expansion

Laws and governments

• Lithuania has officially become an Internet oligarch
• Contrary to previous reports, Russia is not building its own mobile OS but plans to give grants to developers to port their apps to Tizen and Sailfish, as well as work on a localized version of the latter
• Buzzfeed published a story claiming that Cisco altered sales records in Russia in order to “dodge sanctions and provide equipment to Vladimir Putin’s military and security services”
• Russian think tank claims to have developed software that will search Russian social media posts for signs of plans by political opposition to the government to stage unapproved protests or meetings
• Russia warned Google, Twitter and Facebook on law violations
• Republic of Estonia has invited the world to apply for Estonian ‘e-Residency’ online
• Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office has blocked access to three websites selling imported food banned in the country
• Russia has debuted its own CPU as it aims for US tech breakaway
• Hungary will offer tax payment delay on Internet network development in 2016
• Russia and China have signed a cyber-security deal, pledging not to hack each other

In other news

• Mandriva has filed for bankruptcy in France and moved all development to Russia
• Turkish freelancers are protesting against changes in the way the company works with search assessors
• Social investment network eToro launched in Russia
• Clutch has identified top mobile app developers in Poland, Ukraine and Russia
• Flying car prototype crashed in Slovakia. Fortunately, the pilot and inventor Štefan Klein suffered only light injuries
• Yandex has reportedly shut down its Android-based mobile OS project Yandex.Kit
• Estonia is backing up its entire government dataset, and also devising ways to operate through the cloud in the event of an attack by a foreign nation
• Yota Devices launched an Indiegogo campaign for its dual-screen smartphone YotaPhone 2 and has already raised more than $225,000
• Yandex’s browser entered beta, added a strong focus on privacy outside Russia
• Ukrainian GSC Game World, known as the developer of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., announced its next title, “Cossacks 3″
• Poland-based company Security Explorations revealed seven vulnerabilities in the Google App Engine

Good (long) reads from around the Web

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Apple says Watch OS 1.0.1 records heart rate irregularly on purpose. Thanks, Apple

In the latest update of Apple Watch OS 1.0.1, users are reporting that their heart rates are being recorded less frequently, thus providing a less accurate picture of heart activity. Previously thought to be a bug, Apple has now confirmed that this behavior is actually intentional. Huh?

In Watch OS 1.0, the user’s heart rate is recorded every 10 minutes. Now, Apple has clarified to say that in the latest version, the Watch will still do the same, but won’t record anything if the arm is not in motion or is the arm is moving.

Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, considering that most people would probably be interested in their heart rate changes during cardiovascular exercises, such as running. The same Apple Watch update page even advises that “Rhythmic movements, such as running or cycling, give better results compared to irregular movements.”

9to5Mac alleges that the update was probably made to help conserve battery, which comes at the expense of inaccurate heart rate measurements.

If you prefer to have the Watch measure your heart rate more frequently, you can force monitor by using the Workout app to record changes every 10 seconds. Doesn’t seem all that smart to have to manually turn this function on, but, you know, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

➤ Apple says Watch OS 1.0.1 attempts to record heart rate every ten minutes, but won’t if arm is moving [9to5mac]

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Treat yourself! The top TNW Deals this week

Whether you are looking to upgrade your business skills, your computer, or your free time, the offers over at TNW Deals this week should interest you. Here’s a roundup…

70% off a VPN Unlimited Lifetime Subscription

The usual reason to set up a virtual private network is for security, as it makes you practically untraceable online. But it also brings other benefits, such as access to region-locked content. VPN Unlimited lets you take full advantage of this by offering unrestricted bandwidth and an uncapped high-speed connection.

This means you can stream video from around the world — you can pick from a list of global servers — and the service works on both desktop and mobile devices. Pick up a lifetime subscription now for $39.

➤ Get this deal

85% off the Complete Arduino Starter Kit and Course Bundle

Owning an Arduino is a great excuse to unleash your inner (or not so hidden) big kid mode. This bundle provides you with your very own starter Arduino, plus all the kit needed to start making circuits.

When you are ready to get started on some more ambitious projects, you can also check out the three included video courses: Make a Remote-Controlled Car, Your Guide to the Internet of Things, and Make Your Own Environment Monitor System. Get the bundle now for $75.99 with free shipping.

➤ Get this deal

96% off the Skillsology ‘Start Your Own Business’ Bundle

The benefits of founding a successful startup are very appealing, but to get there, you first need to understand how to make money. This bundle of seven courses teaches business from the ground up, with specific tracks on all the major skills any worthwhile CEO needs to have.

These include financial math, sales, online marketing and related analytics, and advice on strategies and models which are proven to generate revenue. Get the bundle now for $59 to get started.

➤ Get this deal

39% off the Striiv Fusion Activity + Sleep Tracker

The unbeatable feeling of achievement as you watch your personal best rise with each passing day is made possible by wearing a fitness tracker like the Striiv. It counts the steps you take, the calories you burn, the distance you cover, and the time you spend doing it.

But this bracelet can also monitor your sleep patterns, wake you up in the morning with a vibrating alarm, and even go in the shower (it is water-resistant). Hook it up to the Striiv app, and you can view all your past data. You can grab the bracelet now for $59.99 with free shipping.

➤ Get this deal

92% off the Interactive Coding Bootcamp

If you would like to get into the tech sector as a developer, but don’t know where to start, this is the course for you.

The Bootcamp is a twelve-week course which teaches front-end (HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, and more) and back-end development (Ruby on Rails, Node.js, databases, ecommerce, and more), along with the fundamentals of computer science. You learn through examples, and the idea is that you finish the course with a killer portfolio. Order it now for $39 for the huge discount.

