Relay’s AMP converter technology helps shave down the time it takes for mobile pages to load.
Google has acquired Relay Media, potentially to take advantage of the firm’s technology for speeding up mobile web pages.
On Monday, as reported by TechCrunch, the news was quietly posted on Relay Media’s homepage .
The company, a creator of a converter of web pages to the AMP HTML format, said Relay Media was acquired by Google this month.
No financial details have been disclosed.
“We’re excited to announce that Google has acquired Relay Media’s AMP Converter technology,” Relay Media says. “Service for current customers will continue uninterrupted as we transition the Relay Media AMP Converter to Google’s infrastructure. We’re pausing new publisher onboarding as we focus on the integration effort.”
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open-source initiative to promote the new AMP HTML standard for quickly loading mobile pages — adverts, analytics, paywalls and all.
It is sometimes the case that a company or vendor will have a sleek, intuitive desktop browser-based domain, but when attempting to load the same domain on a mobile device, extra embedded content such as adverts or popups can slow down loading or disrupt the entire structure of a page.
The AMP Project utilizes AMP HTML — with some restrictions — to improve performance; the AMP JS library for quick rendering, and the AMP Cache, Google’s cache which can be used to serve cached pages.
Relay Media launched in May 2016. At the time, CEO and co-founder David Gehring, who has otherwise worked with Google and news publishers through the Digital News Initiative (DNI), said that mobile is far from dead, as there are “favorable currents amidst the troubled waters of the digital ecosystem for quality publishers.”
“More users encounter content on the open mobile web than on desktop browsers or apps, and total mobile ad spending is now outpacing desktop,” Gehring said. “Programmatic CPMs are rising for quality publishers and viewable impressions. Unfortunately, publishers’ ability to compete for revenue and engagement is impeded by cluttered, slow-loading pages and non-viewable ads.”
“AMP is a well-timed opportunity to course-correct, providing the instant experience users desire and a clean, well-lit environment for monetization,” the executive added.
Google may close down the separate service and harness the converter technology itself to boost its own AMP push. Faced with the issues that mobile pages often present consumers, dedicated apps for particular sources — such as news outlets — have become a viable alternative.
However, if AMP takes hold, then Google is able to scrape revenue from mobile searches, and so it makes sense for the tech giant to invest in the project.
ZDNet has reached out to Google and will update when we hear back.

