Kiran Upadhyay

By now everyone has heard of Google’s RankBrain, the new artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm that is supposed to be the latest and greatest from Mountain View, Calif. What many of you might not realize, however, is just how fast the SEO industry is changing because of it. In this article, I’ll take you through some clear examples of how some of the old rules of SEO no longer apply, and what steps you can take to stay ahead of the curve in order to continue to provide successful SEO campaigns for your businesses. So what is artificial intelligence? There are generally three different classifications of artificial intelligence: Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI): This is like AI for one particular thing (e.g. beating the world champion in chess). Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): This is when the AI can perform all things. Once an AI can perform like a human, we consider it AGI. Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): AI on a much higher level for all things ...

Over 30 million Americans have used an online dating service or mobile dating app, according to Pew Research Center. Yet Black online users face apparent bias: Data collected from 25 million OkCupid accounts demonstrated that when users rated their matches they penalized Black men and women. Bae :: Before Anyone Else, a mobile dating app created by Jordan Kunzika, Brian Gerrard and Justin Gerrard, hopes to make online dating a better experience for Black people. Bae founders cultivated their user base by going directly to the communities they believe need the app. They hosted an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) tour which consisted of parties and mixers where people who matched on Bae could meet in person. All attendees had to have Bae downloaded to participate. Within a few weeks of their April 2015 launch, they reached 17,000 downloads, and have grown over ten times since. Bae’s founders are from the community they are building for–an essential dimension of th...

Today was a huge day for Alphabet — the first day it finally broke out its “other bets” in its earnings report — and boy did the company not disappoint. The company smashed expectations on both ends, bringing in $21.3 billion in revenue and earnings of $8.67 per share. Analysts were expecting earnings of $8.09 on $20.8 billion in revenue. And with that, Alphabet became the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world — coming in at a market cap $558 billion after jumping about 8% after the company reported its fourth-quarter earnings, and passing Apple, which sits at a market cap of $535 billion. There weren’t any huge surprises on the earnings call that caused the stock to dip, but its ranking still depends on whether or not the company gives up those gains in extended trading. Either way this is a significant moment for the company and the technology market in general. Alphabet had a huge opportunity to finally pass Apple as the most valuable company in the world. T...

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and the engineers on the WebKit project today announced that they have teamed up to launch WebAssembly, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web. The web thrives on standards and, for better or worse, JavaScript is its programming language. Over the years, however, we’ve seen more and more efforts that allow developers to work around some of the limitations of JavaScript by building compilers that transpile code in other languages to JavaScript. Some of these projects focus on adding new features to the language (like Microsoft’s TypeScript) or speeding up JavaScript (like Mozilla’s asm.js project). Now, many of these projects are starting to come together in the form of WebAssmbly. The new format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++, with other languages to follow), where it is then executed inside the JavaScript engine. Instead of having to parse the full code, though,...

Next week at its F8 developer conference, Facebook will announce new ways for third parties to offer experiences through its Messenger app, according to multiple sources. Facebook hopes to make Messenger more useful, after seeing Asia’s chat apps WeChat and Line succeed as platforms that go beyond just texting with friends. At first, Facebook will focus on how third parties can build ways for content and information to flow through Messenger. Depending on the success of the early experiments, Facebook may then mull bringing more utilities to Messenger. While the Messenger platform is said to be a major part of F8 by all the sources, it’s unclear exactly what form the third-party integrations will take. Considering what WeChat and Line have done, there are plenty of opportunities including ways for businesses to communicate or share content directly with users, or options for richer friend-to-friend content sharing. The platform is likely to start slow, with Facebook working wi...

According to multiple local outlets, WordPress blogs are currently not accessible in Pakistan and pointing the blockage at the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA). TechCrunch has not been able to confirm that yet. As it stands right now, WordPress.com and blogs hosted by WordPress cannot be reached. Self-hosted WordPress blogs still work. The error above is currently displayed when attempting to access a WordPress site in Pakistan. The Pakistan government has a history of temporarily blocking websites including Facebook, Flickr, IMDb, Twitter and Wikipedia. Other times, the government reportedly stated a ban will be temporary, but as is the case with YouTube, the ban is ongoing. The government states these sites, and many others, host content that it sees as blasphemous and inflammatory. Several local news outlets cite sources in the PTA that state the ban will be temporary and could be lifted within several days. TechCrunch has reached out to several companies includin...

Stayzilla, an India-based service that combines regular hotel bookings with short-term, Airbnb-style rentals, has announced a $20 million Series B round to grow its business. The round, details of which leaked last week, was led by Nexus Venture Partners and existing investor Matrix Partners. Stayzilla, which was founded in 2010, nabbed an undisclosed Series A round in October 2013 having closed a $500,000 seed-round in 2012. Stayzilla is an interesting beast. The overall focus is on letting users book accommodation across India for a stay of up to one month. The startup — which makes money via a varying rate of commission on each booking — initially went after traditional stays, such as hotels and guest houses, but hit a growth spurt when it eased up on how it managed ‘alternative’ accommodation selection — principally peer-to-peer rentals and homestays. Stayzilla CEO and co-founder Yogendra Vasupal told TechCrunch that the service had around 22,000 rooms — 36 percent of whic...

