Twine, an online marketplace for creative freelancers in design, music and film, recently launched a new initiative designed to bring quality to the gig economy: They’ll be manually curating the right creatives for each task in order to efficiently pair high-quality jobs with high-quality workers. I chatted with the founder and CEO of the company in order to learn more about just what Twine brings to the freelance table....

VR gives an actual experience in a way no other technology can match. Potential consumers can see exactly how an individual technology will work within a structure, giving more context to a product. This technique works for everything from a new gun in the latest “Call of Duty” to a new mechanical arm serving McDonald’s burgers. VR may have started as a technology for gamers, but it did not end up there by any means....

The law, which has been debated and amended significantly since its introduction into India’s parliamentary system in 2019, was billed as a way to give Indians more control over their data. Along with the widely-criticized anti-VPN laws and the 2021 IT rules that irked social media firms, the withdrawal paints a picture of a government struggling to assert itself confidently on tech issues. India’s Divisive Data Protection Law The proposed 2019 Personal Data Protection Bill was purportedly designed to give Indian citizens – who comprise the world’s second-largest internet market – more control over their personal data....

The question is: does it work? The answer is yes. It’s powerful, it’s affordable, and, perhaps most importantly, it works really well. The Golden Age of the Micro-Influencer The use of micro-influencers will be the biggest trend in influencer marketing in the coming years. Experticity recently conducted a study on micro-influencers. According to the study, 82% of consumers surveyed were far more likely to take a recommendation from a micro-influencer than from those with larger, less personal followings....

There are many creative ways to connect with online influencers – from granting them early access to your product or tagging them frequently in your social media updates. To help you succeed, here are seven influencer marketing tools you can use. Campaign Management This platform can help identify as well as engage potential influencers. With Traackr, you can also manage your relationships with influencers to scale and grow your brand with them....

This series is brought to you in partnership with the Consumer Technology Association (formerly the Consumer Electronics Association). R&D Stagnation According to professor of Innovation & Strategy at Babson College, Jay Rao, U.S. spending on R&D – both by companies and by the federal government – saw regular growth between 1950 and 1980, growing accordingly with the economy. But starting around 1980, this spending decreased and has remained flat ever since....

TheSquareFoot, a commercial real estate startup in New York, decided to get to the bottom of this debate by asking New York workers how they feel about company culture at their jobs. The results? Company culture is just as important as everyone has been saying! It attracts talented and driven employees, it affects financial and worker performance, and it impacts the happiness of everyone working in the building. The survey revealed a number of other important aspects of company culture that can help founders and CEOs better understand their workforce....

Startups and VCs can contact Walk through Twitter or gmail (hunterwalk@gmail.com) in order to be added to the rapidly growing Google spreadsheet documenting participants. Those on the list include Spotify, Survey Monkey, and The Skimm… and that’s just the S’s. The effort, Walk explained in a Medium post this morning, is bipartisan: Walk’s past experience proves his commitment to the tech community’s political investment: In 2012, his app Picswitch helped users overlay an “I Voted” banner on their Twitter and Facebook profile pictures....

“Come on…”, you might say. “How hard could it be to 3D print something, honestly?” It’s very difficult, honestly. The team over at Obrary would even go so far as to say that learning the end-to-end process on fabrication machines is comparable to getting a Master’s Degree. Think about it: you need to learn multiple, complex software packages like CAD and CAM;you need to learn how to do product design;there’s a lack of available designs to start with and iterate on; andthere’s a lack of documented best practices, tips, and tricks....

Plug.dj is a real-time social media experience that unites users in a virtual room while users take turns DJ’ing. Sound familiar? Where these services differ, however, is their ability to distribute content via YouTube and Soundcloud internationally without copyright fees. Although Turntable has established itself as the leader amongst the social, dancing avatar services, having launched only earlier this year, Plug.dj has gotten off to a bullish start – over 220,000 registered users across 180 countries....

