08 April 2018

Dictionary app Reverso learns new tricks


Dictionary app Reverso is getting new features with its 8.0 update. There are new exercices and games to help you learn new words. Reverso also now has an integrated thesaurus.

Reverso is one of the biggest dictionary players out there. It now has over 40 million unique visitors on its website and app every month. It’s a weird industry because a significant part of the traffic on those reference websites comes from search engines. And Google Translate is quite dominant as well.

So how do you go beyond search engine optimization? Reverso has been building many different services to become your go-to destination when it comes to your language needs. For instance, you can translate a word or a sentence and find contextual examples. You can access verb conjugation, translate big chunks of text, access traditional dictionaries and more.

More interestingly, the company has been focused on language learning for its mobile app. Every time you search for something, you can add a word to your phrasebook. After that, you can then go through your phrasebook with a quiz to learn those words.

Your data will get synced across multiple devices as long as you’re logged in. You could install Reverso’s Chrome extension to add words to the mobile app for instance.

If you don’t have time to add words yourself, the company is also putting together lists of not-so-simple-but-generally-useful words. The idea is that you could be learning new words when you’re waiting in line instead of wasting time scrolling through feeds.

In addition to those new exercices, Reverso now has an integrated thesaurus. You can search for a word and tap the tiny “S” in the corner to access related words. The company has been crunching all its translations to put this together. Chances are that two words that have the same translation in multiple languages probably mean the same thing.

Reverso isn’t necessarily reinventing the wheel with all those services. But there’s an advantage in having the same company run all of those services. You can jump from one service to another, add words from multiple scenarios and more.


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Robo Wunderkind wants to build the Lego Mindstorms for everyone


Lego Mindstorms have paved the way for many programmable toys. And Austrian startup Robo Wunderkind is building a new kind of Lego-like programmable kit. The startup first launched on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage and just raised $1.2 million (€1 million) from SOSV, Austrian Federal Promotional Bank and multiple business angels.

Compared to many programmable toys out there, Robo Wunderkind is still a Lego-like building kit. This is key as too many toys forget that it’s fun to build something with a few bricks.

Robo Wunderkind also has special blocks to turn your dumb robot into a connected one. In addition to the usual sensors, such as proximity sensors, motion detectors and light sensors, the company also has some more sophisticated ones. You can put a tiny camera in your construction, use an IR blaster and receiver and program a tiny LED screen.

But the best part is that Robo Wunderkind also sells Lego adapters so that you can put together a sophisticated robot that uses both Lego bricks and Robo Wunderkind modules.

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The company has two different apps in the store. The first one called Robo Live lets you control your robot in real time. The other one Robo Code has a brand new user interface and now detects the blocks you’re currently using.

Robo Code is where Robo Wunderkind shines because you can put together simple algorithms by arranging virtual blocks in the iPad app. It’s a good way to introduce a kid to conditional statements and loops.

You won’t build a robot as sophisticated as a robot built using Lego Mindstorms. But Robo Wunderkind seems more accessible and good way to try robotics before switching to Arduino and Raspberry Pi when your kid grows up.

The company successfully raised a little less than $250,000 on Kickstarter back in 2015. You can now buy a starter kit for $250. Advanced and professional kits will also be available soon.


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RSS is undead


RSS died. Whether you blame Feedburner, or Google Reader, or Digg Reader last month, or any number of other product failures over the years, the humble protocol has managed to keep on trudging along despite all evidence that it is dead, dead, dead.

Now, with Facebook’s scandal over Cambridge Analytica, there is a whole new wave of commentators calling for RSS to be resuscitated. Brian Barrett at Wired said a week ago that “… anyone weary of black-box algorithms controlling what you see online at least has a respite, one that’s been there all along but has often gone ignored. Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It’s time to head back to RSS.”

Let’s be clear: RSS isn’t coming back alive so much as it is officially entering its undead phase.

Don’t get me wrong, I love RSS. At its core, it is a beautiful manifestation of some of the most visionary principles of the internet, namely transparency and openness. The protocol really is simple and human-readable. It feels like how the internet was originally designed with static, full-text articles in HTML. Perhaps most importantly, it is decentralized, with no power structure trying to stuff other content in front of your face.

It’s wonderfully idealistic, but the reality of RSS is that it lacks the features required by nearly every actor in the modern content ecosystem, and I would strongly suspect that its return is not forthcoming.

Now, it is important before diving in here to separate out RSS the protocol from RSS readers, the software that interprets that protocol. While some of the challenges facing this technology are reader-centric and therefore fixable with better product design, many of these challenges are ultimately problems with the underlying protocol itself.

Let’s start with users. I, as a journalist, love having hundreds of RSS feeds organized in chronological order allowing me to see every single news story published in my areas of interest. This use case though is a minuscule fraction of all users, who aren’t paid to report on the news comprehensively. Instead, users want personalization and prioritization — they want a feed or stream that shows them the most important content first, since they are busy and lack the time to digest enormous sums of content.

To get a flavor of this, try subscribing to the published headlines RSS feed of a major newspaper like the Washington Post, which publishes roughly 1,200 stories a day. Seriously, try it. It’s an exhausting experience wading through articles from the style and food sections just to run into the latest update on troop movements in the Middle East.