Facebook’s Internet.org project to provide basic mobile Internet services for free just took its biggest step to date after it launched in India. The service, which is run by Internet.org with input from a number of telecom industry partners, has thus far been available in a handful of African countries and Colombia, but now it is making its way to India’s billion-plus population. The app isn’t available to the full Indian population yet, since Facebook partnered with operator Reliance to offer free access to Internet.org sites in an initial six states: Tamil Nadu, Mahararashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Kerala, and Telangana. That’s the first step on a path to “provide Internet access to more than a billion people in India who aren’t yet connected,” Facebook said in a statement. “Most” of the services on Internet.org are available in English and six local languages — Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati and Marathi — and they can be accessed via the dedicated Android app...

Prezi’s online presentation software already offers a popular alternative to creating otherwise tedious and visually uninspiring PowerPoint presentations, but now it seems the startup wants in on the consumer ‘video’ sharing trend. Taking the same dynamic zooming tech used to spruce up Prezi presentations, the company has created a new app called Nutshell. Simply put, the iOS app lets you take three photos in succession, overlay text and graphics, and turn the result into a short ‘movie’ sequence. Essentially, it’s a way of injecting motion into photos taken on your phone. Or, perhaps, another way to think of it is the ‘Ken Burns effect’ — zooming and panning — that we’ve all become accustomed to in apps like Apple’s iPhoto, but taken up a couple of notches. In fact, Prezi says the idea for Nutshell came about after the startup realised that people were using Prezi’s “zoom-able presentation canvas” for sharing events like birthdays, road trips, and even marriage proposals, appar...

Facebook has a acquired QuickFire Networks, a TC Disrupt 2014 Battlefield contestant that built a custom hardware and software platform for reducing video file sizes and upload times. The Wall Street Journal got the news earlier today, with confirmation later arriving on QuickFire’s site. QuickFire’s tech speeds up encoding videos with different profiles for frame rate, resolution, color and audio settings for different platforms. QuickFire’s solution relied on custom motherboards built to accommodate 11 high-end Intel Core i7 processors. Custom software let these processors work in unison, and a layer on top of that let the startup massively scale up by distributing work among multiple motherboards. For users, the end result of Facebook integrating QuickFire’s tech would be reduced buffering of videos without degradation in quality. According to a letter announcing the acquisition on QuickFire’s site from CEO Craig Lee, the company will wind down its prior business operations...

The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr once observed that “prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Particularly in the ever-changing world of technology, today’s bold prediction is liable to prove tomorrow’s historical artifact. But thinking ahead about wide-ranging technology and market trends is a useful exercise for those of us engaged in the business of partnering with entrepreneurs and executives that are building the next great company. Moreover, let’s face it: gazing into the crystal ball is a time-honored, end-of-year parlor game. And it’s fun. So in the spirit of the season, I have identified five big data themes to watch in 2015. As a marketing term or industry description, big data is so omnipresent these days that it doesn’t mean much. But it is pretty clear that we are at a tipping point. The global scale of the Internet, the ubiquity of mobile devices, the ever-declining costs of cloud computing and storage, and an increasingly networked ...

China may be the ‘home’ of global internet censorship, as recent issues accessing Gmail from the country proved, but India seems to be doing its best to rival its neighbor. Today it emerged that the Indian government has asked internet service providers and mobile operators to block access to 32 sites in the name of its censorship laws GitHub, Archive.org, Imgur, Vimeo, Daily Motion and Pastebin are some of the more familiar names included on the list, a key excerpt of which was made public by Pranesh Pakesh, a director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. Read More

In Mark Zuckerberg’s second public Q&A currently being livestreamed, Zuckerberg discussed how Facebook won’t add a dislike button but wants to give more nuance to how people share emotions and reactions other than approval, and explained how he doesn’t think connecting with friends is a waste of time. The 30-year old CEO, clad in his gray t-shirt uniform, said Facebook changes its privacy policy as infrequently as possible while keeping up with its new technologies. The company is working on oversight of experimentation and user testing around emotion and sensitive communities. And while Facebook gets flack for making us less connected in real-life, Zuckerberg said the product’s goal it to let us blow past Dunbar’s Number and maintain relationships with more people. Zuck’s first public Q&A last month saw him tackle some of Facebook’s toughest questions and criticisms head on. The CEO explained that Facebook split off Messenger from its main app and forced people to downl...

 Yet the news cruised by with analysis focused simply on what Facebook’s new keyword post search does today. Yes, any post by you or any of your friends can now be dug up with a quick search from mobile. But I don’t think people realize how big a deal it is for tomorrow. Facebook just went from data rich to Scrooge-McDuck-swimming-in-a-tower-full-of data rich. The ramifications for advertising, developers, and Facebook itself are tough to fathom. Our most vivid doppelgänger, our digital echoes can now be tracked. They don’t just say who we were, but where we’re headed, and what we’ll want next. First, the trillion post index gives us group memory.Each person can only search stories from their friends and surrounding network, but Mark Zuckerberg recently said those all add up to over 1 trillion posts. If your friends put their lives on Facebook, you can now remember them too. You could say these are just faded snapshots, nowhere near the real thing, but how much of our own l...

