msoftnews

Tweet The 4th largest US carrier has brought back two-year contract agreements for customers. The option was previously discontinued in January following a trend started by T-Mobile US a few years ago. Read more… Neowin

Tweet In a major update to its privacy policies, Facebook on Thursday announced a series of measures that will help its more than 1 billion members from “over-sharing” — such as posting personal information to the general public, or telling friends about every single song they hear. In a blog post, Facebook explained that it will unroll a “Privacy checkup” in coming days that will use simple graphics to explain…

Tweet GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram recently riffed on a superb piece by Stijn Debrouwere about the cargo culting of analytics in newsrooms. Stijn argued that publishers have aped tech companies by bringing data into their newsroom, but, having little idea of what to do with the data, are using it as more totem than tool, unable to distinguish what is measurable from what matters. In my experience at Chartbeat, I’ve seen…

Tweet New companies like Uber and Hailo are shaking up the taxi industry with GPS-based apps that allow customers to summon a taxi to wherever they’re standing. Wildly popular in San Francisco, these so-called “e-hails” have been catching on in New York City, too. New stats from the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission show that customers made 117,000 total e-hail requests in June but, in a curious side note, the e-hails…

Tweet One of the interesting tidbits we heard this week was the fact that Microsoft has been building datacenters in parking lots. Even more interesting? They don’t put a roof on the datacenter. Read more…      Neowin