Specializing in Computer Repair, Networking, Internet Solutions, Web Designing, Hybrid App Designing and Windows Operating systems.
Lauren Goode / Wired:
Virtual labs at WWDC and Microsoft Build lowered barriers to entry and for some felt more personal than live labs, but the conferences lacked communal elements — The end of WWDC marks the end of Big Tech's conference season. What did this virtual experiment reveal about the meaning of community?
Russell Flannery / Forbes:
Agora, which helps app developers embed real-time voice and video communication, closed up 153% in its Nasdaq debut, after raising $350M in its IPO at $20/share — Grocery chain Albertsons might have been the best-known IPO in the U.S. this week among American investors …
Robin Wauters / Tech.eu:
France-based startup ubble, which prompts users to capture a live video of their face and an official ID to verify identity, raises €10M seed round — A fledgling French identity verification tech startup that goes by the name of ubble has raised seed funding from Partech and Breega …
Theodore Schleifer / Vox:
Current and former employees at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative say Facebook's crises affect not only how the organization's employees feel, but what they do — Inside the unrest at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. — At an emotional company town hall last week that blew past its hour-long time limit …
Creative activities can be lots of fun, but many times “creativity” is a learning process, with lots of bumps along the way. Sometimes you have no idea what to make next, or you don’t know how to create it, so you get slowed down while you try to come up with a new plan.
At other times, no matter how many creative hobbies you try out, or how many creativity quotes you search for, you draw a blank for large periods of time. Once you hit this creative block, it’s hard to figure out what to do.
While such blocks are definitely frustrating, they are not insurmountable. In fact, lots of people suffer through creative “dead zones” from time to time, but emerge on the other side just fine.
To help you find your way through such a dilemma, we’ve put together the cheat sheet below. It contains a variety of tips to help you unlock your creativity and get your mental gears rolling again.
FREE DOWNLOAD: This cheat sheet is available as a downloadable PDF from our distribution partner, TradePub. You will have to complete a short form to access it for the first time only. Download the Unlocking Creativity Cheat Sheet.
| Idea | Task Tips |
|---|---|
| Spark Creativity With Learning | |
| Explore a subject you know nothing about. | Pick a podcast at random and listen to it. |
| Pick the first word that pops into your head. Read a book with that word in the title or as the subject. | |
| Use the Random article button on Wikipedia to learn about a brand new subject. | |
| Discover one new YouTube channel per week about a topic that interests you. | |
| Build on an area of expertise. | Complete an online mini-course related to your career or hobby. |
| Subscribe to a YouTube channel devoted to a skill you want to improve. | |
| Sign up for a newsletter based on a subject you would like to learn more about. | |
| Use a historical time period as inspiration. | If you're a writer, write a historical novel. |
| If you're an artist, draw a poster influenced by that time period. | |
| Google a year from history at random. See what information comes up about that year, and use it as inspiration for your next project. | |
| Let Everyday Objects and Activities Inspire You | |
| Find beauty in the ordinary. | Write a short story about a coffee shop you visit often. |
| Create an Instagram display featuring everyday items around your home. | |
| Walk through a part of your neighborhood that you've never been to before and snap pictures of your jaunt. | |
| Discover hidden secrets. | Design a treasure hunting map. |
| Play a mobile game where you have to hunt for treasure. | |
| Look for Easter eggs in apps and services you use. | |
| Learn different ways to solve a Rubik’s cube. | |
| Explore an urban environment. | Draw or paint a picture of an interesting building. |
| Write a story set in a city you've lived in or visited before. | |
| Pick a museum in your city. Go to that museum and explore every exhibit within it. | |
| Explore a rural environment. | Draw or paint a picture of the horizon. |
| Drive, bike, or walk to a nearby rural area. Take panoramic pictures of that landscape. | |
| Write a ghost story set in a small town or village you’ve visited. | |
| Go on a road trip. | Open Google Maps. Chart a drive, and complete that drive in a day. |
| Pick three national parks that you want to visit. Document your visit to each of them through photos and videos. | |
| Pick a campground that is no more than a day away. Drive there and camp out for the weekend. Capture the experience in a journal. | |
| Discover an unfamiliar part of the world. | Open Google Earth. Pick a random destination on the map, and zoom in on it. Explore that part of the map. |
| Go to the Google Tours main page, and find a tour on a subject that you would like to know more about. | |
| Use Google Tours to travel to a place you've never been to before. | |
