In a challenge to Twitch and YouTube, Facebook adds ‘Gaming’ to its main navigation

Facebook’s gaming efforts and challenge to Twitch are taking another big leap today, as the social network begins the initial rollout of a dedicated Facebook Gaming tab in the main navigation of Facebook’s app. The goal with the new addition is to help people more easily find games, streamers and gaming groups they follow, as well as discover new content, based on their interests.

After clicking the new Gaming tab, there will be a feed of content that points you to instant games you can play with friends; videos to watch from top streamers, esports organizations, and game publishers; and updates from your various gaming groups, the company says.

The new Facebook Gaming tab builds on the gaming video destination the site launched last year as Fb.gg. That hub had offered a collection of all the video games streaming on Facebook, and a way to for gamers and fans to interact. As a top-level navigation item, Facebook’s new Gaming tab will now further extend the gaming hub’s reach.

While Twitch and YouTube are today dominating the gaming space, Facebook’s advantage – beyond its scale – are its promises of a reduced cut of transactions. On Fb.gg, gamers were able to attract new fans with the aid of Facebook’s personalized recommendations based on users’ activity, and then monetize those viewers through a virtual tipping mechanism.

Facebook’s cut of those tips ranges from 5 to 30 percent, with the cut getting smaller when users buy larger packs of the virtual currency. Meanwhile, Facebook’s fan subscriptions payments for streamers also see it taking a cut of up to 30 percent, the same as YouTube but smaller than Twitch’s roughly 50 percent.

That could potentially attract streamers who want to maximize their earnings and believe they can port their audience over to a new destination. Of course, some streamers may not trust Facebook to maintain those same percentages over time, nor believe it will ever offer the sorts of features and innovations that a more focused gaming destination like Twitch can.

Facebook also last year experimented with making its gaming hub mobile with the launch of Fb.gg as a standalone mobile app.

The app, like the web-based gaming hub, offered a way for gamers and fans to discover content, join communities, and even play instant games like Everwing, Words with Friends, Basketball FRVR, and others.

However, the strategy of keeping Facebook’s Gaming efforts more separated from Facebook’s main site may not have paid off – the Fb.gg Android app, for example, only has some 100,000+ installs according to Google Play.

Instead, much like YouTube recently decided – Facebook will now leverage the power of its platform to boost interest in its gaming content.

YouTube in September said it was giving its Gaming hub a new home right on the YouTube homepage, and would shut down its standalone Gaming app. (The latter doesn’t seem to have occurred, however). As YouTube noted, gaming was a popular category, but the majority of viewers weren’t looking for a separate app or experience – they were just visiting YouTube directly.

Similarly, Facebook today says that over 700 million people play games, watch gaming videos or engage in gaming groups on Facebook. That’s a far larger number than those who downloaded the Fb.gg app, and surely a much larger number than those who have been visiting the Fb.gg destination directly.

That said, Facebook is continuing its tests on mobile with a standalone (rebranded) Facebook Gaming app on Android, which will have more features that the Gaming tab.

Facebook says it will roll out the Gaming tab to a subset of the over 700 million Facebook game fans, and will expand it over time to more gaming enthusiasts across the network. If you don’t see the new tab in your main navigation bar, you can still find it by going to the Bookmarks menu on Facebook.

 

 

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In a challenge to Twitch and YouTube, Facebook adds ‘Gaming’ to its main navigation

Facebook’s gaming efforts and challenge to Twitch are taking another big leap today, as the social network begins the initial rollout of a dedicated Facebook Gaming tab in the main navigation of Facebook’s app. The goal with the new addition is to help people more easily find games, streamers and gaming groups they follow, as well as discover new content, based on their interests.

After clicking the new Gaming tab, there will be a feed of content that points you to instant games you can play with friends; videos to watch from top streamers, esports organizations, and game publishers; and updates from your various gaming groups, the company says.

The new Facebook Gaming tab builds on the gaming video destination the site launched last year as Fb.gg. That hub had offered a collection of all the video games streaming on Facebook, and a way to for gamers and fans to interact. As a top-level navigation item, Facebook’s new Gaming tab will now further extend the gaming hub’s reach.

While Twitch and YouTube are today dominating the gaming space, Facebook’s advantage – beyond its scale – are its promises of a reduced cut of transactions. On Fb.gg, gamers were able to attract new fans with the aid of Facebook’s personalized recommendations based on users’ activity, and then monetize those viewers through a virtual tipping mechanism.

Facebook’s cut of those tips ranges from 5 to 30 percent, with the cut getting smaller when users buy larger packs of the virtual currency. Meanwhile, Facebook’s fan subscriptions payments for streamers also see it taking a cut of up to 30 percent, the same as YouTube but smaller than Twitch’s roughly 50 percent.