➤ Get this deal

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What $5 per day will buy you on Facebook ads

This post originally appeared on the Buffer blog.

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If you want get your posts seen on Facebook, one of the most common bits of wisdom you’ll hear is this:

Pay for reach with Facebook ads. 

Paid advertising on Facebook seems to be one of the most immediate ways to impact the reach of your content. Though it’s not without its questions. How well does it work? What kind of engagement do you get?

And what can you expect for your hard-earned money?

We’ve been testing Facebook ads a bit with Buffer’s Facebook strategy, looking to see exactly what’s possible on a small budget. I’m happy to share our findings with you. Here’s what we found $5 per day will buy you on Facebook Ads.

I’d love to jump right to our findings here, then get into the specifics below. We tried three different types of Facebook Ads, each designed with a different objective in mind.

Here are our results: 

When we view this in terms of how much $5 per day will buy you, these are the numbers:

• Page Likes – 9 likes per day
• Clicks to the Buffer homepage – 1 per day
• Boosted post – 787 new people reached

How does this jive with your experience on Facebook Ads? 

I’ll be happy to share the specifics of what we tried and how we tried it (and how you can test this for yourself, too.)

One final thought before moving ahead, it might be useful to see how our experience compares to Facebook Ads benchmarks overall. Matthew Kammerer shared an overview of social media advertising in a guest post at the Buffer blog, including the following chart of helpful Facebook benchmarks.

Since we find ourselves in the technology space at Buffer, we can compare to the industry benchmarks in this chart.

Average clickthrough rate: 0.2%

Ours: 0.95%

Average cost per click: $0.20

Ours: $0.97

Average cost per 1,000 impressions: $0.38

Ours: $6.35

A lot of our experience here didn’t quite match up to the benchmarks, likely for a number of factors like this being my first dive into Facebook Ads (lots to learn!) and my not spending the time to truly optimize the campaigns.

Like all the experiments we run and share here, your mileage may vary. And we’d love to hear your experience and results!

How to Set Up a Facebook Ads Campaign

All of Facebook’s ad campaigns run through the Facebook Ads tool, which you can access via a direct link at facebook.com/ads, or by clicking “Manage Ads” in the drop-down menu on your Facebook account, or by clicking any of the CTAs on your Facebook page.

With Facebook, you have many different ways of approaching an ad campaign. These ways can typically fall within three categories of benefits:

• Interaction: Your ad and content right on the homepage allows users to interact with it like they do any other piece of social content.
• Reach: Expand your reach to new potential customers who can interact with your content by commenting, liking, favoriting, retweeting, etc.
• Followers: Brands also report a notable increase in followers through these social advertising options, since brand visibility increases significantly.

For small budgets, you’re likely to get the most bang for your buck with boosting reach. Moz found that $1 per day can grow you audience by 4,000 people (this didn’t quite match our experience, though it’s well worth trying).

Once you’re into the Ads manager, you can navigate with the menu on the left-hand side of the page. To get started with your first ad, click the green button in the top-right corner of the page.

When you click to create a Facebook Ad, you’ll go to a page where you choose the objective for your campaign. There are 10 options here for what you might want to achieve:

1. Boost your posts (more on this below)
2. Promote your page (more on this next)
3. Send people to your website (more on this below)
4. Increase conversions on your website
5. Get installs of your app
6. Increase engagement in your app
7. Reach people near your business
8. Raise attendance at your event
9. Get people to claim your offer
10. Get video views

I won’t get into the specifics of all these as we only tested the top three, but there are some really great resources out there—like this post from Noah Kagan—if you’re interested in learning more about Facebook Ads in their entirety.

How to Set Up a Campaign for Facebook Page Likes

1. Choose the second option from the Create an Ad list: Promote Your Page.

2. At the next screen, select the page you’d like to promote.

3. Choose who will be shown your ad.

The audience can be customized based on all the following demographics:

• Location, starting with a country, state, city, zip code, or address, and refining even further with a mile radius
• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Interests – Facebook looks at a person’s interests, activity, the Pages they like, and closely related topics
• Behaviors – Things like purchase behavior and intent, as well as device usage
• Connections – Choose to show the ad to all people, just those connected to Buffer, or those not connected to Buffer

In addition, with the Connections setting, you can choose advanced targeting, which lets you include or exclude people who are connected to certain pages, apps, or events.

How we chose an audience for the Buffer ad

Facebook recommends narrowing your reach in a targeted way in order to maximize the impact of your ad. We went quite narrow with this experiment, choosing the following audience demographics:

• Location: United States
• Interests: Social media
• Excluded: People who already like Buffer
• Age: 18-65+
• Language: English (US)

This gave us an estimated reach of up to 3,200 people out of 14 million. The 3,200 people are how many we could expect to be online any given day and potentially see our ad.

4. Choose how much you want to spend.

5. Choose an image to create the ad.

You can pick from your library, search, or upload a new one. If you’re able to upload multiple images, you can create multiple ad variations that will run within your campaign, giving you a sort of A/B test to see what works best.

The recommended image size is 1,200 pixels wide by 444 pixels tall.

6. Write the text and the headline.

For the text, you get 90 characters to share a quick message that will appear above your image.

For the headline (which is hidden beneath an Advanced Options toggle), you can use an alternative to your page name, which is shown by default. Headlines can be 25 characters long.

How we wrote the text and headline

We left the page title the same (“Buffer”), although it’s possible we could have tried something like Buffer – Social Media or Buffer App.

For the text, we aimed for a descriptive headline that would help people understand what it is they’d be getting from us. Since we targeted people with an interest in social media, it also made sense to make the message match the audience.

