Leveraging post-literate tools like YouTube and emojis to create a website and mobile app that allows people to review the books they’re reading while they’re..
Leveraging post-literate tools like YouTube and emojis to create a website and mobile app that allows people to review the books they’re reading while they’re reading them, Beek is a startup that embraces the amazing contradictions of the internet age.
The Mexico City-based company, graduating from the most recent batch of YCombinator, began as a hackathon project in Austin, Texas, where co-founder Pamela Valdes was studying at the University of Texas.
It was at the AngelHack hackathon that Valdes met her partner, Max Holzeu, a Guatemalan immigrant and coder who was working at a web studio in the city.
“Austin is like San Francisco in terms of its culture, but it’s much cheaper,” said Holzeu.
As the only person at the hackathon who didn’t know how to code, Val des said that she was shunned by most of the developers, but Holzeu was intrigued (and maybe a little piteous) of the brave woman who came with an idea but no technical chops, and agreed to work with her on the project.
The initial idea for the company actually pre-dated the hackathon, where Valdes had gone to rustle up some talent to help her build a minimum viable product. The idea came from a class that Valdes had talked her way into with the famous venture investor Robert Metcalfe, a professor on the faculty of the UT Austin.
“I didn’t have a product before I had the class with Bob,” Valdes recalls. “I had the idea with 10,000 followers on Facebook when it started. I did a lot of sketches and mockups on the design.”
By the end of the class, when she had met Holzeu, Valdes knew she had a business and convinced Max to return to Mexico City with her to get the idea off the ground.
The key to Beek’s simple success is its ease of use. A user can download the app, sign in through an integration with Facebook, or Twitter, or by generating an email and password.
Once in the app, a user can either browse through book titles or genres that are automatically populated or import a reading list from GoodReads. This user had a hard time getting the integration with GoodReads to work and wound up giving up on the process after waiting about a minute for the integration to occur.
Under the genre heading (with categories like “Teen”, “LGBT”, “Dystopias”, and “Fantasy”) users get pre-populated book suggestions as well as clips from famous BookTubers (YouTube reviewers who film book reviews).
In Mexico, where BookTubing (creating book reviews on YouTube) is a thing with its own conference , Beek has been racking up the hits.
Ideally, future integrations would include getting access to booklists in an Amazon, iBooks, or Google’s Play Books accounts.
Already the company has about 250,000 monthly active users, who have reviewed roughly 200,000 and according to the founders, the company is only just getting started.
Because Beek has loftier goals than simply being a book review site. Like Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, Valdes and her partner see books as a gateway to an expanding number of markets.
Ultimately, the company wants to be the user-generated source for online reviews across Latin America.
“Amazon is not really popular in Latin America,” says Valdes. “There’s a huge opportunity in becoming the trusted review site for people and then using that platform to sell products.”
A vision like that could turn this simple book review site, into a next-generation e-commerce juggernaut.