That could potentially attract streamers who want to maximize their earnings and believe they can port their audience over to a new destination. Of course, some streamers may not trust Facebook to maintain those same percentages over time, nor believe it will ever offer the sorts of features and innovations that a more focused gaming destination like Twitch can.

Facebook also last year experimented with making its gaming hub mobile with the launch of Fb.gg as a standalone mobile app.

The app, like the web-based gaming hub, offered a way for gamers and fans to discover content, join communities, and even play instant games like Everwing, Words with Friends, Basketball FRVR, and others.

However, the strategy of keeping Facebook’s Gaming efforts more separated from Facebook’s main site may not have paid off – the Fb.gg Android app, for example, only has some 100,000+ installs according to Google Play.

Instead, much like YouTube recently decided – Facebook will now leverage the power of its platform to boost interest in its gaming content.

YouTube in September said it was giving its Gaming hub a new home right on the YouTube homepage, and would shut down its standalone Gaming app. (The latter doesn’t seem to have occurred, however). As YouTube noted, gaming was a popular category, but the majority of viewers weren’t looking for a separate app or experience – they were just visiting YouTube directly.

Similarly, Facebook today says that over 700 million people play games, watch gaming videos or engage in gaming groups on Facebook. That’s a far larger number than those who downloaded the Fb.gg app, and surely a much larger number than those who have been visiting the Fb.gg destination directly.

That said, Facebook is continuing its tests on mobile with a standalone (rebranded) Facebook Gaming app on Android, which will have more features that the Gaming tab.

Facebook says it will roll out the Gaming tab to a subset of the over 700 million Facebook game fans, and will expand it over time to more gaming enthusiasts across the network. If you don’t see the new tab in your main navigation bar, you can still find it by going to the Bookmarks menu on Facebook.

 

 

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Firework officially launches a short-form video storytelling app, backed by Lightspeed

Facebook usage declined for the first time in a decade, while video-centric apps like TikTok are being touted as the future of social media. Entering this redefined playing field comes Firework, a fast-growing social video app whose clever trick is something it calls “Reveal videos” – a way for creators to take both horizontal and vertical video in one shot from their mobile device. Video viewers can then twist their phone as the video plays to watch from a new perspective and see more of the scene.

While Snapchat pioneered the idea of vertical video, newer companies are trying to free viewers from format constraints.

For example, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s mobile streaming service Quibi is pitching its ability to offer an ideal viewing experience no matter how you hold your phone. As Quibi CEO Meg Whitman explained last week in an interview at SXSW, the company has “created the ability to do full-screen video seamlessly from landscape to portrait,” she said.

That sounds a lot like Firework, in fact.

Firework has filed a patent on its own flip-the-screen viewing technology which it believes will give creators new ways to tell stories. Besides letting viewers in on more of the action, “reveal videos” also provide an opportunity for things like unexpected plot twists or surprise endings.

The way this works is that creators hold their smartphone horizontally to film, and Firework places a vertical viewfinder on the screen so they know which part of their shot will appear to viewers when they hold their phone straight up and down.

This recording screen has some similarities to TikTok, as you can stop and start recording, reshoot the various parts, and add music.

“Snapchat really pushed being vertical only,” explains Firework Chief Revenue Officer Cory Grenier, who joined the company from Snapchat, where he was the first Director of Sales & Marketing.

“What we see is that most professional filmmakers want to show their work on Vimeo first, and second on YouTube. There isn’t this world where you can really frame the context and the characters of a cinematic story on vertical – it just can’t happen,” he says.

Beyond the technology involved with Firework’s new filming technique, the company is also aiming to carve out a space that will differentiate it from other short-form video – whether that’s TikTok or soon, Quibi.

Firework’s videos are longer than TikTok’s at 30 seconds instead of just 15, but far shorter than Quibi’s eight minutes.

“30 seconds is really the sweet spot between the Snaps that are 10 seconds and something that’s longer-form,” notes Grenier. “10 seconds is too short to really tell a story. You want to have a powerful opening, a clear middle, and a really interesting or unexpected ending,” he says.

This format lends itself better to short stories, rather than the remixed, music-backed memes found on TikTok, the company believes. But it also remains user-gen, as opposed to the high production value “TV quality” content shot for Quibi using two cameras. (And a lot more money).

Instead, Firework is focused on what it calls “premium user-gen” – meaning, it will feature a mix of professional creators and up-and-comers. To date, Firework has worked with names like Flo Rida, Dexter Darden (Maze Runner), model and Miss USA Olivia Jordan, Disney star Jordyn Jones, Frankie Grande, and others.

It’s also working with a handful of brands, including Refinery29 and Complex Networks. But the company doesn’t want to inundate the app with content from brands, it says.