The Best Tips and Tools for Sharing to Social Media

Here’s how the ad looked:

Next: How to Set Up a Campaign for Boosted Posts

How to Set Up a Campaign for Boosted Posts

1. Choose the first option from the Create an Ad list: Boost Your Posts.

2. At the next screen, select the page you’d like to use. Then select the post you’d like to promote.

3. Choose who will be shown your ad.

You have the same options here as you did in the Page Likes campaign mentioned above.

How we chose an audience for the Buffer ad

For this experiment, we went with a quite targeted demographic: younger San Francisco people with an interest in technology.

• Location: A 50-mile radius from San Francisco
• Interests: Technology
• Excluded: People who already like Buffer
• Age: 21-40
• Language: English (US) and (UK)

This led to a great and targeted group of up to 2,800 people per day who might be served our ad.

4. Choose how much you want to spend.

5. Review your post.

In this section, you can see a preview of your post as it will appear in the News Feed on desktop and on mobile as well as in the right column of desktop screens. You can turn any of these views off so that the ad won’t be shown there.

How we chose what to display

Facebook offers some helpful views of what your ad might look like in various places. The three main spots:

1. The News Feed on desktop
2. The News Feed on mobile
3. The right column on desktop

When it came to boost this post, it seemed to us that the best placement was likely to be in the News Feed instead of the sidebar.

When the content moved to the sidebar, the headline was truncated and the description was truncated. The text itself was harder to see. Ultimately, it just wasn’t intended to be in the sidebar; it was meant for the News Feed.

How to Set Up a Campaign for Clicks to Your Website

1. Choose the third option from the Create an Ad list: Send people to your website.

2. At the next screen, type in the URL where you’d like to send traffic.

3. Choose who will be shown your ad.

How we chose an audience for the Buffer ad

For this ad, we went a slightly different route with our audience selection. We chose to target a specific audience—our MailChimp subscribers—using Facebook’s custom audiences.

To create a custom audience, we chose the option from the audience selection portion of our Facebook ad.

Here, you can choose to create the custom audience from a base of three options:

1. Customer list (like an email list, for instance)
2. Website traffic
3. App activity

We chose to use a customer list for our audience segment. We exported our subscribers from MailChimp and imported into Facebook. Our list of 39,000 names returned 23,900 Facebook users.

We then further segmented the list into specific demographics for location, age, and language. We didn’t quite feel the need to segment for interests since everyone of these folks seemed to be interested in Buffer just by subscribing!

4. Choose how much you want to spend.

5. Choose how you want the ad to look.

Depending on the visuals you’d like to associate with your ad, you can choose to either show one image with your ad or show a gallery of five images that people can scroll to view.

6. Connect your ad to a Facebook page.

This allows the ad to appear in the News Feed as if it came from a page, while the ad itself still goes to your chosen URL.

7. Write a headline.

You get 25 characters max.

8. Write description text.

You get 90 characters max.

9. Choose button text from Facebook’s list of options.

• Shop Now
• Book Now
• Learn More
• Sign Up
• Download

10. Add more text to the Advanced Settings for your link.

11. Choose where the ad will be placed.

In addition to the options above for News Feed and right column, this particular type of ad also includes an option for appearing on Facebook’s audience network, which includes third-party mobile apps.

How we chose what to display

We went with an ad for our Buffer for Business landing page, hoping to encourage any current Buffer newsletter subscribers to take a closer look at our business plan.

The ad itself, well, I’m sure I have lots of room for improvement here!

Reflecting back now, I can see that the headline lacks any information about what it is that Buffer does. There’s no benefit there for the user. The image is from PlaceIt, which does great stuff helping get screenshots and app images that look smooth.

If I were to do it again, I’d likely follow a lot of the advice here in Noah Kagan’s post about Facebook ads.

1. Headline: Give away something for free
2. Text: Social proof showing why the reader should care
3. News Feed Link Description: Give call to action for them to get benefit

For example:

Over to you

I feel like we’re quite early on with learning best practices for Facebook Ads at Buffer. I’d love to get any insight you have in this area and hear any tips you might be willing to share!

Overall, the cost of advertising on Facebook seems like it could be most helpful to us in terms of boosted posts as we were able to get more than 750 new people to check out our content for only $5.00.

What has been the best success you’ve found with Facebook Ads?

Read next: How to spend just $100 on a social media budget

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‘Too busy': Two little words, one big lie

Jason Zook is the founder of IWearYourShirt and author of Creativity For Sale. This post originally appeared on his blog.

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I’ve never heard of a highly creative or successful person being too busy. Let me rephrase that: I’ve never heard of a highly creative or successful person that I respect being too busy.

The most creative people of our time are doing more things in a day than most people do in a week (or even month). But you know what you rarely hear a highly creative or successful person say? “I’m too busy.”

Think about the people who you hear say “I’m too busy.” More often than not, those people aren’t actually busy at all. They’re just filling their days to hide insecurities.

I recently listened to an excerpt of an audio book by Tim Kreider, that was featured by Tim Ferriss. Mr. Kreider’s thoughts on being busy resonated with me. If I was “too busy” to listen to that excerpt, this article wouldn’t exist and I wouldn’t have become a slightly better version of myself with something to share.

The digital age we live in should provide us with more time than we could ever imagine. Twenty years ago when you wanted to look up a fact, you had to get in your car, drive to a library, find an encyclopedia (with the letters on the spine that coordinated with your topic), sift through hundreds of pages of information, only then to find your answer.

Nowadays, you just hold down a button on your phone and ask a nonexistent human your question. Or you Google it.

Either way, we should have an immense amount of extra time for any action we take these days. We should never actually be “too busy.”

However, it seems just the opposite. It seems as if our days are filled to the brim. It feels like there are never enough hours in the day. This makes it nearly impossible to find creativity and inspiration.