| Find inspiration in nature. | Go for a walk in a park. |
| Watch one nature documentary per week through a streaming service of your choice. | |
| Pick any landscape formation (i.e. cliffs, forests, waterfalls) and explore all examples of it in your area. | |
| Listen to ambient rain sounds while you're working. | |
| Write a short story or a novella about a severe storm that you've experienced. | |
| If there's a thunderstorm approaching, turn off all music, TV, and radio stations. Listen to the sounds of that storm while you work. | |
| Forget About Speed, Perfection, and Monetization | |
| Just have fun! | Play a mobile game made for kids or a board game that you loved as a kid. |
| Start a sketchbook. Draw one thing in that sketchbook per day, until the sketchbook is full. | |
| What creative activity did five-year-old you love to do? Indulge in that activity now. | |
| Make a Pinterest board for a subject that interests you. | |
| Rearrange your phone/desktop screen with custom icons, so finding the app you need is easy and unique. | |
| Create a handful of cartoon avatars for yourself. | |
| Do nothing. | |
| Make creativity a habit. | Set aside one hour per day away from work, family, and friends. Spend that time working on a specific creative project. |
| Come up with a specific theme every month and base your creative activities on it. | |
| Use the Pomodoro method or the Don’t Break the Chain method to work on creative tasks. | |
| Build a LEGO castle brick by brick as you work through your project. | |
| Start your own version of Project 365. Take a photo, draw a sketch, write a poem, or do any such creative activity daily for 365 days. | |
| Go on an artist date i.e. a solo creative expedition every week. (The idea was popularized by Julia Cameron in the book The Artist’s Way.) | |
| Use a Bullet Journal to document your creative progress in a fun manner. | |
| Look for novelty and variety. | Read a book that’s on a friend’s reading list. |
| Watch a movie from a different genre every week. | |
| Discover a new artist using Spotify’s radio feature. | |
| Work on an unfamiliar activity. Build a one-page website. Create your own font. Design your dream home with a 3D modeling tool. | |
| Embrace mistakes. | Free write a short story. |
| Find an object that interests you. Instead of trying to take the "perfect shot," take 20 pictures of the same object. Pick your favorite. | |
| Pick a challenging project from your to-do list—the one you've been most afraid to start. Focus on finishing it, whatever its outcome. | |
| Imagine Your Idea on the Silver Screen | |
| Watch classic movies. | Pick one year from the past hundred years and watch three movies from that year. |
| Look for a list of "the best classic films" online. Watch three movies from that list. | |
| Pick a historical era that you enjoying seeing on screen. Watch a classic movie that was set in that era. | |
| Watch movies from a genre that inspires you. | Start a movie review blog. |
| Write your own movie script. | |
| Pick a year and a genre of movies. Watch three movies from that genre that were released in that year. | |
| Watch TV shows to learn how to craft a story. | Read a book on how to write a TV script. |
| Watch TV shows about TV shows. | |
| Write a review of a TV show to visualize what you liked about the story and what you didn’t. Apply those lessons to your own story. | |
| Sharpen Your Problem-Solving Skills | |
| Find an innovative way to solve a problem. | Play a puzzle game. |
| Look at a historical, well-documented problem. Ask yourself "how would I react to this problem, if I was faced with it?" | |
| Brainstorm solutions for a tricky problem listed on Quora or Reddit. | |
| Listen to other innovative thinkers. | Watch one TED Talk per week. |
| Watch a Netflix documentary about an innovative historical figure. | |
| Watch documentaries about current events and issues, to see how people are trying to solve problems right now. | |
| Break down a problem into smaller parts. | List 10 creative goals that you want to complete. Pick your top three goals from that list and work on them. |
| Define a problem in one word on a whiteboard. Whenever you think of a solution, write that down next to the initial word. | |
| Start with a keyword and create a word bubble using free association. Mix and match words in the bubble to spark an idea or a solution. | |
| Reward Yourself for a Job Well Done | |
| Celebrate your success in simple ways. | Buy a new game, book, or some other form of creative media once you've reached a major creative goal. |
| Buy a candy jar. Put it on your desk. When you finish a milestone task associated with your creative project, give yourself a treat. | |
| Find a drawing that you finished 5+ years ago. Redraw it with your current skill level and enjoy how far you've come. | |
After you’ve checked out the cheat sheet, explore these smartphone apps for breaking creative blocks. We also recommend reading up on creative hobbies that will make you a happier person to find personal fulfillment through the arts.
Image Credit: Jess Bailey on Unsplash
Read the full article: Unlocking Creativity: Simple Tips to Beat Mental Slumps
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.
