Pavel Varenka Hardly a single day goes by without some curiosity happening in the technological world that rewrites previously known facts, or offers us a view of a given issue from a completely different perspective. The same is true of Netflix, which has decided to focus only on audio, and startup Astra, which has set out to compete with NASA and SpaceX. And as it seems, his journey is far from over, on the contrary. Even Facebook has not been sleeping for a long time, and after a long hiatus due to the US presidential election, it is again slowly and carefully making available political ads that can potentially influence the decisions and opinions of voters. Well, let's not delay and plunge into the whirlwind of events.
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Facebook and political ads strike again. The company wants to take advantage of the post-election drought
The US presidential election was seemingly successful, and even though the political "throne" fights continue to rage and will continue to rage for months, this does not mean that the public's attention will not turn elsewhere. And as it turns out, Facebook wants to make great use of this opportunity. In the inter-election period, the company turned off political ads, which could exponentially accelerate the spread of disinformation, as well as favor one side or the other. As a result, the tech giant has avoided a public lynching by citizens and politicians alike, and now the time has come for the media company to strike again. In Georgia, the second round of elections, the so-called "runoff election", is starting, when the final candidate has not yet been chosen, and it is the second round that is supposed to definitively confirm the dominance of one of the opponents.
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Although most of the company welcomed Facebook's decision to suspend political ads during such a crucial period, advertising agencies and partners were not so enthusiastic. The management, headed by Mark Zuckerberg, has therefore decided on a pretty Solomonic solution - it will publish tendentious posts, but slowly and carefully. Georgia, which was the last undecided bastion in the first round of the election, is supposed to be the first swallow. The state will thus serve as a perfect testing ground for similar experiments, and if everything goes well and there is no big wave of resentment, Facebook will gradually introduce the system back into play in other states and regions as well.
SpaceX and NASA have a new competitor. The Astra startup is backed by former employees
When it comes to the space race, a certain amount of competition is not only taking place on the interstate field, with different superpowers racing against each other, but also especially between individual American companies. So far, the two big players have been NASA, which needs no further introduction, and the space company SpaceX under the baton of the visionary Elon Musk. However, as is often the case in lucrative industries, other companies also want to take their piece of the pie. And one of them is Astra, a promising startup, about which not much was known until now and it was more of a secretive matter. However, the company gained media attention after the successful launch of two rockets, which were supposed to clearly prove that they are no newcomers.
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While the first flight ended in relative fiasco, when the rocket, simply named Rocket 3.1, failed in mid-altitude flight and exploded near the launch pad, the second follow-up flight exceeded all expectations. However, this is far from the last word of this promising startup. As a third of all good things, he is soon to send a third device into orbit, significantly cheaper than his competition. After all, founder and CEO Chris Kemp served quite a few years as the chief technical officer for NASA, and his staff are no slouch either. Many of them moved to Astra from NASA and SpaceX, so it looks like we definitely have something to look forward to.
A quick video recap of our 8.5-minute flight to space today! pic.twitter.com/gvElF4fbAZ
— Astra (@Astra) December 16, 2020
Netflix without video? This feature is also expected to be available soon
If you actively use the streaming platform Netflix, then you must have noticed that you can, for example, browse the web on your smartphone and watch your favorite TV show in the window at the same time. After all, a number of other companies offer a similar feature, and it's nothing special or new. But what if you could play only audio without video and enjoy something like a podcast? Spotify, for example, offers similar functionality, and as it turns out, users are quite grateful for it. It is not always possible to pay attention exclusively to what is happening on the screen, and many people simply let the series sit in the background.
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Also for this reason, Netflix rushed with a similar function that allows you to turn on any program without necessarily having to tolerate playback in a window. In practice, this is a relatively simple but highly effective trick, where you just click off the video and simply let Netflix run in the background while you can do other things, or move outside for example. Not all series are based exclusively on the visual side, and the non-invasive audio mode could popularize this option even among people who prefer to play the series as a background. In any case, the feature is slowly starting to roll out among subscribers and can be expected to make its way to us in the coming weeks.
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Amaya Toman 