Gongol.com Archives: July 2015
July 24, 2015
$800 billion in investments have left China in the last year
The government may be propping up the stock market, but that's a huge amount of capital outflow from the private sector. Gargantuan, really.
Amazon.com earned a profit in the second quarter
Remarkable because the company doesn't usually earn a profit. It was only $92 million on $23 billion in sales (or a 0.4% profit margin), but it's in the black nonetheless. The thing is, it's really hard for anyone to compete with an outsized market dominator that doesn't turn a consistent profit.
Fiat Chrysler recalls 1.4 million US vehicles
They were left vulnerable to hacking because a communications port was left open. A USB device is supposed to fix the error.
YouTube still working on a subscription model
They say content creators responsible for 90% of time spent watching have signed up to permit their videos on the subscription service, but they want 100% parity between the two versions of YouTube (ad-supported and subscription), so they might end up dropping some videos if the creators hold out.
"Time-lapse mining" from photos shared online
Researchers at the University of Washington and Google cooperated to "mine" social media for thousands of photos of well-known locations to create time-lapse videos using "geometric stabilization" (since the photos are aggregated from different perspectives). The paper concludes, "Our system discovered 10,728 time-lapses that show how the world's most popular landmarks are changing over time" and suggests how more could be done in the future as the number of online photos available for "mining" will grow. The system seems to especially like buildings under construction and waterfalls.