In addition to the horizontal-to-vertical trick, Firework is also doing something different in terms of fan engagement: it’s ditching comments. Users can only privately message a video’s creator – they can’t comment on the video itself.

“Haters and trolls, they want an audience  – they want to elicit a polarizing reaction. We remove that,” says Grenier.

And instead of “liking” a video, users can only bookmark the video or share it – an engagement which is styled like a retweet, as the video is posted to your profile with all the original credit intact.

Founded less than two years in Mountain View and now relocated to Redwood City with teams in L.A., Japan, and Brazil, Firework parent Loop Now tested a couple apps that didn’t find product market fit before launching Firework.

Its team of 51 full-time today combines both tech talent and Hollywood expertise.

This includes: CEO Vincent Yang, a Stanford MBA and previously co-founder and CEO at EverString; co-founder and COO Jerry Luk, employee No. 30 at LinkedIn and previously at Edmodo; biz dev head Bryan Barber, formerly of Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures and Fox; and CRO Corey Grenier, noted above.

Unlike Quibi, Firework’s parent company Loop Now Technologies has raised “millions” – not a billion dollars – to get off the ground. Its early backers include original Snap investor Lightspeed, IDG Capital, and an (undisclosed) early investor in Musical.ly. (Firework is poised to announce its Series A in a few weeks so is holding off on investment details for now.)

The app launched last year and has been in an open beta until now.

According to data from Sensor Tower, it has 1.8 million installs on iOS, 55 percent in the U.S.

Firework claims it has 2 million registered users, across iOS and Android.

 

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Harnessing Organizational Knowledge for Machine Learning

Posted by Alex Ratner, Stanford University and Cassandra Xia, Google AI

One of the biggest bottlenecks in developing machine learning (ML) applications is the need for the large, labeled datasets used to train modern ML models. Creating these datasets involves the investment of significant time and expense, requiring annotators with the right expertise. Moreover, due to the evolution of real-world applications, labeled datasets often need to be thrown out or re-labeled.

In collaboration with Stanford and Brown University, we present "Snorkel Drybell: A Case Study in Deploying Weak Supervision at Industrial Scale," which explores how existing knowledge in an organization can be used as noisier, higher-level supervision—or, as it is often termed, weak supervision—to quickly label large training datasets. In this study, we use an experimental internal system, Snorkel Drybell, which adapts the open-source Snorkel framework to use diverse organizational knowledge resources—like internal models, ontologies, legacy rules, knowledge graphs, and more—in order to generate training data for machine learning models at web scale. We find that this approach can match the efficacy of hand-labeling tens of thousands of data points, and reveals some core lessons about how training datasets for modern machine learning models can be created in practice.

Rather than labeling training data by hand, Snorkel DryBell enables writing labeling functions that label training data programmatically. In this work, we explored how these labeling functions can capture engineers' knowledge about how to use existing resources as heuristics for weak supervision. As an example, suppose our goal is to identify content related to celebrities. One can leverage an existing named-entity recognition (NER) model for this task by labeling any content that does not contain a person as not related to celebrities. This illustrates how existing knowledge resources (in this case, a trained model) can be combined with simple programmatic logic to label training data for a new model. Note also, importantly, that this labeling function returns None---i.e. abstains---in many cases, and thus only labels some small part of the data; our overall goal is to use these labels to train a modern machine learning model that can generalize to new data.

In our example of a labeling function, rather than hand-labeling a data point (1), one utilizes an existing knowledge resource—in this case, a NER model (2)—together with some simple logic expressed in code (3) to heuristically label data.

This programmatic interface for labeling training data is much faster and more flexible than hand-labeling individual data points, but the resulting labels are obviously of much lower quality than manually-specified labels. The labels generated by these labeling functions will often overlap and disagree, as the labeling functions may not only have arbitrary unknown accuracies, but may also be correlated in arbitrary ways (for example, from sharing a common data source or heuristic).

To solve the problem of noisy and correlated labels, Snorkel DryBell uses a generative modeling technique to automatically estimate the accuracies and correlations of the labeling functions in a provably consistent way—without any ground truth training labels—then uses this to re-weight and combine their outputs into a single probabilistic label per data point. At a high level, we rely on the observed agreements and disagreements between the labeling functions (the covariance matrix), and learn the labeling function accuracy and correlation parameters that best explain this observed output using a new matrix completion-style approach. The resulting labels can then be used to train an arbitrary model (e.g. in TensorFlow), as shown in the system diagram below.

Using Diverse Knowledge Sources as Weak Supervision
To study the efficacy of Snorkel Drybell, we used three production tasks and corresponding datasets, aimed at classifying topics in web content, identifying mentions of certain products, and detecting certain real-time events. Using Snorkel DryBell, we were able to make use of various existing or quickly specified sources of information such as:

• Heuristics and rules: e.g. existing human-authored rules about the target domain.
  