I’d like for you to answer the following question honestly. If you’ve ever said the words, “I’m busy” or “I’m too busy,” was it due to tasks you actually enjoyed doing?

For myself, the answer is no. That’s 100% real truth. The only time I ever actually feel busy is when I’m doing a bunch of mundane stuff I don’t want to be doing. But I’m a realist, and I haven’t manufactured a life without mundane stuff (yet).

If the work you are doing makes you feel busy, then the work you are doing doesn’t truly matter to you.

Work worth doing isn’t busy work.

We live in such an amazingly exciting time. The possibilities created by the Internet—by the vast amounts of communication, by the access to information—should not keep us tethered to a life full of feeling busy.

Do yourself a favor and the next time you feel busy, just take a break. Take a few minutes to reassess your current situation. If you aren’t willing to actually change it and make your life a little bit better through some hard work and tough choices, then at least stop complaining about it to other people. Be honest with yourself and make changes.

If someone asks you the question, “how are you doing?” don’t answer by saying “I’m busy.” Instead, tell them the truth:

“Honestly, my job isn’t great and I feel like I’m doing a lot of work that doesn’t really matter to me. My day is full of tasks that aren’t fulfilling and I’m scared I’m going to be stuck here until I’ve saved enough money that I can retire and maybe fully enjoy my life.”

Because that is the truth. I know, because I was there. I worked a few 9-to-5 jobs I didn’t enjoy.

I owned a company that made me feel busy all the time. I was stuck in the mindset that if I wasn’t working, then I was missing out on opportunities. Funny enough, by removing mundane tasks and projects from my life, I’ve actually created more opportunities that don’t make me feel busy.

I have more tasks on my to-do list right now than I’ve ever had. But I will never tell you how busy I am. Instead, I’ll tell you that I’m excited for the possibilities ahead. I’m excited to see where my life takes me because of the bold choices I’m making. I’m in as much charge of my life as I feel anyone can be. It’s scary about 33 percent of the time. The rest of the time I’m genuinely enthusiastic about it.

I’m not a self-made billionaire. I haven’t built a startup and sold it for a ridiculous amount of money. I’m not a best-selling author with a potential movie deal.

I’m an entrepreneur who isn’t willing to live someone else’s life. I measure my success by the things that make me happy, not by things that are glorified by our society.

Stop being busy. Start being honest with yourself. Make changes in your life. It will be scary, but it will be worth it.

Read next: The J. J. Abrams guide to intelligent online business

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Google’s Gmail API officially gets push notification support

At last year’s Google I/O developer conference, the company launched its official Gmail API. One year later, it’s adding a small but important feature to this API: Push notification support.

The inclusion of push notification support means third party developers no longer have to poll Gmail for new messages, which helps eliminate time and extra network costs. As Google puts it, “Just subscribe to a Gmail mailbox and whenever a change occurs, the Gmail API will instantly notify your server.”

Although you can still use IMAP, the official Gmail API will support all the features that come with Gmail, such as drafts, replies and native search, to name a few.

For more info on what you can do with the new update, read the developer’s guide here.

➤ Gmail API Push notifications: don’t call us, we’ll call you [Google]

Read next: Everything Google announced at Google I/O 2015 in one handy list

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The J. J. Abrams guide to intelligent online business

Aaron Orendorff is a contributor at Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Business Insider, Success Magazine, CopyBlogger & MarketingProfs. You can check out how he’s “Saving the World from Bad Content” at iconiContent or on Twitter.

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J. J. Abrams is a geek. And I mean that in the best way possible.

In fact, as one of the most successful geeks in Hollywood today, it’s a title Abrams wears proudly …

When I was a kid, it was a huge insult to be a geek. Now it’s a point of pride in a weird way.

Intelligence gives us the ability to craft, plan, love, and survive. Matching those abilities with strategies in your business — especially your online business — will help you Abrams-level grandeur.

So what exactly can J. J. Abrams teach you about intelligent business?

A lot.

To prove it, let’s break down four staggeringly brilliant lessons from the geeky brain and life of Abrams that you can apply today:

1. Tell a story

For Abrams, intelligence starts with a good story. Epic stories aren’t created in a day, in a week, or even in a year. Instead, they build over time.

Which is perfect, because as Jeffrey Madoff, the man behind branding at Victoria’s Secret and Ralph Lauren, points out, “A brand is a story well told.”

Compelling stories demonstrate raw emotion and human truths. They include complex characters, interwoven back stories, and adventure. They draw your audience in.

In a 2013 interview, Abrams explained it like this:

To pack a punch in a crowded market, gripping stories need to be backed by hard stats and data. The best storytellers can also tell their stories simply.

In other words, telling a story, and telling it well, is the first and most powerful way to connect with people — across all industries.

The problem is most companies forget that it’s not enough to just pump out slick color-palettes, inspiring logos, clever mottos, beautiful packaging, or even trendy content… and then just expect people to convert.

99Designs makes this point wonderfully in “The basics of branding: How to make your business iconic”:

Design is that element that stands out initially, but it’s your brand story that is going to give that design and your company’s identity resonance.

So, how can you tell a Abrams’ story in your business? Be relatable.

Being relatable means having real flesh-and-blood characters in your marketing. It also means getting to the action.

Those are the nonnegotiable cornerstones of great storytelling: actors and action.

Google does this powerfully. In fact, this three-minute video — “Reunion” — tells the story of a man from Delhi who hasn’t seen his childhood friend Yusuf since the Partition of India in 1947. The man’s granddaughter arranges for the two to meet again … of course, using Google.

