How did Facebook go from 1 billion to 8 billion videos views per day in 18 months without the whole server farm catching fire? It’s called SVE, short for streaming video engine. SVE lets Facebook slice videos into little chunks, cutting the delay from upload to viewing by 10X. And to ensure the next generation of 360 and virtual reality videos load fast too, it’s invented and… Read MoreFacebook’s Engineering Wizardry Makes Even VR Videos Load Fast
How did Facebook go from 1 billion to 8 billion videos views per day in 18 months without the whole server farm catching fire? It’s called SVE, short for streaming video engine. SVE lets Facebook slice videos into little chunks, cutting the delay from upload to viewing by 10X. And to ensure the next generation of 360 and virtual reality videos load fast too, it’s invented and… Read More
Facebook wasn’t built for sports. Its filtered, non-chronological News Feed made it tough to follow real-time chatter about the game. Twitter’s feed is great for it. But out of Facebook’s 1.55 billion users, there are a LOT of rabid sports fans who aren’t on Twitter. Facebook’s not actually trying to steal Twitter’s hardcore users as much as box it out of… 
Numerous startups over the years have tried to tackle the problem of helping people track down the photos others have taken, but hadn’t yet shared with you. Today, the outsize winner in the space is Facebook, whose Moments application has taken over the social network’s photo syncing function, while leveraging Facebook’s massive scale to allow for easier private… 
After more than a year in development, KnowMe, a new video creation and sharing platform, is launching on the iPhone. The app was created by Andrew Jarecki, the Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker behind The Jinx, Catfish, and Capturing the Friedmans. KnowMe was designed from the ground up to give its users access to video editing technology that would feel less complicated… 
QuizUp, the Icelandic company that put trivia in an app, has announced that it is receiving up to $7.5 million in funding from Glu Mobile, with an option to call to acquire. This comes in the wake of a partnership forged between NBC and QuizUp, announced in October, with the network looking to turn QuizUp content into a proper TV show played both in studio and at home through the app. The… 
Twitter stock is seeing a mini-rally today after hitting an all-time low yesterday, on rumors that News Corp was eyeing a tie-up with the company. Twitter didn’t comment on the report, and News Corp apparently denied the rumor, but the fact that the rumor surfaced and picked up speed so quickly points to just how precarious the company feels right now as a public stock and perhaps as… 
Yik Yak, the anonymous, location-based social network that has taken college campuses by storm, has today launched a web client. The company has been working on the web version of the app for the past few months in a closed beta, and is now ready to unveil it to the public. To get going on the web, users simply add in the same phone number they use with the mobile app, and verify their… 
Facebook has added what it dubs “experimental support” for accessing its services via Tor on Android, using the Orbot proxy app for Android. The feature will be rolling out over the next few days, it said yesterday. 
Netflix had another big beat for its fourth-quarter earnings, and once again showed strong international growth — so much so that investors seem to be overlooking its weaker domestic growth and sending shares soaring.
Twitter is having a tricky Tuesday. The social media site has been offline the last several hours, covering a number of — but not all — regions, and its stock hit a new low after it opened up for trading after the long weekend. From what we’ve been able to see, the service was not working, either partially or not at all, in London and other parts of the UK, Switzerland,…