• Topic models, taggers, and classifiers: e.g. machine learning models about the target domain or a related domain.
  
• Aggregate statistics: e.g. tracked metrics about the target domain.
  
• Knowledge or entity graphs: e.g. databases of facts about the target domain.
  

In Snorkel DryBell, the goal is to train a machine learning model (C), for example to do content or event classification over web data. Rather than hand-labeling training data to do this, in Snorkel DryBell users write labeling functions that express various organizational knowledge resources (A), which are then automatically reweighted and combined (B).

We used these organizational knowledge resources to write labeling functions in a MapReduce template-based pipeline. Each labeling function takes in a data point and either abstains, or outputs a label. The result is a large set of programmatically-generated training labels. However, many of these labels were very noisy (e.g. from the heuristics), conflicted with each other, or were far too coarse-grained (e.g. the topic models) for our task, leading to the next stage of Snorkel DryBell, aimed at automatically cleaning and integrating the labels into a final training set.

Modeling the Accuracies to Combine & Repurpose Existing Sources
To handle these noisy labels, the next stage of Snorkel DryBell combines the outputs from the labeling functions into a single, confidence-weighted training label for each data point. The challenging technical aspect is that this must be done without any ground-truth labels. We use a generative modeling technique that learns the accuracy of each labeling function using only unlabeled data. This technique learns by observing the matrix of agreements and disagreements between the labeling functions' outputs, taking into account known (or statistically estimated) correlation structures between them. In Snorkel DryBell, we also implement a new faster, sampling-free version of this modeling approach, implemented in TensorFlow, in order to handle web-scale data.

By combining and modeling the output of the labeling functions using this procedure in Snorkel DryBell, we were able to generate high-quality training labels. In fact, on the two applications where hand-labeled training data was available for comparison, we achieved the same predictive accuracy training a model with Snorkel DryBell's labels as we did when training that same model with 12,000 and 80,000 hand-labeled training data points.

Transferring Non-Servable Knowledge to Servable Models
In many settings, there is also an important distinction between servable features—which can be used in production—and non-servable features, that are too slow or expensive to be used in production. These non-servable features may have very rich signal, but a general question is how to use them to train or otherwise help servable models that can be deployed in production?

In many settings, users write labeling functions that leverage organizational knowledge resources that are not servable in production (a)—e.g. aggregate statistics, internal models, or knowledge graphs that are too slow or expensive to use in production—in order to train models that are only defined over production-servable features (b), e.g. cheap, real-time web signals.

In Snorkel DryBell, we found that users could write the labeling functions—i.e. express their organizational knowledge—over one feature set that was not servable, and then use the resulting training labels output by Snorkel DryBell to train a model defined over a different, servable feature set. This cross-feature transfer boosted our performance by an average 52% on the benchmark datasets we created. More broadly, it represents a simple but powerful way to use resources that are too slow (e.g. expensive models or aggregate statistics), private (e.g. entity or knowledge graphs), or otherwise unsuitable for deployment, to train servable models over cheap, real-time features. This approach can be viewed as a new type of transfer learning, where instead of transferring a model between different datasets, we're transferring domain knowledge between different feature sets- an approach which has potential use cases not just in industry, but in medical settings and beyond.

Next Steps
Moving forward, we're excited to see what other types of organizational knowledge can be used as weak supervision, and how the approach used by Snorkel DryBell can enable new modes of information reuse and sharing across organizations. For more details, check out our paper, and for further technical details, blog posts, and tutorials, check out the open-source Snorkel implementation at snorkel.stanford.edu.

Acknowledgments
This research was done in collaboration between Google, Stanford, and Brown. We would like to thank all the people who were involved, including Stephen Bach (Brown), Daniel Rodriguez, Yintao Liu, Chong Luo, Haidong Shao, Souvik Sen, Braden Hancock (Stanford), Houman Alborzi, Rahul Kuchhal, Christopher Ré (Stanford), Rob Malkin.

Slack removes 28 accounts linked to hate groups

Today in a short blog post, Slack announced that it had removed 28 accounts with a “clear affiliation with known hate groups.” Few details were provided about the accounts or how Slack identified them, but we have reached out to the company for more information.

The announcement, brief as it is, comes as a surprise. To date, Slack has managed to stay out of the conversation around what happens when sometimes violent politically extreme organizations use popular social platforms to organize. While that conversation should be fairly clear cut when it comes to public-facing content somewhere like Facebook, it’s a bit more nuanced on messaging platforms where communication is private in nature.

