P interest Jelly, Hot Hands and Messenger Day
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there. For those looking to dig in, click on the links for the full story.
Pinterest acquires Jelly, the startup from Twitter’s Biz Stone
By Jon Fingas From Engadget
- “Pinterest has acquired Jelly. The terms of the deal aren’t available, let alone the ultimate intentions, so it’s unclear just what will happen.”
- “Stone sees the deal as important to the “future of human powered search and discovery,” though, so you know what his focus will be.”
Your Hot Hands Can Give Away Your Smartphone PIN
By Kaveh Waddell From The Atlantic
- “At an upcoming conference on human-computer interactions, they will present a new study that explains how someone armed with a thermal-imaging camera would have little trouble extracting your passcode from the heat signature left on your smartphone’s screen.”
- “Because heat decays at a known rate, a person typing in a PIN with four different digits would leave behind four heat traces of slightly different temperatures: The first digit entered would be coolest, and the last digit would be warmest.”
- “For swiped patterns, thermal attacks can guess the right shape 100 percent of the time even 30 seconds after it’s entered—but only if the shape has no overlaps.”
Facebook Messenger Day launches as a Snapchat Stories clone for making plans
By Josh Constine from TechCrunch
- “While Snapchat Stories is for retelling what you’ve done, Messenger Day’s “Who’s up for?” filters and Active Now indicators help you find friends to chat and meet up with.”
- “If Messenger Day catches on, it could encourage visual communication through Messenger’s newly enhanced camera, jumpstart chat threads and get friends together offline.”
- “Surely with time, Messenger will adopt some of these and build more features that make it stand out. But for v1 of a global rollout, it does a remarkable job of hitting most of the key features so it immediately feels usable.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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