This week, we’re looking at the highlights from Apple’s first-ever virtual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and what its announcements mean for app developers. Plus, there’s news of the U.S. antitrust investigation into Apple’s business, a revamp of the App Store review process, and more. In other app news, both Instagram and YouTube are responding to the TikTok threat, while Snapchat is adding new free tools to its SDK to woo app developers. Amazon also this week entered the no-code app development space with Honeycode.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple held its WWDC developer event online for the first time due to the pandemic. The format, in some ways, worked better — the keynote presentations ran smoother, packed in more content, and you could take in the information without the distractions of applause and cheers. (If you were missing the music, there was a playlist.)
Of course, the virtual event lacked the real-world networking and learning opportunities of the in-person conference. Better online forums and virtual labs didn’t solve that problem. In fact, given there aren’t time constraints on a virtual event, some might argue it would make sense to do hands-on labs in week two instead of alongside all the sessions and keynotes. This could give developers more time to process the info and write some code.
Among the bigger takeaways from WWDC20 — besides the obvious changes to the Mac and the introduction of “Apple silicon” — there was the introduction of the refreshed UI in iOS 14 that adds widgets, an App Library and more Siri smarts; plus the debut of Apple’s own mini-apps, in the form of App Clips; and the ability to run iOS apps on Apple Silicon Macs — in fact, iOS apps will run there by default unless developers uncheck a box.
Let’s dig in.
Dr. Ian Cutress / AnandTech:
A look at AMD's 25x20 project, which it started in 2014 to improve overall “Performance Efficiency” 25x by 2020, and what its success means in the long run — One of the stories bubbling away in the background of the industry is the AMD self-imposed ‘25x20’ goal.
Adriana Lee / WWD:
Tech is transforming the fitting room, where companies like True Fit, which claims 2M+ new users per week since March, use AI to predict shopper fit remotely — Virtual fitting rooms gain new attention, as stores reopen without dressing rooms. — The fitting room's move from physical to digital …
“We have the greatest testing program anywhere in the world,” US President Donald Trump told reporters on June 23. “We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases.” Trump went on to say the US had done 25 million tests—far more than the couple of million that “even large countries” had done elswehere.
Let’s start with what he got right: as of June 23 the US had successfully run 27,553,581 covid-19 tests (meaning tests that look for the presence of the virus, to determine whether someone is currently infected or not). So he’s more or less in the ballpark there. And current sources suggest that, yes, the US has carried out more tests than any other country.
But the US testing program can’t be considered “best in the world.” The US has run 83.24 tests per thousand individuals, according to numbers from Our World in Data. By comparison, Russia, which is also being hit hard by the virus, has run 120.07 tests per thousand people.
And the US is currently testing about 500,000 people per day, far behind the 5-million-a-day mark that Trump said the country was closing in on in late April. That is not necessarily because it can’t test more people: the country’s testing capacity has significantly improved since the pandemic began. Still, a Washington Post survey of about 20 states last month found the country was running at least 235,000 fewer tests a day than it could have run. While places with spikes in infections—like Arizona—are facing shortages, large swaths of the country are actually reporting underutilized availability.
On the one hand, this could mean we can immediately test more people—we just have to get the word out. But on the other hand, that greater capacity also presents an opportunity to rethink the role of testing during a pandemic as we seek to reopen the economy. Finding new infections is not the only way to use this untapped reservoir.
Most health experts will tell you that testing is vital in controlling the pandemic. On a personal level, testing can tell you whether you’re infected, regardless of whether you’re showing symptoms. If you test positive, you can isolate yourself to protect others, and contact tracers can try to find people you may have exposed, to isolate them as well. Testing can also tell us where new infections are popping up, so authorities can limit the scope of the outbreak and warn neighboring communities that might be hit next. If we don’t have enough testing, we can’t do any of these things well, and that lets the virus spread faster.
Another issue: the jury is still out on exactly how much asymptomatic cases contribute to transmission of covid-19. But if it turns out asymptomatic transmission is a major problem, “we’re only going to get ahead of this if we’re able to identify people who don’t know they’re infected,” says Ann Kiessling, the director of the Bedford Research Foundation, a lab in Massachusetts. “They’re the ones who are going to infect you tomorrow.”
So how much testing should the US really be doing? American public health experts have never agreed. The economist Paul Romer has said we need to be doing 30 million tests a day. A model developed by the Safra Center at Harvard called for 10 million tests a day.