Slack is mostly used for workplace communication, but the chat platform Discord, popular with gamers, has been grappling with the same issues. In 2017, Discord removed a public server tied to AltRight.com that the company said violated its rules against harassment and calls for violence. As fringe groups are booted off of mainstream platforms, it will be interesting to see where they wind up and how their new platforms of choice will handle their unsavory new clusters of users.

For reference, here’s Slack’s full blog post:

Today we removed 28 accounts because of their clear affiliation with known hate groups. The use of Slack by hate groups runs counter to everything we believe in at Slack and is not welcome on our platform. Slack is designed to help businesses communicate better and more collaboratively so people can do their best work. Using Slack to encourage or incite hatred and violence against groups or individuals because of who they are is antithetical to our values and the very purpose of Slack. When we are made aware of an organization using Slack for illegal, harmful, or other prohibited purposes, we will investigate and take appropriate action and we are updating our terms of service to make that more explicit.

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Huawei has built an Android alternative in case US tensions increase

Tensions between the U.S. and Huawei show no sign of easing. Last week, the electronics giant announced that it has filed a lawsuit against the government, over an “unconstitutional” ban on its products. Meanwhile, earlier this week, the U.S. threatened German intelligence over the country’s use of Huawei 5G products.

The company has understandably been prepping for a further downtown in relations by building its own in-house alternative to Android. The backup was noted by Huawei mobile head Richard Yu, following a year of rumors around the mobile OS.

“We have prepared our own operating system, if it turns out we can no longer use [Android], we will be ready and have our plan B,” the exec said.

Huawei began building the software in earnest after a U.S. ban on ZTE. The use of software and hardware from U.S. companies like Google and Qualcomm in Chinese smartphones has led to increasing tariffs on both sides.

In addition to concerns over ties to the Chinese government, Huawei has also been hit over its alleged skirting of Iranian tariffs. That landed the company’s CFO Meng Wanzhou in a Canadian jail. Of course, all of this hasn’t slowed Huawei’s global growth. The company saw a 50 percent jump in revenue in spite of mounting concerns.

We’ve reached out to Huawei for further confirmation.

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Valve lets you stream Steam games from anywhere

Valve doesn’t want to miss the cloud gaming bandwagon. As PC Gamer spotted, The company quietly released a beta version of Steam Link Anywhere. As the name suggests, it lets you turn your gaming PC into a cloud gaming server and stream games from… anywhere.

The company’s strategy is a bit puzzling here as Valve recently discontinued its hardware set-top box, the Steam Link. While Valve might be done on the hardware side, the company is still iterating on Steam Link apps.

You can now download the Steam Link app on an Android phone, an Android TV device or a Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, Valve still hasn’t found a way to release its Steam Link app on the App Store for iOS devices and the Apple TV. You can start Steam on your computer and play demanding PC games on other screens.

Steam Link works fine on a local network, especially if you use Ethernet cables between all your devices. With Steam Link Anywhere, your performance will vary depending on your home internet connection. If you don’t have a fiber connection at home, the latency might simply be too high to play any game.

Now let’s see if Valve plans to flip the switch and let you run Steam games on a server in a data center near you. That would turn Steam Link Anywhere into a Shadow competitor.

Microsoft recently showed off Forza Horizon 4 running on an Android phone thanks to Project xCloud. Google has also been teasing its Game Developers Conference to learn more about its gaming projects. It’s clear that everybody wants to turn 2019 into the year of cloud gaming.

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Daily Crunch: Telegram soars after Facebook outage

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov wrote, “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.” Durov doesn’t offer an explicit explanation for Telegram’s sudden spike in signups, but he does take a thinly veiled swipe at social networking giant Facebook.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Facebook and its related family of apps went down for most of Wednesday.

2. Google removed 2.3B bad ads, banned ads on 1.5M apps + 28M pages, plans new Policy Manager this year

Using both manual reviews and machine learning, Google said that in 2018 it removed 2.3 billion “bad ads” that violated its policies — which at their most general forbid ads that mislead or exploit vulnerable people.

3. Uber reportedly raising $1B in deal that values self-driving car unit at up to $10B

Uber is in negotiations with investors, including the SoftBank Vision Fund, to secure an investment as large as $1 billion for its autonomous vehicles unit. The deal would value the business at between $5 billion and $10 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

4. Opportunity’s last Mars panorama is a showstopper

The Opportunity Mars Rover may be officially offline for good, but its legacy of science and imagery is ongoing — and NASA just shared the last (nearly) complete panorama the robot sent back before it was blanketed in dust.

5. AI photo startup Polarr raises an $11.5 million Series A

At the moment, Polarr is probably best known for its photography app for iOS and Android, which utilizes machine learning and AI to improve image editing. The company says it has around four million monthly active users.