2. Have a master plan

When an eight-year-old Abrams toured Universal Studios with his grandfather, his life-long passion for movies was ignited. After returning home from the adventure, that night, J. J. persuaded his father to let him use the family’s super 8mm camera to record his own films in the backyard. Since then, everything he’s done has been in service to that master plan.

Naturally, Abrams’ plan began with nothing more than passion, an idea, and an opportunity. However, he built technical skills around that foundation. He learned. He planned. He networked. He grew.

Left: Abrams Family, Right: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for A.F.I. via NYTimes 2011

His master plan evolved from shooting short flicks with his pals in the yard after school to directing TV shows and feature films with global appeal. Through this process, especially as his projects grew to intergalactic proportions, he learned the immense importance of details.

The same is true of you and your business.

What started as a note on a napkin has grown and that growth, at times, can feel overwhelming.

This is where your one, unified master plan has to kick in. And managing your master plan requires strategic planning. At a technical level, ERP (enterprise resource planning) tools aren’t a requirement for every intelligent business, but the larger your organization, the more essential they become. Not only to align your individual projects with your overall master plan, but to bring together third-party tools like Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.

3. Love your audience

Abrams loves his audience. And — more importantly — his audience loves him.

Why? Simple… because he’s one of ‘em.

When asked what it is that made him fall in love with Star Wars, Abrams answered, “It was absolutely the first film that struck a cord and that resonates to this day. I think it’s because everyone relates to being stuck in your life and feeling like something extraordinary is just around the corner.”

This love and identification with his audience enables Abrams to jump into the seat of the movie goer and direct his films with a connected purpose.

Nowhere is Abrams’ connected purpose more evident than his 2013 mystery novel S. As both literature and a physical object, S. was heralded as a “profound and tremendous work of art,” by bringing together a fictional book, pre-printed notes in the margins, maps, and a storyline that overlaps two realities

For intelligent online businesses, truly loving your audience comes down to one thing: analytics. To love your audience, you have to know them… intimately.

Big picture analytics gives you precious insight into the life of your consumers. Naturally, Google Analytics is a phenomenal starting point. Other all-in-one dashboards can give your business the intelligence required to make content that your customers love.

Making the most of your analytics by combining onsite data with email, social media mentions, and keyword ranking, helps you connect with your audience on a deeper level.

4. Stay consistent

A recipient of the Visual Effects Society’s Visionary Award last year, Abrams knows you don’t build an empire without stability.

The Visionary Award recognizes an individual who has “uniquely and consistently employed the art and science of visual effects to foster imagination and ignite future discoveries by way of artistry, invention and groundbreaking work.”

One of the biggest mistakes online businesses make is technical inconsistency: giving your market a spotty, it-works-one-day-and-then-crashes-the-next experience.

How do you become consistent in your customer’s eyes?

Make sure your site works… and works fast. Inconsistent performance and unreliable site speed doesn’t just cost you customers it drastically affects your site ranking.

Since 2010 Google has been factoring website speed into search result ranking. For this reason, consistent providers like Hostt.com — who boasts a 99.999 percent uptime for desktop and mobile sites — are a must.

Audiences are impatient. In fact, a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions as KISSMetrics proves:

Getting intelligent…

Abrams is a geek. And you should be too, especially when it comes to running an intelligent online business. How?

1. Tell a story
2. Have a master plan
3. Love your audience
4. Stay consistent

Follow those four steps and maybe you can be just as geeky as Abrams … and just as successful.

Read next: How to survive the entrepreneurial rollercoaster

Top image credit: Joegrooming.com

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Watch: The Business of Cybercrime – ‘Victims of cybercrime don’t even know about it’

XPRIZE‘s competitions touch the furthest reaches of human achievement in fields like healthcare, oceanography and even space exploration.

The organization is currently designing a competition in the field of cybersecurity. In the second of this three-part series produced by XPRIZE, you’ll hear from some of the giants in the Internet and cyber-security fields as they relate stories of cybercrime becoming a worldwide business and the real possibility of cyber-warfare.

Watch next: The end of privacy – ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to live for’

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Google’s solar-powered drone crashed in New Mexico during test flight

Google has confirmed that a prototype of its solar-powered drone designed to bring Internet service by air crashed earlier this month in New Mexico.

News of the unmanned Solara 50’s crash, now coming to light, happened on May 1 on a private test site outside of Albuquerque. It was reportedly flying at an altitude of 20,000 feet when it began to fall. No one was injured in the crash, Bloomberg reports.

The Solara 50, developed by Titan Aerospace, a company Google bought last year, is Google’s second initiative to provide Internet via sky; the first is Project Loon which peruses high altitude balloons. The drones are expected to fly above the weather at 65,000 feet to beam Internet service down below.

The crash is a setback to Google’s initiatives to race against Facebook’s own version of the project in collaboration with Internet.org. Facebook was reportedly also interested in acquiring Titan Aerospace last year.

➤ Google’s Solar-Fueled Cyber Drone Crashes in New Mexico Test [Bloomberg]

Read next: Everything Google announced at Google I/O 2015 in one handy list

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15 of the best new and updated Android apps from May

It’s been a busy month for Android apps, with news from big names – Periscope from Twitter lading on the platform for the first time and notable updates to Flickr’s mobile apps.

Then, of course, there’s the black-and-white photography app Lenka, and an overhauled version of QuizUp.

All you need to do is peruse the list below and choose your favorites.

Snap Me Up

Maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you like your morning alarm. Maybe you like selfies.

If that is the case, there’s a good chance you’ll also like Snap Me Up, a new Android app that won’t let you silence your alarm until you’ve taken a selfie.

If you just want to set a normal alarm, you can do that too, but it sort of negates the point of downloading it in the first place.

There’s also a nap option if you just want a quick snooze.