Sentiment rank: 1.6

© Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-acquires-relay-media-in-mobile-push/
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The downfall of Harvey Weinstein would seem like obvious grist for TV’s late-night comedy shows. Weinstein was facing three decades’ worth of allegations that he sexually harassed women…
The downfall of Harvey Weinstein would seem like obvious grist for TV’s late-night comedy shows. Weinstein was facing three decades’ worth of allegations that he sexually harassed women; on Sunday, his own film studio fired him. The story seemed to parallel those of other powerful men who were confronted with numerous accounts of sexual misdeeds, including Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes and President Donald Trump — all of whom were widely pilloried in the monologues of the late-night hosts and on shows like “Saturday Night Live.”
Yet since Thursday, when The New York Times published an investigation into the history of complaints against Weinstein, most of the late-night shows have avoided the matter altogether. “The Daily Show” addressed it fleetingly in an episode Thursday night, and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” weighed in Sunday night.
The omission seemed especially glaring on this weekend’s installment of “Saturday Night Live,” a show with a history of responding rapidly to news events and which, in a 90-minute broadcast, has multiple opportunities to address a range of topics.
As it turns out, the show did have jokes about Weinstein ready — they just were not used, according to a person familiar with how Saturday’s episode was prepared.
The absence of any commentary about Weinstein opened up “SNL” to rebukes from conservative critics who said that the show was covering up for a prominent liberal.
That criticism was hardly alleviated by remarks made early Sunday by Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer of “SNL.” Speaking to a videographer for The Daily Mail who noted that the show had made no mention of Weinstein, Michaels said, “It’s a New York thing.”
That brought a further round of jabs from people like Donald Trump Jr., who suggested in a Twitter post that “SNL” had one standard for people like his father, and another for people like Weinstein.
Michaels was unavailable for comment Sunday night. But the person familiar with the preparations for this weekend’s episode said the show cut material about Weinstein during its dress rehearsal. (This person spoke on the condition of anonymity because NBC had not authorized the person to speak for attribution.)
This person said there were jokes about Weinstein in a comedy sketch that was dropped before airtime, and also in its “Weekend Update” segment. These cuts were made simply because the material seemed to fall flat with the show’s studio audience, the person said.
Overall, this person said, the tone of this weekend’s show was greatly affected by the shooting massacre at a Las Vegas country music festival on Oct. 1, in which 58 people were killed and hundreds more were injured. The “SNL” broadcast opened with remarks and a performance by Jason Aldean, the country singer who was on stage at the festival when the shootings began; “SNL” also featured long comic monologues from the “Weekend Update” co-anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che, who spoke in favor of gun control.
The person familiar with Saturday’s episode said Michaels, in referring to “a New York thing” and Weinstein, had meant that the events surrounding Weinstein seemed at the time like a New York media story with which a national television audience might not be familiar.
After the news of Weinstein’s firing Sunday, this person said the story had only grown bigger, and that it was still possible for “Saturday Night Live” to address the topic in a new episode this coming Saturday.
Oliver told a series of jokes about Weinstein in Sunday’s episode of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight.” Referring to a TV journalist’s claim that Weinstein masturbated in front of her, Oliver said, “Step aside, ‘Chocolat,’ you are no longer the most horrifying picture that Harvey Weinstein has ever produced.”

Similarity rank: 14

Sentiment rank: -1.2

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TW sentiment: -10

© Source: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/oct/10/snl-prepped-jokes-about-harvey-weinstein-then-shel/
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This series intends to bring real-world thought and coding practices to a side project aimed at creating an enterprise-ready ranking system using Kotlin.
Welcome to the first installment of the upcoming “Real Coding” series. Over the next two weeks, I’m going to develop a real, working application, working one Pomodoro per day and sharing the progress, reasoning, and lessons learned here on DZone.
There are two categories of reasons on why I decided to start this little series: one purely selfish and one a bit less selfish.
The former category consists of me trying to fight off my recent writer’s block, having little time for writing longer pieces, and missing the daily development of features at my day job.
The latter, less selfish category is mostly my hypothesis that people should learn more from real, working projects rather than from cheesy 5-line examples or, worse, a description of code without actual code.
Between the two categories lies the fact that the world lacks a good, “enterprise-ready” ranking application, which I need and I’m willing to open-source.
What the world and I are in need of is a ranking application for office games like table soccer, table tennis, board games, and the like. The term “enterprise-ready” I mentioned before implies a strong, non-negotiable requirement that the application should be able to integrate with the company’s Single-Sign-On gateway or Active Directory so that people don’t have to create accounts, manage passwords, etc.
A bit less strong, although still rather non-negotiable requirements are:
A single instance of the application should support multiple rankings for multiple, different games.
Both solo and team modes should be supported.
The ELO system or something similar should be used.
Both players/teams should accept a match/game result before any ranking adjustments are made.
Finally, there are two nice-to-have features that probably won’t make it into the first version of the application, but we should keep them in the back of our minds:
Tournament mode, which allows for organizing short-term groups and play-off tournaments.
Automatic match-up — the application could automatically generate match-ups between players of similar skill, which would surely mean more cross-project and cross-department matches than normally.
Having recalled and written down all of the above, there were about 18 minutes left on my Pomodoro. I decided that before I jump into the code and start bashing around, I should come up with some design starting point that would give hope for satisfying the requirements.
Yes, I really couldn’t wait to start writing code that much. Unfortunately, 5 minutes was just enough to launch a new Maven project, configure Kotlin, and only begin fiddling with the classes:
As you can see, I just typed in some nouns that popped up during the analysis without a chance to do anything meaningful yet.