6. WeWork Labs is launching a food tech accelerator

WeWork is committing $1 million to back the first batch of companies.

7. Facebook won’t store data in countries with human rights violations — except Singapore

When Mark Zuckerberg said in a lengthy blog post that Facebook would not build data centers in countries with poor human rights, he chose to ignore Singapore — known for a lack of privacy and freedom of expression.

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Daily Crunch: Telegram soars after Facebook outage

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov wrote, “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.” Durov doesn’t offer an explicit explanation for Telegram’s sudden spike in signups, but he does take a thinly veiled swipe at social networking giant Facebook.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Facebook and its related family of apps went down for most of Wednesday.

2. Google removed 2.3B bad ads, banned ads on 1.5M apps + 28M pages, plans new Policy Manager this year

Using both manual reviews and machine learning, Google said that in 2018 it removed 2.3 billion “bad ads” that violated its policies — which at their most general forbid ads that mislead or exploit vulnerable people.

3. Uber reportedly raising $1B in deal that values self-driving car unit at up to $10B

Uber is in negotiations with investors, including the SoftBank Vision Fund, to secure an investment as large as $1 billion for its autonomous vehicles unit. The deal would value the business at between $5 billion and $10 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

4. Opportunity’s last Mars panorama is a showstopper

The Opportunity Mars Rover may be officially offline for good, but its legacy of science and imagery is ongoing — and NASA just shared the last (nearly) complete panorama the robot sent back before it was blanketed in dust.

5. AI photo startup Polarr raises an $11.5 million Series A

At the moment, Polarr is probably best known for its photography app for iOS and Android, which utilizes machine learning and AI to improve image editing. The company says it has around four million monthly active users.

6. WeWork Labs is launching a food tech accelerator

WeWork is committing $1 million to back the first batch of companies.

7. Facebook won’t store data in countries with human rights violations — except Singapore

When Mark Zuckerberg said in a lengthy blog post that Facebook would not build data centers in countries with poor human rights, he chose to ignore Singapore — known for a lack of privacy and freedom of expression.

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Apple’s WWDC kicks off on June 3

Apple’s annual developer conference is returning to San Jose for the third year in a row, at the McEnery Convention Center. This year, WWDC will take place on June 3-7. As always, you should expect a keynote on the first day of the event with consumer-focused announcements. This year marks the 30th year anniversary of WWDC.

You can now register on Apple’s website for $1,599 — the same price as in previous years. But buying a ticket doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll get to attend the event. Apple will hold a lottery to select the lucky winners who get to pay to go to a developer conference.

You have until March 20 at 5 p.m. to register. Developers will receive a notification on the next day if they’ve been selected. And if you’re a student, you should consider applying for a WWDC scholarship. This year, 350 students will be able to attend the event for free through this process.

In addition to some new announcements on the first day, Apple will hold many technical sessions and hands-on labs to help third-party developers in the Apple ecosystem at large. This conference is mostly aimed at developers working on apps for iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS. It’s a good way to understand how new frameworks are going to affect your apps and how you could take advantage of them.

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How to Delete a File in Use by Another Program

Windows File Explorer claims the file you’re trying to delete is open in another program or the system? When you can’t open, edit, or delete a file, it’s either still running in the background or didn’t close properly.

Fortunately, you can force close, rename, move, or delete a file that is in use. Here’s how!

How to Overcome the “File in Use” Error

If you want to skip the manual solutions, scroll down to the section where we list tools that can help you unlock and delete a file in use.

1. Close the Program

Let’s start with the obvious. Did you just open the file and not close it? If the file is closed, but the program is still running, close it too, then try again.

2. Reboot your computer

While rebooting is inconvenient, it requires zero skills or fiddling with stuff like the Task Manager or third party tools. Rebooting also clears your RAM and possibly fixes other nuisances in one go. So try this if you can’t be bothered to look into the cause.

If you have already tried rebooting and it didn’t help, skip to the next option.

3. End the Application via the Task Manager

The reason rebooting helps is because the system will start from scratch and—among other things—all processes currently running in the Task Manager will be closed. Instead of rebooting, you can also try to manually end the process or application that holds your file hostage. This is the most successful method to fix the “file is open in another program” error.

Click Ctrl + Shift + ESC to open the Task Manager. Alternatively, you can right-click the Taskbar or click Ctrl + Alt + Del anywhere in Windows and select Task Manager. If you see the compact Windows 1o version, click More details and make sure you’re in the Processes tab. Now browse for the application that you used to open the “file in use”. For example, if you were viewing a document, look for Word.

Once you find the process, select it and click End task in the bottom right. This will close all instances of the program. If you cannot seem to find the process, have you tried rebooting, yet?