➤ Snap Me Up

MixRadio

MixRadio, once the preserve of Windows Phone devices, launched for iPhone and Android this month.

Just like on Microsoft’s mobile OS, it allows you to create personalized radio stations for free from its database of 35 million tracks – and allows you up to six skips per hour.

It promises to get better at curating your own station over time as it learns what you like, and what you don’t. Alternatively, there are some preset stations according to genres or specific themese.

➤ MixRadio

Periscope

Given how much noise there has been around live-streaming apps recently, there’s a good chance that you knew already that Periscope arrived on Android this month.

If you somehow didn’t, you do now.

Just like on iOS, it allows you to create a live broadcast of whatever you are doing and share it with the world. Or you could just watch other people’s streams, if that’s more your thing.

➤Periscope

QuizUp

QuizUp shot to popularity at the end of 2013, but it took until this month for the company to significantly revamp the platform to put more emphasis on social interaction around gaming.

Indeed, alongside quizzing, the app now has full profiles and revamped UI to make it easier for you to find opponents based on age, topics, gender etc.

The update also ushered in support for playing QuizUp on the desktop for the first time.

➤ QuizUp

Mistaken

Yes, Mistaken is a photo-sharing app, but it’s one with a very simple premise.

You take a photo, never see it and instead see a stranger’s photo in return.

Sound a bit weird? Perhaps. But admit it, you’re tempted to see what you’ll get in return aren’t you?

Thankfully, you don’t need an account or anything like that if you want to test the app out.

➤ Mistaken

Pext

If you’re all about memes, Pext is an app for you.

In a nutshell, it makes it easy to create and send your own custom memes in messages across a whole range of services, as well as via its own network.

It’s not perfect (I can’t verify that the One Direction member above does indeed hate carrots), but the automated system certainly does make it quick and easy to whip up a customized meme.

➤ Pext

SwiftKey

SwiftKey is by no means new, but an update this month ushered in a whole new look and support for 9 more languages.

On top of that, it also got integration with Dashlane’s password manager, allowing you to automatically enter your credentials using the SwiftKey keyboard.

➤ SwiftKey

Bundle

Bundle is a new Android (and iOS) app that allows you to organize all of your photos into ‘bundles’ for private sharing with a group of people.

The idea is that other members of your group for the event or outing can also add their own photos to the bundle.

Once the images are all bundled together from an event, the app then suggest the best photos to keep by flagging duplicate images and focusing on face and smile detection.

The basic version is free with unlimited storage of low-res files. A soon-to-launch $1 per month plan allows you to export bundles to your existing cloud storage service of choice, like Drive or Drobox, while a $5 per month option lets you make full resolution backups to Bundle’s own storage.

➤ Bundle

Office Lens

Microsoft’s Office Lens scanner app shed its ‘preview’ tag this month and made its way to the Google Play Store.

Once you’ve taken a scan of a receipt or document, the image can be converted directly into a Word document, PowerPoint slide or searchable PDF.

Scanned business cards can be sent straight to your OneNote account too.

➤ Office Lens

Twitch

This won’t be for everyone, but if you’re an e-sports fan, May’s update to Twitch will help make it easier for you to catch up on gaming streams that you missed.

The update rolled out across both Android and iOS and allows on-demand viewing of previous broadcasts for you to watch back at your leisure, providing the broadcaster enabled the option, of course.

➤ Twitch

Lenka

Already available on iOS for around a year, Lenka, the black-and-white photography app from Kevin Abosch is now available on Android devices.

The app offers up a live viewfinder to help you set your monochromatic scene and allows for manual or automatic focus.

Brilliantly, or despairingly, Lenka doesn’t support the front-facing camera for selfies and nor does it have a flash option. You can shine a constant light though by pressing the light bulb button.

➤ Lenka

Sunrise

Sunrise calendar, now owned by Microsoft, was updated this month to include TV scheduling information.

OK, so it’s not the biggest update in this roundup, but if you’re a dedicated live TV viewer, knowing when your favorite show is on and getting a reminder in your calendar could well be appreciated.

Happily, it works in Europe as well as North America and contains schedules of more than 90,000 programs across 2,800 TV channels. Get to it.

➤ Sunrise

Hyperlapse Mobile

Microsoft released a pretty cool tool for making hyperlapses this month, and there is also an Android beta version for you to test out too.

We described them as “dreamily smooth” and if you happen to be a Windows Phone (or Windows desktop) user, there’s a version available for you too.

In order to get access to the app on the Google Play Store, you will need to sign up as a beta tester first though.

➤ Hyperlapse Mobile

Flickr

Flickr chose May to roll out a massive update across all its mobile and desktop platforms, which ushered in a new look and options designed at making it easier to use.

With too many updates to detail here, you’ll want to check out the new Camera Roll, filters and freshly-added Instagram support.

There are also new tools to help you edit things like white balance and exposure (among other things) directly from your mobile. These edits are non-destructive, meaning you can restore the original photo at any time.

➤ Flickr

Adblock Plus Browser

Wherever you stand on the debate about ad-blockers, this one is pretty straightforward.

It does exactly as it says on the box: it’s a browser that integrates the Adblock technology to…you got it, block ads.

Essentially, it’s just a slightly tweaked version of Firefox 37 for Android. In order to get access to it on the Google Play Store, you’ll need to sign up to the Google+ community.

➤ Adblock Plus

Want more?

If 15 new and updated Android apps aren’t enough to satisfy your needs, check out our roundup from last month, or our 60 of the best Android apps from 2014 post. Or if you’re an iOS user, you can check out our monthly iPhone and iPad roundup.