Sentiment rank: 2

© Source: https://dzone.com/articles/real-coding-quotenterprisequot-ranking-application?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedpress.me&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dzone
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TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, our premier European event is fast approaching this December. And that means some of the top players from Silicon Valley will be..
TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, our premier European event is fast approaching this December. And that means some of the top players from Silicon Valley will be coming over.
In this context, we are always interested in the experiences of European entrepreneurs who have made it in the SF and the Valley. So we’re delighted to announce two new speakers for the conference.
Andy McLoughlin
Partner
SoftTech VC
Andy is a Partner with SoftTech VC, one of Silicon Valley’s most active seed-stage venture capital firms where he primarily invests in SaaS, vertical industry solutions, and developer tools.
Prior to joining SoftTech, Andy was co-founder of London-headquartered Huddle, an enterprise SaaS collaboration platform that was acquired in 2017. Andy’s angel investment portfolio includes innovative B2B products like Pipedrive, Intercom, Apiary (acquired by Oracle), Buffer and Bugsnag, as well as consumer services including Postmates, Secret Escapes, HER, and Calm.
Andy co-founded and is the US Trustee for the Founders Pledge, a charity that promotes altruism in early-stage entrepreneurs by enabling them to donate a percentage of personal proceeds following an exit. He was awarded an OBE in the 2015 Queen’s birthday honors list for services to the UK technology industry. Follow him on twitter @bandrew
Timo Rein
Co-founder/CEO
Pipedrive
Timo Rein, co-founder and CEO of Pipedrive an activity-based simple sales management tool that helps over 60,000 sales teams to get more organised and focused, has 15+ years of experience as a salesman, sales manager and software entrepreneur. Timo is passionate about sales tactics and has always had a knack for reading people.
As CEO, Timo is responsible for setting long-term product vision and business-critical strategy goals. While Pipedrive has grown to over 300 employees working from different locations in New York, Lisbon, London and Estonia, Timo is still closely involved in the hiring process of new people and helps to find the best possible professional and personal fit between the new employee, the job or the rest of the team.
Prior to founding Pipedrive Timo worked for eleven years as one of the three partners at Vain & Partners, a sales consulting and training company with clientele like PwC, Coca Cola and Nissan. Timo’s goal was to create programs that would help different companies and people sell more, and manage better. Timo worked with about 30-40 companies, and 500 people each year to figure out ways to better sales results in different industries.
Timo also considers selling books door-to-door for 3 months in 2000 (in California, US) with Southwestern Comp, crucial to his sales experience that was eventually put to use as the architecture of Pipedrive. He was in top 1% performers among 4,000 sales people and while he never thought he was the type of person who could sell, he pulled off 14-hour-long days, 6 days a week, and 12 weeks in a row.
Timo’s first full-time job as a university student was a recruiter when he worked for four years interviewing people applying for managerial and specialist positions in different companies. Timo studied psychology at Tartu University and completed his BA studies in 1999.
Disrupt Berlin 2017 takes place December 4-5 at the historic Arena Berlin in the heart of Berlin, Germany.
Get your Disrupt tickets ASAP or rather right now to save 30% off of your tickets. You’ll see the Startup Battlefield competition, in which a handful of startups pitch our judges with the hopes of winning the coveted Disrupt Cup and a massive cash prize.
And you’ll get to chat with representatives from scores of promising startups in Startup Alley, see amazing on stage content, and unwind after a long day at the show with a cocktail and some new friends at the Disrupt After Party.
Are you a startup? The Startup Alley Exhibitor Package is your best bet to get the greatest exposure by exhibiting your company or product directly on the Disrupt Berlin show floor and if you get your exhibitor package before this Friday 29 September you’ll get an additional general admission ticket! Check it out .

Sentiment rank: 0.8

© Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/10/softtechs-mcloughlin-and-pipedrives-rein-join-techcrunch-disrupt-berlin/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29
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