“He’s got game” usually refers to someone’s athletic skills or romantic swagger. In Anthony So’s case, he’s got mad game…data science game — arguably, the hottest skills in the business world today. The difference is, in most industries, after a long day of mining data, analysts don’t “step out of the office and into the game” the way So and his colleagues do at Talking Stick Resort Arena. As a Basketball Analytics Analyst for the Phoenix Suns, So uses his data science know-how to help give his team a winning advantage....

Machine learning has captured the human imagination, but the notion that machines will somehow replace humans is an idea best left to science fiction. The Importance of the Algorithm Algorithms have played a key role in ad tech since the very beginning of the industry. However, the simple fact is that we don’t differentiate between companies based on their algorithms is unsettling at best and dangerous at worst. For one, the algorithm is proprietary, so there are legal limits on the ability of marketers to compare machine learning technology....

The panelists included Andreas Ronneseth, cofounder of Revolution Parts, Sean and Thora Dowdell cofounders of Club Tattoo, and was moderated by Carly Levin, NEXT Director at J.P. Morgan. For early-stage founders, raising capital from friends and family might be their first step to launching their business. But at some point, taking on funding or lines of credit to fuel your business might be on the radar. While the panelists suggested to stay debt-free as long as you can, at some point, taking on funding or lines of credit to fuel your business might be needed....

The San Francisco-based startup ManServant provides women with men who do exactly what they want. The company, founded by two advertising copywriters, has a catalog of gentleman tailored-to-order and willing to be your butler, photographer, bodyguard, or cabana boy. Now, before you think this is some sort of gigolo service or Magic Mike (without the extremely hot strippers) scenario, it isn’t. Is it reverse sexism, where men are objectified to satisfy the non-sexual needs of women?...

At Denver Startup Week we caught up with Mark Cuban and had a blunt talk about his annoyances, the stupid things startups do when pitching for money and the importance of sales. How much politics played into buying decisions in big companies. I would not have wasted so much time chasing big name accounts. Business is the most competitive sport there is. If you can’t take a hit and rebound you won’t survive....

The 13-week accelerator graduated its first cohort of six promising early-stage, health and wellness-focused startups, and offered them a chance to present their companies to an audience of roughly 200 people from Maine’s startup ecosystem, including accredited investors. (The event was live streamed online and is available in two parts: here and here.) David Roux, a Maine native and cofounder of Silicon Valley-based Silver Lake Partners, one of the largest tech-focused private equity firms in the country, kicked off the event with a keynote talk that discussed the nature and importance of entrepreneurship....

Womply Founder and CEO Toby Scammell lived in Australia for 5 years, and during that time, Womply (the pet) lived in their backyard. They didn’t so much take care of it as live alongside it. “We went out and said hi every once in a while, but we didn’t put it on a leash and take it for walk or anything.” Womply the company has nothing to do with Womply the wombat – or pets....

While weak account credentials can be alleviated with a password manager, systems configured in error like this present their own kind of threat to businesses. Whilst Microsoft says there’s no indication that any customer accounts or systems were affected, it’s a stark reminder that even the largest companies are at risk. Microsoft Systems Breached SOCRadar, a threat intelligence organization, notified Microsoft in late September that the “sensitive data of 65,000+ entities in 111 countries” was leaked due to a misconfigured data bucket....

This is one update that all Windows users will want to install as soon as they can: If successful in an attack, a hacker can use this vulnerability to view, change, and delete data, as well as create new Windows accounts in the software. Some critics have called out Microsoft for the time they took to issue the patch, saying the software corporation should have taken action several years ago when the flaw was first disclosed in a 2020 academic paper....

The news will fall on welcome ears; the number of industry vacancies out there is huge, and the threat from cybercriminals will only be thwarted by filling these roles and developing antivirus software, as well as other related technology, at a rate that outpaces the work of malicious actors. The initiative is one of several cybersecurity-related investments Microsoft has made recently, and the tech giant is joining forces with organizations in the private sector — as well as government departments — fighting similar battles....