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Ocushield: A screen protector that protects your eyes more than the screen

It’s easy to get consumed in our smartphones, tablets and laptops, considering everything they can do. But the side effects are often overlooked. Eye strain, retinal dysfunction and fatigue can all be caused by using electrical devices too much and at the wrong times of day.

A recent study by BMJ Open analysed the sleep and device usage of 9,846 people aged between 16 and 19. It found that they only got around five hours of sleep a night, as a result of using tech before clocking off. It’s recommended that adults should get eight hours of sleep a night.

Many optometry experts believe that a lot of this comes down starting at bright displays for hours on end, rather than just using tech too much. Is there a way to change this? One optometry student reckons there is: the Ocushield.

The Ocushield, developed by City University London optometry student Dhruvin Patel, is a screen protector that boasts a 95 percent transparency. As well as this, it cuts blue light side effects by 30 percent.

It’s affixed to a digital device like any other screen protector, but isn’t made from cheap plastic. Instead, it’s compromised of a sheet of Polyethylene Terephthalate, a synthetic resin made by copolymerising ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid.

Dhruvin came up with the product during his university studies and was largely inspired by lens coating built for glasses.

He says: “I saw a product made by Hoya, called Blue Control when I was working with Vision Express. It was a lens coating for people who wear glasses, protecting their eyes from harmful blue light.

“I was intrigued at the blue light phenomenon and started doing some research. I found that blue light also causes sleep cycle disturbance and is a risk factor is diseases such as AMD (age related macular degeneration).

“Based on these findings, I knew I had to develop a product that would people from their digital devices. A screen protector seemed the best way of doing this, as not everyone wears glasses. And there are many who happen to wear them but feel self-conscious.”

The enterprising, tech-savvy student took his findings and idea to a business competition called Cityspark and ended up winning £3,500 ($5,350) to help bring the product to market.

Dhruvin is adamant that he’s created a unique product here. He says: “With a background in ocular health and being sold by opticians, Ocushield is definitely the best quality product to protect your eyes and sleep.

“This is because it cuts blue light by up to 25 percent, one of the most effective filters on the market, while still ensuring the image quality of the screen is flawless – meaning images and movies can be seen as normal.”

Dhruvin has plenty of plans for the future of his product, including expansion to other devices and areas of the world.

“This summer we are launching Ocushiled for the VDU market, MacBook Pro and Samsung devices,” he says. “With distribution extending to Europe and USA, we’re excited to get things moving even further. And I think that as the research increases and more publications on the World Wide Web are published, blue light protection will be as big as glare protection.”

➤ Ocushield

Image credits: Ocushield

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19 of the best new and updated iOS apps from May

We’ve looked at a lot of new and updated iOS apps this month, with the usual healthy smattering of ones dedicated to messaging and photo organization /optimization.

Some big names – like The New York Times and Flickr – also have revamped apps worth revisiting.

All you need to do is peruse the list below and pick your own favorites.

Kwilt

Kwilt isn’t a new app – it first launched in November – but it did undergo a reasonably significant visual overhaul in May to make it easier to use.

Alongside a tweaked UI, the multi-platform photo organizer also got a revamped collage option – now called KwiltSnaps.

The update also added support for streaming images from a few new Network Attached Storage drives too.

➤ Kwilt

QuizUp

QuizUp shot to popularity at the end of 2013, but it took until this month for the company to significantly revamp the platform to put more emphasis on social interaction around gaming.

Indeed, alongside quizzing, the app now has full profiles and revamped UI to make it easier for you to find opponents based on age, topics, gender etc.

The update also ushered in support for playing QuizUp on the desktop for the first time.

➤ QuizUp

The Net Set

Not content with being a fashion retailer alone, Net-a-Porter launched its curated fashion app for iPhone and Apple Watch owners in May.

Alongside the expected feed of luxury fashion items, there are a whole range of social features to allow you to comment and advise friends of their choices. Each brand also has its own little hub, to make it easier to find your way around.

The company hopes that by offering two-way interaction between individuals’ and brands’ profiles it’ll be a more compelling repeat shopping experience.

There’s no Android version, as yet.

➤ The Net Set

WifiMapper

Who needs a Wi-Fi map in 2015, right? Wi-Fi is everywhere.

You might well think that, but just wait until you really need a Wi-Fi connection and can’t find one and then come back and tell me that.

WiFiMapper by OpenSignal does exactly as you’d expect – it shows you available Wi-Fi connections around you.

Unlike many others though, it combines that data with Foursquare information to give you a better sense of where a particular network is located.

➤ WifiMapper

Pext

If you’re all about memes, Pext is an app for you.

In a nutshell, it makes it easy to create and send your own custom memes in messages across a whole range of services, as well as via its own network.

It’s not perfect (I can’t verify that the One Direction member above does indeed hate carrots), but the automated system certainly does make it quick and easy to whip up a customized meme. Fear not, Android users, it’s available for you too.

➤ Pext

Secretmoji

If you don’t have enough emoji in your life already and you’re the sort of person who’s happy to converse in images rather than words, then Secretmoji for iPhone is probably worth checking out.

Essentially, it simply conceals your messages as a string of emoji until you tap the padlock icon at the top. The recipient also needs the app to decipher the received string of random emoji – they don’t actually represent the written message.

The app is free, but you’ll either have to put up with ads or pay $0.99 to unlock an ad-free version.

➤ Secretmoji

NYT Now

The New York Times Now mobile app used to require a subscription if you wanted unfettered access to its iOS app, but as of this month it’s completely free for all.

The company is hoping that the pricing change and visual overhaul will help it to reach younger users.

Now, each day’s stories are displayed in a stream of cards that can be expanded to see the full story.

➤ NYT Now

Bleep

If what you really need in life is something to censor your filthy potty-mouth in videos, then Bleep for iOS is the answer.