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New York City has slapped Verizon with a lawsuit that claims the telecommunications conglomerate broke a 2008 contract to provide citywide fiber coverage,..
New York City has slapped Verizon with a lawsuit that claims the telecommunications conglomerate broke a 2008 contract to provide citywide fiber coverage, depriving residents of competitively priced options for better television and Internet service.
In a statement , New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “Verizon must face the consequences for breaking the trust of 8.5 million New Yorkers. Verizon promised that every household in the city would have access to its fiber-optic FiOS service by 2014. It’s 2017 and we’re done waiting. No corporation—no matter how large or powerful—can break a promise to New Yorkers and get away with it.”
Verizon claims it is already capable of providing FiOS service to 2.2 million households in New York City. According to Ars Technica , however, this means that almost one million New York City households still do not have access to Verizon’s fiber network, since it has 3.1 million households.
In its complaint, which was filed in New York Supreme Court on Monday, New York City says that the agreement called for Verizon “to install fiber optic cable—in underground conduit, along above-group utility poles, or otherwise—in front of (or behind) each residential building” by 2014.
The city alleges that Verizon not only did not fulfill that agreement, but also “failed in many instances—believed to number at least in the tens of thousands—to timely complete installations as requested by potential subscribers, leaving such New Yorkers without the desired television service. Indeed, Verizon has failed even to accept many New Yorkers’ requests for FiOS service, although [its agreement with the city] requires it to do so.”
Not only does this inconvenience consumers, but Verizon “undermined one of the central goals of making FiOS available to every resident in the City: to expand New Yorkers’ options for receiving cable television service and thereby to create competition that would constrain prices and enhance quality,” the complaint continued.
In a letter to Anne Roest , the commissioner of the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Verizon hit back. The company said it had understood the agreement to mean that it would lay its fiber-optic network along the same route previously used for its copper line, and that the city’s interpretation was impractical.
“Digging up City streets and sidewalks on the scale that you are demanding would cause enormous and unnecessary disruptions to vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and would impose immeasurable inconvenience and hardship on countless residents and businesses,” claimed Craig Silliman, Verizon’s executive vice president of public policy and general counsel.
The dispute dates back to 2015, when New York City released an audit of Verizon’s fiber coverage .
Disclosure: TechCrunch is a property of AOL, a Verizon company.

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The Nginx Plus R12 server can be programmed using NginScript, a JavaScript-based tool
Nginx has upgraded its web server and load balancer to take advantage of its JavaScript implementation.
The company on Tuesday debuts Nginx Plus R12, the commercially supported version of its technology. This release moves NginScript, a JavaScript-based programming tool , to general availability for production use. Developers can choose NginScript for traffic handling, via a familiar JavaScript syntax. The code can be embedded in Nginx Plus for actions on HTTP, TCP, and UDP traffic.
“JavaScript programmers can actually do the same thing you can do in Lua,” which has been used for programming the Nginx server, said Chris Lippi, vice president of products for Nginx. JavaScript is more pervasive than Lua, so users get an expanded programming talent base to choose from for hiring purposes.
NginScript in Nginx Plus 12 features enhancements for ECMAScript 6 math methods and constants, as well as additional string methods. Nginx co-founder Igor Sysoev talked in late 2014 about the company’s JavaScript intentions ; with the R12 release, those ambitions come to fruition.
R12 also features configuration sharing via a sharing script for pushing configuration from a master Nginx Plus instance to peers. This process is used for backups and verifies the validity of the configuration on remote peer. Enhanced caching, meanwhile, is enabled via Stale-while-Revalidate and Stale-if Error cache extensions. Cache revalidation is done in the background to keep users from being delayed by a round trip to the original server.
To improve health checking, traffic can be delayed to new servers in a load-balancing pool until a health check passes. Servers are added via the API or DNS interfaces, and a slow-start capability enables servers to be gradually introduced to the pool. Nginix also offers greater visibility into application performance, including server response times, error codes for TCP/UPD services, and shared memory zone utilization. These metrics can be viewed via the server’s live activity monitoring dashboard, or they can be exported in JSON format into another monitoring tool.
When upgrading to R12, the on-disk cache will be invalid and Nginx Plus automatically refreshes the cache as needed; old cache entries are deleted. Also, connections to upstream servers can be queued if servers are overloaded; the queue directive must be placed after any load-balancing directives. Third-party dynamic modules installed from the Nginx repository will be automatically updated during the upgrade; any third-party modules users built will require manual updates.
More about Cache

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Microsoft, Google and others have spent enough on AI, but Peter Cochrane sees little evidence of it when it comes to email and search,Big Data and Analytics,Software ,Netscout-Collaboration,NetscoutCollaboration,email,Peter Cochrane,Artificial Intelligence,Google,Microsoft
Up to about a year ago my life was running reasonably smoothly, if frantic at times. Granted, it was getting somewhat faster year on year, but that’s more or less as it has been since the early 1990s….

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