4. Change File Explorer Process Settings

By default, File Explorer launches all its windows in a single process (explorer.exe). It could be, however, that your settings force File Explorer to launch separate processes, which could cause a conflict between different processes.

Press Windows + E to open File Explorer. Go to View > Options > Change folder and search options.

In the Folder Options window, switch to the View tab and find the Launch folder windows in a separate process option. Make sure it’s not checked. Click Apply to save any changes.

If the option was unchecked in the first place, you could try if checking it solves your issue.

5. Disable the File Explorer Preview Pane

Previews in the File Explorer can cause conflicts like the “file is open in another program” error.

Press Windows + E, switch to the View tab, and press Alt + P to close the preview pane. The screenshot below shows an open preview pane on the right.

After closing the preview pane, try the operation again and see whether the “file in use” error has disappeared.

6. Force Delete the File in Use via the Command  Prompt

You can bypass the File Explorer and force delete the file using the command prompt.

First, we need to track down the file path directory in File Explorer. Press Windows + E to open file explorer, locate the affected file, and copy the file path.

Now press Windows + S, search for Command Prompt, right-click the respective result, and select Run as administrator. To navigate to the file directory of your file in use, enter cd [directory path you copied] and hit Enter.

Before we can proceed and force delete the file in use, we have to temporarily kill the File Explorer process. This will cause your Taskbar, wallpaper, and open folders to disappear. But don’t worry, you can restart File Explorer and we’ll show you how below.

To close File Explorer, press Ctrl + Shift + ESC, find Windows Explorer, right-click the process, and select End task.

Return to the Command Prompt. If you lost the window, press Alt + Tab to jump to it.

Enter this command to delete the file, replacing everything between the quotes with your actual file name: del "File in Use.doc"

To restart the File Manager, open the Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + ESC), click File > Run new task, enter explorer.exe, and click OK. This should restore your desktop to its usual appearance.

Unlock the File in Use With a Tool

Sometimes, the file in use remains locked, even though it shouldn’t be. If trying to delete it through the Command Prompt didn’t work or if that task is too daunting, use one of these tools.

1. Microsoft Process Explorer

Process Explorer is a more powerful File Explorer. It doesn’t just list all running processes, it can also show you which process took your file hostage. Simply open the Process Explorer Search via Find > Find Handle or DLL (or press Ctrl + F), enter the file name, and wait for the list of processes accessing your file.

You can’t close the process from the search window, but you can use Process Explorer or Windows Task Manager to close the offending application.

2. Unlocker

Unlocker used to add itself to the Windows context menu, meaning you could right-click the file in use and unlock it via the context menu.

In Windows 10, launch Unlocker, browse for the file, select the file, and click OK. Unlocker will look and (if found) remove locking handles. Even if it does not find a handle, you can use Unlocker to Delete, Rename, or Move the file.

Should the file still be in use, you can let Unlocker perform the action upon your next reboot.

3. LockHunter

LockHunter will add itself to the Windows context menu. Once installed, just right-click the locked file and select What is locking this file? This should bring up a window showing all processes using the file. You can now select to Unlock, Delete (at next system restart), or Unlock & Rename the file. In our case, we couldn’t unlock the file, but deleting it at the next system restart did work.

Another third-party tool, FilExile, failed to delete our file in use, even though it reported success. However, if your file path is too long, you might still want to give this tool a try.

File Still in Use? Boot Into Safe Mode

If the above didn’t work or if you’re not interested in installing software, there is one last thing you can try: boot into Windows Safe Mode. The file you’re trying to delete may automatically be loaded by another application. Unlockers should still work if that’s the case, but if malware is involved or if you don’t want to deal with third-party tools, this is an alternative route you can take.

In Windows 10, press Windows + I, navigate to Update & Security > Recovery and under Advanced startup select Restart now. From the next screen, select Troubleshoot > Advanced Options > Startup Settings > Restart. When your computer reboots, you’ll see the Startup Settings screen, from where you can choose Safe Mode.

Once you’re in Safe Mode, navigate to the file in question and try your luck once more.

More Windows File Explorer Tricks to Know About

We showed you a few ways to unlock a file open in another program or in use by the system. Hopefully, one of them worked. Two methods involved the Windows File Explorer.

Did you know about these Windows File Explorer features:

Image Credit: Jane0606/Shutterstock

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Why You No Longer Need a KVM Switch for Multi-PC Setups

Whenever I think of a KVM switch, my mind turns to those archaic hardware A-B switches that allow you to hook up a parallel printer to two computers. In the days before high-speed internet, seamless Wi-Fi, and USB hubs, a physical KVM switch was a handy tool.

A KVM switch isn’t quite that archaic. It’s short for “keyboard, video, and mouse,” and they’re still handy even with all the mod-cons at our disposal.