Twitter’s not the only one Facebook is battling for control of news and content distribution. With Pages getting quieted down in the feed, Facebook wants to make its home for businesses less like a newspaper that come to you and more like TV channels you turn on. That’s why it’s YouTube that’s getting flattered by the social network with a new design for the Video section of Facebook Pages. All businesses will soon be able to choose a featured video to be displayed extra-large with a live comment feed atop their Page, and cobble together playlists of more of their videos. This makes the Videos tabs of Pages look and feel a lot like YouTube Channels. TechCrunch spotted the new design and features on ABC News’ Page, and the company confirms it testing the format with a handful of Pages, and plans to roll it out to them all in the coming weeks. Facebook’s video product changes come alongside pushes on the monetization front. It just struck a deal with the NFL to show football game...

GameAnalytics, a free analytics platform for games developers, has leveled-up its funding. The Copenhagen-headquartered startup, which also has a sales office in London and a development hub in Berlin, has closed a $5.5 million Series A round. The new funding comes from previous backers — Sunstone Capital, CrunchFund (Disclaimer: TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington is a Partner), Jimmy Maymann (CEO, Huffington Post) and René Rechmann (President, Maker Studio) — alongside new investor, Beta Angels, and the company’s newly-recruited management team. It brings the total raised by GameAnalytics to $8 million. Those changes in the startup’s management sees the recruitment of a new CEO, and a number of other executive hires. Replacing co-founder Morten Wulff in the top job is former Managing Director of Aol, Luke Aviet. Meanwhile, another ex-Aol employee, Nick Roveta, who held the role of Head of Product and Partnerships at the U.S. tech/media company (and owner of TechCrunch), becomes G...

stonian startup Taxify is one of a number of taxi apps aiming to help traditional taxi firms and drivers fight back against behemoth Uber and its ilk. It does this by providing an iOS, Android and mobile web app that lets you order a cab online. This helps to bring the same convenience of Uber et al. to the licensed ‘taxi’ industry, helping it compete via technology instead of merely lobbying regulators or protesting loudly, Ubergeddon-style. Today the company has picked up an additional €1.4 million in funding, adding to the previous €100,000 raised — money it will use to consolidate what it claims is a leading position in Eastern Europe, and for further European expansion. Specifically, Taxify is active in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland, and I’m told is eyeing up four more countries in the near future, including Netherlands. Of the 53 countries Uber is present in, Finland and the Netherlands can be counted. However, my understanding is that it has also registered entiti...

It’s time to gather all your startup family and watch the epic annual First Round Capital holiday parody video once again. In this 7th annual creation, we find partners twirling around in ballet attire and telling us, “we’re taking off, taking off,” Taylor Swift-like. Parodies of Pharrell’s Happy, Gurley, Sam Smith and Meghan Trainor weave in (“cuz it’s all about burn rate. Bout burn rate, slow spending”), one after the other, whilst startup employees dance around with their own themed contributions. First Round is known for its holiday parody videos. Last year’s ritual included a nod to Cowboy Ventures Aileen Lee’s coining of the term “Unicorns” and Miley Cyrus’ ‘Wrecking Ball.’ Brief mentions of Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and taking a selfie show up in this one, along with market bubble confessions sung to the same rythm as Trainor’s ‘All About That Bass’: I see the industry fearing a bubble pop We don’t build for hype We know it’s gotta stop If you make users happy and ...

Over the past few years, technology has given educators and the parents of autistic children tools they could never have imagined before. Mobile apps and games help kids learn communication skills, while virtual reality can potentially teach them how to cope in different social situations. Many of these tools are created by independent developers, but as autism diagnoses increase, large companies have also begun focusing on the neurodevelopmental disorder. The latest tech company to come out with an autism tool is Samsung, which just released Look At Me, an Android app that it claims can help kids learn how to better maintain eye contact, something that many people with autism have difficulty doing. The app’s launch comes a few weeks after Google and advocacy group Autism Speaks announced MSSNG , a project seeking to develop the world’s largest database of sequenced genomic information from people with autism spectrum disorder and their families, which will be stored on Google Cl...

If you’ve got more time than money and have a startup idea that you think you have the skills to build, a new partnership between Amazon Web Services and online education portal edX will hook you up with $1,000 in credit for completing one of two courses on entrepreneurship. Unless you’ve already taken some classes on building a startup, you’re not going to be able to completely BS your way through MITx’s Entrepreneurship 101 or 102 on edX. You actually have to pass the course, so expect to put at least tens of hours into the class. But once you make your way through the coursework, you automatically receive $1,000 in credit to spend on processor time and/or storage in Amazon’s cloud. You also get a few more bonuses meant for those more comfortable with code than administrating infrastructure, including credit for instructor-led training and web classes on using AWS, free support at Amazon’s premium tier, and “office hours” with Amazon specialists who can help figure out how to ...