Facebook will now let Pages schedule Live Video

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Live video is great and all, but it’s not very useful if most of your audience doesn’t know when you’re planning on streaming. Facebook is addressing that problem by introducing official scheduling feature for Verified pages; users can be notified about videos up to a week in advance. To be clear, this only applies to Pages, not verified users. Still, it’s a welcome update: Publishers can schedule video in advance and build up hype for a video, essentially creating an audience before a stream even starts. It can potentially make the live video experience a bit more like watching live television. Of course,…

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Facebook Analytics for Apps brings push notifications to all businesses

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Fresh after adding cross-platform metrics all in one place, Facebook Analytics for Apps is doubling down on notifications by opening its push campaigns to all businesses. Facebook first introduced the push campaign tool at its F8 conference this year, and then opened a public beta last month. It’s been popular so far, with Facebook seeing over 10,000 apps requesting access to the feature when it first became available. It’s not hard to see why; the company says it sees some apps show “up to 180 percent higher retention” when users opt in to receiving push notifications. That makes sense; a Facebook study shows that one…

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‘Frightgeist’ cooks up incredible Halloween costume ideas using Google Trends data

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Halloween is but a fortnight away, and ‘Frightgeist‘ is cooking up a special brew of costumes that might allow you to shelve that slutty kitten costume this year (men and women). Topping the list is a duo of characters — Harley Quinn and Joker — from the universally-hated film ‘Suicide Squad.’ ‘Superhero’ is next, for those that are feeling powerful but lack the decisive nature to decide between other top 15 choices, such as Wonderwoman, Batman, or Deadpool. Mixed in we see a spattering of traditional favorites like a pirate, witch, clown (probably a terrible idea right now), mermaid, zombie, and…

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Instagram puts Stories front and center in the Explore tab

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Instagram Stories are about to get a lot more public. The company today announced it’s bringing Stories to its Explore tab, making it easy to find new Stories from random people around the world. When you open up Explore, you’ll find a new ‘suggested stories’ section at the top including content only from people you’re not already following, from pretty much anywhere on the planet. As with images and videos, Instagram says the results are tailored to your interests. When Instagram introduced its Stories in August, it was called out for flat-out copying Snapchat, but Instagram has been building up…

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Facebook now lets you publicly endorse candidates (if you’re brave enough)

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It’s generally pretty easy to tell which candidates people support based on the things they post and like, but now Facebook is making your endorsements really obvious. The company today quietly added an endorsement feature that anyone can use to prominently display their colors and invite endless family feuds about politics. Candidates now have an Endorsement tab on their pages, from which you can click just click on ‘endorse.’ Thankfully, Facebook does provide some control. If you were to endorse Vermin Supreme (you can’t actually endorse him, much to my dismay), you would be able to hide your views from specific people or groups of…

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Microsoft’s speech recognition is now just as accurate as humans

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Robots are now just as good at transcribing speech as humans. According to a paper published yesterday, a team of Microsoft engineers in the Artificial Intelligence and Research division reported their system reached a word error rate (WER) of 5.9 percent, a figure that is roughly equal to that of human abilities. “We’ve reached human parity,” said Xuedong Huang, the company’s chief speech scientist. “This is a historic achievement.” After decades of testing, the milestone comes on the heels of last month’s ‘close but no cigar’ score of 6.3 WER and figures to have wide-reaching implications as the battle for…

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Zelda fans are going nuts over rare title they’ve never heard of

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Chances are you’ve never heard of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablet.’ This forgotten title was stowed away for years after originally being made for Nintendo’s Super Famicom system in the 90s. The most hardcore of the hardcore Zelda fans have undoubtedly been waiting to get their hands on it for decades, but until now the game has only been available for the Satellaview, a Japanese only peripheral that opened the gates to downloading console games over the internet. This early version, however, broadcast it over satellite. Oh, and it was only in Japanese. For years, though, players only…

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