It works either as you’re recording or on videos in your Camera Roll and you just need to tap the screen at the point that you want to censor.

There is a watermark on the resulting video though unless you cough up $1.99.

➤ Bleep

MixRadio

MixRadio, once the preserve of Windows Phone devices, launched for iPhone and Android this month.

Just like on Microsoft’s mobile OS, it allows you to create personalized radio stations for free from its database of 35 million tracks – and allows you up to six skips per hour.

It promises to get better at curating your own station over time as it learns what you like, and what you don’t. Alternatively, there are some preset stations according to genres or specific themes.

➤ MixRadio

Sunrise

Sunrise calendar, now owned by Microsoft, was updated this month to include TV scheduling information.

OK, so it’s not the biggest update in this roundup, but if you’re a dedicated live TV viewer, knowing when your favorite show is on and getting a reminder in your calendar could well be appreciated.

Happily, it works in Europe as well as North America and contains schedules of more than 90,000 programs across 2,800 TV channels. Get to it.

➤ Sunrise

Camera51

Although Camera51 has been available on Android devices since the tail end of last year, it only arrived for iOS in May.

Just like on Android, it’s an algorithmically-driven guided-shooting app that aims to give novice photographers pointers to help capture a better picture.

The algorithms direct you to aim the camera up, down, left, right, move back or zoom in until you get just the right spot.

It also identifies and analyzes objects, faces, shapes, lines and scenes to give you better feedback on how to improve your shot. It’ll even warn you about items in the periphery of your shot, in case you want to re-frame.

➤ Camera51

Shuffle

Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s useful to have a disposable email address or phone number – and for those times, there’s Shuffle.

Similar to Burner, but with the additional support for email aliases, Shuffle lets you do exactly that on a pay-per-use basis.

For $1.99 per month you get a disposable phone number, on which incoming calls cost 1.5 cents per minute and outgoing calls cost 5 cents per minute. An SMS costs 1.5 cents and email addresses will set you back 0.75 cents for every email it forwards. Shuffle-to-Shuffle calls and texts have lower rates.

It’s currently only available in North America and Canada on iOS devices, though there is an Android version on the way.

➤ Shuffle

Bundle

Bundle is a new iOS and Android app that allows you to organize all of your photos into ‘bundles’ for private sharing with a group of people.

The idea is that other members of your group for the event or outing can also add their own photos to the bundle.

Once the images are all bundled together from an event, the app then suggests the best photos to keep by suggesting removing duplicate images and focusing on face and smile detection.

The basic version is free with unlimited storage of low-res files. A soon-to-launch $1 per month plan allows you to export bundles to your existing cloud storage service of choice, like Drive or Drobox, while a $5 per month option lets you make full resolution backups to Bundle’s own storage.

➤ Bundle

Handpick

Instagram is a place full of wondrous photos of pretty much anything and everything. It’s also a really bad place to visit if you’re hungry, given all the photos of mouth-watering meals you’ll find.

Now, however, there’s Handpick for iOS and Android, which combines those tempting photos with related recipes.

You can tap through from an image to get a list of ingredients or similar dishes. Alternatively, you can tell it what you have in the cupboards already and it’ll suggest an appropriate dish.

It won’t necessarily make you a better cook, but it probably won’t hurt either.

➤ Handpick

BitTorrent Bleep

If you needed another messaging app, then BitTorrent Bleep arrived on iOS in May with a nifty new feature in tow designed to enhance user privacy.

Called ‘whispers’, all the new feature really does is prevent you from seeing the sender at the same time as any messages.

So, you can view the sender of the message, or view the content, but not both at the same time, which makes screenshotting said conversations a bit more effort.

Not impossible, but more effort.

➤ BitTorrent Bleep

Twitch

This won’t be for everyone, but if you’re an e-sports fan, May’s update to Twitch will help make it easier for you to catch up on gaming streams that you missed.

The update rolled out across both iOS and Android and allows on-demand viewing of previous broadcasts for you to watch back at your leisure, providing the broadcaster enabled the option, of course.

➤ Twitch

Flickr

Flickr chose May to roll out a massive update across all its mobile and desktop platforms, which ushered in a new look and options designed at making it easier to use.

With too many updates to detail here, you’ll want to check out the new Camera Roll, filters and freshly-added Instragram support.

There’s also new tools to help you edit things like white balance and exposure (among other things) directly from your mobile. These edits are non-destructive, meaning you can restore the original photo at any time.

➤ Flickr

Telegram from Aniways

If you hadn’t guessed from its name, Telegram for Aniways is a messaging service based on Telegram.

Launched this month, there’s one key difference though – it suggests appropriate GIFs and Smart Emoticons as you type your messages.

If you needed a quicker way to GIF your heart out while messaging and are already a Telegram user, you’ll want to check this out. It’s also available on Android.

If neither of those apply, it would probably be better to skip this one.

➤ Telegram from Aniways

Spark

Last on this month’s iOS app roundup is Spark, a new email entrant to the iOS store.

While it doesn’t take the ‘simplicity’ approach of something like Inbox by Google, it does throw in a lot of features for power users, as well as support the Apple Watch.

There’s also support for natural language search (“emails with attachments received this week,” for example) and a nifty quick reply feature to help you blaze your way through a big stack of email that needs attending to.

It also offers a snooze option, but this was a little unreliable in our testing. Still, it’s early days, it only launched today.

➤ Spark

Want more?

If 19 new and updated apps aren’t enough to satisfy your needs, check out our roundup of the best apps from April or our post with 65 of the best iOS apps from 2014 too.  Or if you’re an Android user, you can check out our monthly Android roundup.

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