Ashish Jha, the director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, and his colleagues came up with a much more modest number for what’s acceptable: 900,000 a day. Their model begins with the idea that everyone with even mild symptoms of influenza-like illness should be tested. Jha’s best guess at the moment is that there are probably about 100,000 new cases of covid-19 throughout the country every day. Assuming that perhaps about 20% of those people won’t show symptoms, then that’s 80,000 who need to be tested. Plus, each positive case is estimated to have about 10 contacts who ought to be identified and tested. Plug in a host of other variables (like the rate of new infections and the impact of reopenings), and you get a minimum of 900,000 tests a day.
“I would take 30 million tests if we had it,” says Jha. “I think 3 to 5 million would be great—I think that’s an ideal range. But 900,000, we think, is a minimum we need to aim for.”
So why isn’t the US isn’t meeting this number? In the early stages of the pandemic, the system simply couldn’t meet the demand. People who did not have clear symptoms of a moderate or severe infection were often turned away from testing. By the end of April, the country was still running under 300,000 tests a day, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Nowadays larger labs around the country have acquired more equipment and resources necessary to run many more covid diagnostic tests, and many smaller labs have pivoted to focus entirely on covid testing. And yet, as the Washington Post found, a state like Utah is running only a third of the 9,000 tests it could run every day. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has admitted that the state could test 100,000 people a day but is using only 40% of that capacity. The Boston Globe reported a few weeks ago that Massachusetts had the potential to process 30,000 tests a day but was averaging less than one-third of that. Thousands of tests in Oregon, Los Angeles, Texas, and elsewhere go unused every day. The US could immediately do hundreds of thousands more tests if so inclined. So why isn’t it?
“We’re still operating on the mindset of a testing scarcity,” says Jha. Though capacity has improved, he notes, most states either haven’t eased up restrictions against testing people with mild or no symptoms, or haven’t encouraged more of those people to seek testing. Instead, many communities have simply elected to open their economies back up—even New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic in North America. The US is now seeing a surge of new cases.
Not every health expert is gung-ho about mass testing. Michael Hochman, a physician at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, thinks we could get by with the current level of 500,000 a day. He wrote an op-ed in Stat last month arguing that there are some downsides to mass testing, including the cost, the potential for infection to spread at testing sites themselves, and the concerning prospect of false negatives. He would prefer to limit testing to the symptomatic, and instead have communities maintain a greater focus on simpler day-to-day habits like social distancing, wearing face masks, washing hands frequently, and keeping surfaces clean. Places that have managed the virus well, like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Iceland, and Hong Kong, have had successful testing programs, but he thinks the reason they’re now able to open up their economies more widely has more to do with how they made face masks the norm.
Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, says we certainly need more testing, but he adds that viral testing is most important at the beginning of a pandemic, when cases are spiking and it’s critical to find and isolate those who are infected. Later on, he says, “we don’t necessarily want to be testing everyone if viral presence is low.” That’s when serological testing, which looks for the presence of antibodies indicating a previous infection, can provide a better sense of how the epidemic is trending in a community in the long run and whether it’s safe to open things up again. Mina also suggests that the additional testing capacity will be more valuable in the fall, when an expected second wave of infections hits the US.
But even if you think current testing levels are fine for now, there’s an argument to be made that we’re wasting this untapped capacity if we just wait until the second wave hits.
Kiessling is one researcher who has seen how testing facilities are being underutilized. Every Tuesday for the last six weeks, the First Parish Unitarian Church in Bedford, Massachusetts, hosts a covid-19 testing clinic administered by her lab. As a local lab with a smaller operation, Kiessling believed she and her team at BRF would be able to return test results to people in under 48 hours, versus the 7 to 14 days many people around the country have been forced to wait.
Early on, the testing site was getting upwards of 100 people. Numbers have since decreased bit by bit. When I went, on June 16, only 30 people were registered, and a few didn’t even show up. At full capacity, the lab could be running 200 tests a day, but it rarely meets those limits these days.
Why have numbers plummeted so drastically? “We don’t really know why,” says Ryan Kiessling, BRF’s operations manager. “It seems to be fatigue.” That’s probably a pretty good theory. According to a Gallup poll this month, many Americans think the situation in the US is getting better. With more businesses and more recreation areas like beaches opening up again, people are more willing to let their guard down and abandon the wearying habits they’ve kept up for several months: they are increasingly resuming regular activities, and the number of Americans practicing isolation dropped from 75% to 58% in May. And that also means they may view testing with diminished importance. “People are just feeling really tired about anything that has to do with covid at this point,” he says. “They just want it to be over, even though it’s not.”
