Anyword is a technology company that offers an artificial intelligence platform, using natural language processing to generate and optimize marketing text for websites, social media, email, and ads. The company also offers a complete managed service to publishers and brands to help them increase their revenue through social ads. It is used by National Geographic, Red Bull, The New York Times, BBC, Ted Baker, etc. The company has an office in New York, and Tel Aviv. == History == It was founded in 2013 — its original name was Keywee Inc. In March 2015, Anyword received $9.1 million in the Series A funding round led by a notable group of investors. In July 2016, the company was selected as an official Facebook Marketing Partner. In August 2019, Anyword was named Best Content Marketing Platform in the Digiday Technology Award winners. In November 2021, it raised $21 million in its Series B funding round.
VistaCreate
VistaCreate (formerly Crello) is an online graphic design platform for non-designers, launched in 2016. As of 2022, it has more than 10 million users in 192 countries. == Overview == VistaCreate (then known as Crello) was launched in 2016 as a part of Depositphotos. In 2019, the product hit a milestone of 1 million registered users and also launched mobile apps. In 2020, the library of templates and objects became free. A music library and a background remover tool were added to the platform. In May 2021, Moufflons Basketball, in collaboration with VistaCreate, organized a poster design competition in support of gender equality in sports. In October 2021, Vistaprint acquired Crello and its parent company, Depositphotos, for a total price of $85 million. After the acquisition, Crello was rebranded to VistaCreate. Along with Vistaprint and 99designs, it became part of the new Vista parent brand. After Russia started a full-scale war on the territory of Ukraine in February 2022, VistaCreate suspended all business in Russia and Belarus. VistaCreate's team and Depositphotos gathered collections of images and templates dedicated to the war in Ukraine.
Fediverse
The Fediverse (commonly shortened to fedi) is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol. Users of different websites can send and receive status updates, multimedia files and other data across the network. The term Fediverse is a portmanteau of federation and universe. The majority of Fediverse platforms are based on free and open-source software, and create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol. Some software still supports older federation protocols as well, such as OStatus, the Diaspora protocol and Zot, while newer protocols such as AT Protocol connect via network bridges. Diaspora is the only actively developed software project classified under the original definition of Fediverse that does not support ActivityPub. == Design == While a traditional social networking service will host all its content on servers managed by the owner of the website, the decentralized structure of the Fediverse allows any individual or organization to host a social platform using their own servers (referred to as an "instance"). Every instance is independent, and can set its own rules and expectations. Even so, much like how users of one email service such as Gmail can still send emails to users of another service such as Outlook, users may still view content and interact with users on any other instance in the Fediverse. A user on one Mastodon instance, for example, may view and interact with posts made by a user on a different instance even if it is not running Mastodon. Instances hosted by different social networking services may also communicate with one another. A user on the microblogging platform Misskey, for example, may view and interact with posts made by users on Mastodon. Some Fediverse networks even allow users to interact with different social networking formats from the same platform. For example, a user on a social news instance running Lemmy can interact with another post from an mbin instance, a similar service, as well as microblog statuses from Mastodon. === Content moderation and user safety === Decentralized social networking platforms introduce new challenges and difficulties for user trust and safety. By nature of the Fediverse, operators of an instance are solely responsible for moderation of its content. As there is no form of centralized governance or moderation across the Fediverse, it is impossible for an instance to be "removed" from the Fediverse; it can only be defederated per an instance operator's choice, which makes that instance's content inaccessible from the operator's instance. Individual instances are responsible for defining their own content policies, which may then be enforced by its staff. Moderation of a Fediverse instance differs significantly from that of traditional social media platforms, as moderators are responsible not only for content posted by users of that instance ("local users"), but also for content posted by users of other instances ("remote users"). == History == === Historical protocols === The concept and the functionality of the Fediverse existed before the ActivityPub protocol and the term itself. One of the first projects that included support for a decentralized social networking service was Laconica, a microblogging platform which implemented the OpenMicroBlogging protocol for communicating between different installations of the software. The software was later renamed to StatusNet in 2009, before being merged