Some sites try to get around this by offering an almost array of RSS feeds built around keywords. Yet, stories are almost always assigned more than one keyword, and keyword selection can vary tremendously in quality across sites. Now, I see duplicate stories and still manage to miss other stories I wanted to see.

Ultimately, all of media is prioritization — every site, every newspaper, every broadcast has editors involved in determining what is the hierarchy of information to be presented to users. Somehow, RSS (at least in its current incarnation) never understood that. This is both a failure of the readers themselves, but also of the protocol, which never forced publishers to provide signals on what was most and least important.

Another enormous challenge is discovery and curation. How exactly do you find good RSS feeds? Once you have found them, how do you group and prune them over time to maximize signal? Curation is one of the biggest on-boarding challenges of social networks like Twitter and Reddit, which has prevented both from reaching the stratospheric numbers of Facebook. The cold start problem with RSS is perhaps its greatest failing today, although could potentially be solved by better RSS reader software without protocol changes.

RSS’ true failings though are on the publisher side, with the most obvious issue being analytics. RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. It’s nearly impossible to get a sense of how many RSS subscribers there are, due to the way that RSS readers cache feeds. No one knows how much time someone reads an article, or whether they opened an article at all. In this way, RSS shares a similar product design problem with podcasting, in that user behavior is essentially a black box.

For some users, that lack of analytics is a privacy boon. The reality though is that the modern internet content economy is built around advertising, and while I push for subscriptions all the time, such an economy still looks very distant. Analytics increases revenues from advertising, and that means it is critical for companies to have those trackers in place if they want a chance to make it in the competitive media environment.

RSS also offers very few opportunities for branding content effectively. Given that the brand equity for media today is so important, losing your logo, colors, and fonts on an article is an effective way to kill enterprise value. This issue isn’t unique to RSS — it has affected Google’s AMP project as well as Facebook Instant Articles. Brands want users to know that the brand wrote something, and they aren’t going to use technologies that strip out what they consider to be a business critical part of their user experience.

These are just some of the product issues with RSS, and together they ensure that the protocol will never reach the ubiquity required to supplant centralized tech corporations. So, what are we to do then if we want a path away from Facebook’s hegemony?

I think the solution is a set of improvements. RSS as a protocol needs to be expanded so that it can offer more data around prioritization as well as other signals critical to making the technology more effective at the reader layer. This isn’t just about updating the protocol, but also about updating all of the content management systems that publish an RSS feed to take advantage of those features.

That leads to the most significant challenge — solving RSS as business model. There needs to be some sort of a commerce layer around feeds, so that there is an incentive to improve and optimize the RSS experience. I would gladly pay money for an Amazon Prime-like subscription where I can get unlimited text-only feeds from a bunch of a major news sources at a reasonable price. It would also allow me to get my privacy back to boot.

Next, RSS readers need to get a lot smarter about marketing and on-boarding. They need to actively guide users to find where the best content is, and help them curate their feeds with algorithms (with some settings so that users like me can turn it off). These apps could be written in such a way that the feeds are built using local machine learning models, to maximize privacy.

Do I think such a solution will become ubiquitous? No, I don’t, and certainly not in the decentralized way that many would hope for. I don’t think users actually, truly care about privacy (Facebook has been stealing it for years — has that stopped its growth at all?) and they certainly aren’t news junkies either. But with the right business model in place, there could be enough users to make such a renewed approach to streams viable for companies, and that is ultimately the critical ingredient you need to have for a fresh news economy to surface and for RSS to come back to life.


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Snapchat brings back chronological Stories feed for some


Snapchat has undone its controversial redesign’s most significant change in an update to some users today. A tab that shows Stories in reverse chronological order, replacing the redesign’s algorithmically sorted feed for many people.

We’ve reached out to Snap Inc and haven’t heard back.

Showing the most recent Stories first makes them predictable and coherent to browse. It helps you see what’s going on with friends right now. That could be helpful if you wanted to find out which friends were free to hang out or if there’s a party you could join.

Users are seeing the reverse chronological Stories feed in both the design where there’s just Stories and All tabs, as well as the design where there’s separate Stories and Chat tabs.

Snapchat has now re-added a chronological Stories feed

But reverse chronological order heavily prioritizes people who post frequently, which can bury your best friends. Snapchat’s move towards algorithmic ranking in its big redesign ensured that people you watched Stories from or chatted with most showed up at the top so you’d be less likely to miss their content. That’s similar to how Facebook’s feed worked for a long time, and how Instagram started ranking its feed two years ago. By moving social media stars and brands that don’t follow you back over to the Discover section as part of the redesign, there’s less noise in the chronological Stories list, so it works better than it did a year ago.

Switching to algorithmic sorting has helped Instagram and Twitter boost growth, which is likely why Snapchat made it part of the redesign. The company had seen daily active user growth sag from 17 percent to under 3 per quarter after the launch of Facebook’s Snapchat clone Instagram Stories. Snapchat saw growth improve after starting to roll out the algorithm-powered redesign in Q4 2017.

For the most hardcore Snapchat users who check it constantly, today’s update has been met with joy and gratitude. They were likely to see their closest friends’ posts no matter when or how infrequently they posted.

But ditching the algorithm could make it tougher for newer and less consistent Snapchat users who want to pop in and see the most relevant content instead of having to sort through distant acquaintances. That could inhibit growth. Essentially, Snapchat might have to decide between preferencing it’s most engaged and loyal users, or aiming to add more casual users.


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