It’s easy to understand that people want to go back outside. It might also be easier to accept if we were taking advantage of all the testing capacity at our disposal. Ann Kiessling thinks we could test people regularly (at least every 14 days) to ensure they’re safe to go back to work or school, and get results fast enough to isolate them immediately if it turns out they’re infected.
This isn’t exactly a brand-new idea—many employers are already looking into mandatory regular testing for employees to open offices back up. But she wants to take this idea a step further, and use testing as a means to soften social distancing rules in certain situations.
For example, let’s say a school or day-care center wants to reopen. It’s going to be extremely difficult to maintain stringent social distancing in these types of settings. But one solution could be to mandate that all employees and all children enrolled be tested regularly (perhaps multiple times a week) and rigorously monitored for any potential symptoms. This could make it possible to safely open these places back up. And it could be accomplished with all the extra testing capacity sitting idle right now.
If done carefully, such a plan could work in offices too. Social distancing is very important to stopping the spread of the virus, and we don’t want to ease those requirements on a whim. But, says Kiessling, if you’re working with a small group of the same people, and your job doesn’t require you to interact face to face with strangers, regular testing might lower the level of risk to a point you and your coworkers find acceptable.
But the Massachusetts health department and the state’s local boards of health have not revised their guidelines to make testing part of the strategy for reopening businesses or schools. Kiessling says she’s brought it up quite a few times with state and local health officials, especially at the behest of several businesses that simply can’t operate under current social distancing requirements—to no avail. Officials simply seem uninterested in trying to expand the role of testing. “It’s stupid,” she says.
Rethinking how we use excess testing capacity might be a moot point in a few months anyway: when the weather gets colder, the virus is expected to hit hard again, and many areas could be overwhelmed as they were in March and April. The system could be pushed to its limits once more.
Jha suggests that if capacity becomes scarce again, we could stretch it out with strategies like pooling, in which test samples from multiple individuals are processed as a single assay: if it’s positive you have to go back and retest the samples one by one to see who’s infected, but if it comes out negative, you can rule out infection for many people all at once. Ultimately, though, he is concerned. “If we’re really stuck at testing numbers of around 400,000 to 500,000 a day,” he says, “it’s going to be very hard for us to do anything useful in terms of keeping this virus under control.”
Reuters:
US curbs on Chinese tech firms has led to an investment boom across China's semiconductor industry, prompting investors and analysts to warn of a looming bubble — SHANGHAI (Reuters) - U.S. curbs on Chinese tech firms amid the intensifying Sino-U.S. battle for tech supremacy are feeding …
Creative teams depend on the free and easy flow of ideas to collaborate and inspire new thoughts. When you have to work digitally, these free apps help foster creativity and brainstorm fresh ideas.
The most obvious starting point for creative brainstorming is to use a mind-mapping tool. This article won’t go into that because we’ve already reviewed the best free mind-mapping apps for single users or teams.
Instead, we’ll focus on tools that ease creative collaboration across a range of fields, like design, writing, music, and more.
Red Pen is the fastest and easiest way to collaborate on images, designs, and mockups. Create an account, upload an image, give it a name and description, and you’re ready to go. Click anywhere on the image to start a new comment. Then share the link with collaborators.
Anyone with the link can now see all the comments on it. You can mention other users in comments by adding @username. Press Ctrl+C to see all comments in a list form.
You can also create Projects, which are essentially folders in which you add as many images as you want. Red Pen offers unlimited images and unlimited collaborators.
The website has a scary “14-day trial” sign at all times, but don’t worry, Red Pen is still free after that time period. You will then be on the basic plan, which lets you upload single images (no projects) that last for 20 days before being auto-deleted. If you want projects and images that last forever, check out the plans that start at $5 per month.
Where do you go to find creative people looking to collaborate on your ideas? Try Dextra, a social network for painters, designers, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and all other types of artists to discover like-minded collaborators.
The first step is to create your own profile and add “dexes”, which is the social network’s term for your skills. Add as many as applicable, and choose your proficiency level in each. Based on these skills, Dextra will show you a feed of open projects by others looking for collaborators. It spans a variety of project fields; for example, if you’re a writer, you will see everything from blogging to writing film scripts.
You can also create your own project, fill in its details, and hope others sign up for it. The next step is for the collaborators to talk and see if they’re the right fit as a creative team. Once you tick all the boxes, add the project to your ongoing portfolio. Meanwhile, keep browsing other projects to find something cool to get your creative juices flowing.
