Month: September 2016

(credit: Marco Paköeningrat Follow)

On Friday, Facebook took to its official blog to confirm and respond to a Wall Street Journal report. In the blog post, the company acknowledged that one of Facebook's most crucial metrics for measuring video-view performance had been wildly inflated.

The blog post, from Facebook VP of marketing David Fischer, spells out exactly what the company did wrong. Its advertising-dashboard measure of "average duration of video viewed" was apparently based on questionable math. To get that count, the "total time spent watching a video" was only divided by the number of people who have seen at least three seconds of the video rather than everyone who watched the video.

Fischer writes:

Enlarge / It's exactly like this. Exactly.

Last night brought revelations that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey is funding an odd political group that produces anti-Clinton memes to spread online. Today, a handful of smaller developers have publicly announced that they're dropping Oculus support from their current and upcoming games.

"Hey Oculus, Palmer Luckey's actions are unacceptable," writes Tomorrow Today Labs, a company working on VR physics middleware and an unannounced VR game. "NewtonVR will not be supporting the Oculus Touch as long as he is employed there."

Newcomer indie developer Scruta Games, which is currently working on a number of VR titles, echoed the same sentiment. "Until Palmer Luckey steps down from his position at Oculus, we will be cancelling Oculus support for our games," the company tweeted.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Barcroft)

The greedy, price-hiking ways of Turing, Mylan, Valent, and countless others are breaking out like blemishes across the face of the pharmaceutical industry. So it may come as no surprise that a simple acne cream, called Aloquin, saw its price hit a whopping $9,561 (£7,400) last week.

The 60g tube of zit-zapping topical previously cost just $241.50—but that was months ago, before Chicago-based Novum Pharma bought the medication from Primus Pharmaceuticals in May of 2015 and made no changes to the product at all. Since then, Novum hiked the price three times, reaching an increase of 3,900 percent.

Like many other drugs that have seen huge and sudden price hikes, Aloquin is old and cheap to make. It consists of two main ingredients: iodoquinol, a generic, longstanding antibiotic; and extracts from the aloe vera plant. As the Financial Times points out, a similar cream containing the iodoquinol costs less than $30, and aloe vera extracts are just a few dollars.

Enlarge (credit: Jawbone)

It has been nearly a year since Jawbone's most advanced tracker, the Up4, hit shelves, and the company doesn't seem to be doing well. According to a Business Insider report, Jawbone didn't pay its customer service partner NexRep, and Jawbone cut ties with the company shortly after.

The report cites an e-mail from a NexRep executive that says Jawbone is "struggling financially" and couldn't pay for the company's services. The abrupt termination affected 93 NexRep jobs, leading to some layoffs and others being reassigned to other clients. Jawbone cites "restructuring" of its customer service for the partnership change.

In addition to its financial issues, Jawbone's website is curiously out of most of its inventory. All of its fitness trackers, including the Up4, are listed as "sold out" and are unavailable for purchase. Another source familiar with the NexRep-Jawbone relationship claims in the report that Jawbone shipments have slowed in the past few weeks and have nearly come to a halt. Because of this, NexRep employees assigned to Jawbone couldn't fill replacement orders that came in from complaining customers.

Enlarge (credit: Google Fiber)

AT&T has sued Nashville to stop a new ordinance designed to accelerate the deployment of Google Fiber.

The lawsuit (PDF) was filed in US District Court in Nashville yesterday, only two days after the Nashville Metro Council passed a “One Touch Make Ready” rule that gives new ISPs faster access to utility poles. The ordinance lets a single company make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself, instead of having to wait for incumbent providers like AT&T and Comcast to send work crews to move their own wires. Google Fiber says it is waiting on AT&T and Comcast to move wires on nearly 8,000 poles.

AT&T’s lawsuit claims that the ordinance is preempted by Federal Communications Commission pole attachment regulations and violates AT&T’s 58-year-old pole attachment contract with Nashville. The company seeks a declaration that the ordinance is unlawful and a permanent injunction preventing the local government from enforcing it.