Autor: HCFG

An e-commerce startup called Reflektion has raised an $8 million series B round of venture capital for its technology that helps retailers personalize the online shopping experience for consumers. Intel Capital led the round, and Nike and several private investors also pitched in. This seems like the latest thing in marketing — not just targeted advertising but entire tailored experiences for individual shoppers. It does add an Amazon-like recommendation experience, although one might fairly question whether most product catalogs are large enough to warrant it.

Now that Samsung has announced the Galaxy S5, it’s time for the company to start showing off all of the phone’s features in details. Samsung published its first promo video for the Galaxy S5 on Tuesday, which was spotted by Android Central, and it’s a good example of why the phone looks far more user-friendly and less complicated than its predecessor.

Samsung touches upon all the Galaxy S5 specifications as expected, but focuses more on the features, giving a better understanding of how the phone will actually work. Quite a bit of time is spent on the camera interface, along with the dual-focus feature that lets you choose which section of the image will be the focal point after taking the shot, as well as the new fingerprint sensor. I still have doubts about that particular function as it may require two hands to use and you have…

We’ve already written about Reddit’s new “live reporting” feature, which gives users the ability to live-blog a breaking news event or post updates about an ongoing story like the revolution in Ukraine — a feature that I’ve argued could make a significant contribution to crowdsourced journalism. But I wanted to find out more about the motivation behind it, so I asked Reddit general manager Erik Martin why the site decided to add the feature, and what he sees as the potential value for both citizen journalists as well as society in general.

As with so many other things that have emerged from the Reddit community over the years, such as its popular “Ask Me Anything” celebrity interviews or the “Explain It Like I’m Five” feature, Martin said the live-update platform was essentially invented by users, who hacked the site’s traditional post format in order to post multiple updates about…

Security is a big issue when it comes to the internet of things. This isn’t privacy, which is a different but related topic, but merely securing the devices and data they generate so malicious people can’t steal it, see it or otherwise use it for nefarious purposes. Right now, it’s something many people are talking about, but something few people are trying to solve.

That may be partly because, as this New York Times story notes, software and internet companies are more concerned with getting users and revenue than security, but when it comes to connected devices there’s another layer of challenges. Devices have to connect to the web, but they also are incredibly person, either part of the user’s home or on their person at all times. This gives them a lot of “knowledge” that if shared can lead to an actual loss of personal safety or belongings.

Beenox has announced via Twitter that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 game will be released on April 29th in North America and May 2nd in Europe. The company also revealed that the Gamestop pre-order bonus of Web Thread Suit Pack will be coming to the Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PC, and not Wii U.

Thanks to those who sent this in.

Graphene is an amazing material, but it has its flaws. Electricity can run through it at super-fast speeds, but graphene in its natural form can’t start and stop its flow, limiting its use for applications like solar cells.

One potential fix is to pair it with other materials, creating a hybrid that borrows needed characteristics from both ingredients.

A Northwestern University graduate student recently discovered a way to combine graphene with silver, which has interesting optical properties and is already widely used in solar cells. Pairing the two up until now eluded scientists because silver is not compatible with the most common technique for making graphene.

Though there are other existing and emerging approaches, graphene is generally made in an oven stocked with gases like methane and propane. At high temperatures, graphene naturally pulls out of the gases and deposits itself in sheets on copper placed in the oven…

What do you get when you mix an Iranian born-and-educated CEO, two college dropouts, a stint in China, a short-lived consumer business and the Irish startup visa program? A natural-language processing startup called Aylien, naturally. Although, jokes aside, it might represent something much larger than the company’s business acumen if Aylien is able to succeed in this field.

Aylien, which launched in 2010 as a consumer business with a product called Talk.ee (“basically, a better Reddit,” founder and CEO Parsa Ghafarri said), pivoted in late February into the business-to-business world with a collection of API services that expose its text-analysis capabilities to interested developers. “[We] realized that maybe we are not a consumer team by nature,” Ghafarri said. “It’s like going to the gym because the cool guys are doing it.”

Among the new products is a text-analysis API that performs tasks such as classification, entity and concept extraction, language…