Download: Dextra for Android | iOS (Free)
In simple terms, Chanty is a chat app like Slack, but with robust task management and to-do list features baked into it. The free version allows up to 10 people in one team and has everything you’d need from a chat app for collaboration.
Any line said in chat can be turned into a task. That task can then be reassigned to any team member. You can view all tasks in the handy “Tasks” room, and interact with each task to mark it as done, comment on it to create the task’s own discussion thread or delete it forever. Funnily, there’s no simple way to set a deadline for any task.
Apart from the tasks, Chanty does most of the things that any chat app like Slack would. You can create rooms, search through chat history, leave voice messages, share files (up to 20GB), integrate other apps, and talk like you would in any chat room.
Download: Chanty Desktop for Windows | macOS | Linux Deb | Linux RPM (Free)
Download: Chanty Mobile for Android | iOS (Free)
CryptPad is a privacy protecting alternative to Google Docs, Microsoft Office Online, and other online office suites. And while protecting privacy, it still allows for real-time collaboration between creative partners.
The suite includes rich text (like a word processor), presentation, spreadsheet, coding, kanban board, whiteboard, online polls, and cloud storage. Registered users get 1GB of free storage, and you’ll need to sign up to share files with others. However, those users don’t need a CryptPad account to open or download the files you send them.
The apps themselves look and behave like any office suite, so you’ll feel right at home while using them. In a nice move, CryptPad adds a chatroom to the apps, so apart from comments, you can actually chat with collaborators for a more free-wheeling discussion. It’s one feature you won’t find in Google Docs or Microsoft Office, and it could be a game-changer.
Stuck in a creative rut? Brainsparker’s free online cards help spark new ideas and provide creative inspiration. Use it by yourself or as a team to kickstart the brainstorming process.
It’s a cool but simple process. Once you find yourself stuck, open the card deck and play it. The animation cycles through all of Brainsparker’s cards at a fast pace. Pause or screenshot the video to find a card, and write or discuss all the thoughts that the card inspires. Use the best free screen-sharing apps to turn the card game into a collaborative experience with creative partners.
There are five free card packs on the website, as well as on the iPhone app: starter, vision, journal, kids, and kickstart. Each has its own set of inspirational ideas to change your perspective, like “challenge the viewer” or “trust your intuition” or “create a limitation” and so on. Go through the exercise a few times and you’re bound to break through your mental block.
Download: Brainsparker for iOS (Free)
If none of these apps are what you’re looking for, maybe you simply need a blank space where you and your collaborators can brainstorm. The internet has some free digital whiteboard alternatives you should check out.
Read the full article: 5 Free Apps for Creative People and Teams to Collaborate Digitally
Nitasha Tiku / Washington Post:
Tech companies often rely on their Black employees to help address their response to systemic racism, giving them more work without additional pay or time off — As Black Lives Matter protests captured national attention, tech companies have leaned heavily on black employee resource groups …
Reuters:
Lazada, Alibaba's SE Asian arm, named its third CEO in three years; sources say company's middling performance after losing ground to rival Shopee led to change — SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Southeast Asian e-commerce firm Lazada, a unit of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (BABA.N) …
New York Times:
For posts about voting, Facebook says it will attach labels that will direct users to accurate election and voting information on its Voter Information Center — Posts about voting will direct viewers to accurate information, and violations from important political figures will be marked “newsworthy.”
Newzoo:
Newzoo report: global games market to generate revenue of $159.3B in 2020, up 9.3% YoY, with Asia-Pacific region alone generating $78.4B — The following free report boasts high-level takeaways from our 2020 Global Games Market Report, featuring a detailed breakdown of the market in terms of revenue and gamer forecasts per segment.
Shoshana Wodinsky / Gizmodo:
Brands' ad boycott of Facebook has been uneven, with some continuing to funnel money into Instagram, and third-party apps via the Facebook Audience Network — Yesterday, Verizon became the latest company to join a corporate chorus boycotting Facebook advertisements in July as part …
Bloomberg:
Sources: DOJ has been meeting with developers to discuss Apple's rules that require apps to use its App Store payment system for subscriptions — - Developers complain they're locked in to Apple payment system — Apple inquiry progresses as DOJ poised to file Google lawsuit
Riya Bhattacharjee / CNBC:
Coca-Cola to pause paid ads on all social media platforms globally for at least 30 days to reassess its ad policies, but isn't joining the official boycott — - Coca Cola on Friday announced it will be pausing advertising on all social media globally. — The company clarified …