Times are changing, however. You no longer need a dedicated KVM switch for your multi-system setup. Here are three software you can use instead!

What Does a KVM Switch Do?

A KVM switch is a hardware switch that allows you to control multiple computers from one keyboard, video display (monitor), and mouse. Essentially, you can control two computers with a single mouse and keyboard, all through your regular monitor. A KVM switch can save you a fortune in hardware costs if you have more than one computer at home.

KVM switches are not just physical hardware. There are several handy virtual KVM applications that let you share your mouse and keyboard across computers. Better still, they’re easy to set up!

3 Software KVMs to Replace a Physical Switch

Critical to the success of a virtual KVM is ease of use. The following programs represent the easiest way to share your mouse and keyboard without requiring a physical KVM switch.

1. ShareMouse

ShareMouse is the easiest of the three programs to set up and run. Once installed, it shows up in the taskbar as an arrow icon. Hover over the icon to see how many other PCs on your local network are set up with ShareMouse and ready to use. ShareMouse instantly detects my laptop and desktop.

ShareMouse has some cool features. One I particularly like is the ability to dim the monitor you are not using. It is an excellent reminder for the screen your mouse is currently lurking on, but also helps preserve precious laptop battery life if you’re not charging.

Another excellent feature is the file drag and drop and shared clipboard between your computers. ShareMouse definitely makes it easy to share files without using a USB flash drive or otherwise.

You can use the Monitor Manager to tell ShareMouse where your monitors are in relation to one another. The Monitor Manager is simple to use; just drag and drop your monitors into their correct position. ShareMouse displays the monitor letter on each screen as you move them, so you know which is which.

The free version of ShareMouse does come with a few limitations. For instance, you can only use two computers, and those computers must only have one screen each. You cannot use the free version in a server environment.

Download: ShareMouse for Windows | macOS (Free)

2. LiteManager

LiteManager is a little different to other KVM options on this list. LiteManager is more akin to a VNC viewer but shares many of the same mouse and keyboard sharing characteristics you want in a KVM. (Here are 7 more screen sharing and remote viewing tools for you to check out.)

The key difference is that instead of sliding your mouse to one side of your monitor to take control of your second screen, LiteManager displays the second system on the screen you are working on. In that, LiteManager is a better match for multi-system setups that involve computers in separate rooms (although it is perfectly fine for a side-by-side configuration, too).

Once you download LiteManager, you must install either the Viewer (client) or Server software depending on which computer you’re using. For instance, I use my desktop primarily, so this is my Server. My laptop is the Viewer.

Once the server installation completes, select the Open LiteManager Free Server Now option. A new icon will appear in your system tray. If you roll your mouse over it, the LiteManager server icon will give you a list of IP addresses you can use to connect the viewer (on your other computer) to the server.

Copy one of the local IP addresses down and head to your second computer where you installed the Viewer. Open the Viewer, then select Add new connection. Paste the local IP address and any passwords, and you’re good to go. You can access your new remote connection by double-clicking the screen in the Online section.

LiteManager Free comes with a vast range of tools for managing your remote connection. For instance, you can lock the server’s mouse and keyboard, remove the server wallpaper, disable the synchronized clipboard, and more.

You can also change a number of security settings, such as the level of encryption for the connection, the password difficulty, IP filtering with white or blacklists, and the denial of certain connection types.

LiteManager Free is available for several different operating systems, extending the functionality of the tool and your productivity!

Download: LiteManager Free for Windows | macOS | Android | iOS (Free)

3. Input Director

Input Director is the final virtual KVM program for you to consider. Input Director uses on installation to give you the option of being a Master (server) or Slave (client). You run the Master on your primary system, then install the Slave on as many additional systems as you like. In that, Input Director allows you to build an extensive network of Master/Slave systems all using a single keyboard and mouse.

Configuring the placement of your screens isn’t quite as pretty as ShareMouse, but it does the trick. You can add Slaves using their network IP address, or the hostname provided in each Input Director window. Setting up your network across all the systems you want to control is a piece of cake.

Input Director has some cool features, too. If you enable the Cursor Wraparound feature, you can take your cursor off the edge of any screen on to another (rather than in parallel). Another handy feature is the cursor ripple effect. When you near the edge of the screen, the cursor gains a water ripple effect, letting you know you’re approaching the transition zone.

Download: Input Director for Windows (Free)

KVMs Are Great for Multi-System Setups

If you have more than one system in use, a KVM switch is an effective way to boost your productivity. Using a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple systems will save you both time and money. And who doesn’t want that?

If you have a multi-monitor setup, rather than multi-system, check out our guide on how to make the most of your monitor real-estate.

Image Credit: Robert Freiberger/Flickr

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