into the GNU social project in 2013 along with Free Social, with the two latter servers being a fork of StatusNet. Over time, the limitations of the OpenMicroBlogging protocol became more apparent, being designed as a one-way text messaging system. To replace the ageing protocol, OStatus was devised as an open standard for microblogging, combining various other technologies like Salmon, Atom, WebSub and ActivityStreams into a single protocol used for communicating between instances. StatusNet first implemented the OStatus protocol on March 3, 2010, with version 0.9.0, and OStatus quickly became the most popular federated protocol in usage. Around the same time as OStatus was gaining popularity, the Diaspora social network was formed, using its own federated protocol. To illustrate the differences between the two protocols, the terms of the Fediverse and the federation began to enter common usage, mainly after 2017. The term "the Fediverse" was used to describe the network formed by software using the OStatus protocol, such as GNU Social, Mastodon, and Friendica, in contrast to the competing diaspora protocol under "the federation". === ActivityPub === In December 2012, the flagship StatusNet instance at the time, identi.ca, transitioned away to a new software named pump.io, with a new federation protocol to replace OStatus. The new protocol was designed to be useful for general activity streams and not just status updates, and replaced many of OStatus' external dependencies with JSON-LD and a REST API for its messaging and inbox systems, as well as making more use of ActivityStreams. While not as utilized as its OStatus predecessor, it would later become influential in the development of the ActivityPub standard. In January 2018, the W3C presented the ActivityPub protocol as a recommended standard. The standard aimed to improve the interoperability between different software packages running on a wide network of servers and to supersede both the OStatus protocol and Pump.io. By 2019, almost all software that was using OStatus had added support for ActivityPub. While Mastodon began to remove OStatus support, other projects maintained it in their code, such as Friendica (which also maintained diaspora support along with ActivityPub). === AT Protocol === A major protocol often contrasted with ActivityPub is the AT Protocol, which powers the Bluesky social network. While both protocols aim to create decentralized social networks, they employ different technical philosophies regarding user identity. Developers of the AT Protocol, including Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, have stated they chose not to use ActivityPub because it did not natively support easy "account portability", the ability for a user to move their account, data, and social graph to a new provider without relying on the original server to authorize the move. In the ActivityPub model (used by Mastodon), a user's identity is typically tied to a specific server, similar to an email address; if that server goes offline, the identity can be lost. The AT Protocol aims to solve this by separating identity from hosting, allowing users to switch providers without losing their identity. Although the two protocols are technically incompatible by default, third-party "bridges" such as Bridgy Fed have been developed to allow users on ActivityPub networks to follow and interact with users on the AT Protocol network, and vice versa. === Other Fediverse protocols === While the Fediverse has traditionally been the network most commonly referred to and used as an example regarding the subject of decentralized social networks, alternatives to it and the accompanying ActivityPub have been developed and deployed. Smaller competitors such as Nostr and Farcaster have become popular within the cryptocurrency community. These protocols have used ActivityPub as a frame of reference for which to design their own architecture, as these newer protocols use a different federation model based on publishing content to relays for distribution rather than ActivityPub's server-centric model. Despite their differences, software exists that permit the bridging of user content between these protocols, including "double-bridges" that span multiple protocols for the purpose of distributing the same content. == Adoption == Users have been slow to embrace the Fediverse due to poor user experience and excessive complexity. Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in November 2022, certain major social networks, including Threads, Tumblr and Flipboard, expressed interest in supporting the ActivityPub protocol, as a large number of users began to migrate to Mastodon, a server that supports the Fediverse and was also the most popular alternative to Twitter at the time. Flickr also expressed support in supporting ActivityPub. As of November 2022, no information had been released by Flickr after the initial tweets by the CEO, with support for ActivityPub suspected to be on hold or cancelled. In 2024, the local government of the Stary Sącz municipality in Poland launched their own PeerTube instance in order to de facto abolish its presence on YouTube. According to the government, they stopped using YouTube for official communications "in order to adhere to the appropriate regulations". In the same year, VIVERSE, HTC Vive's metaverse platform, implemented support for ActivityPub in their chat feature, allowing users to send direct messages to other
Electronic kit
An electronic kit is a package of electrical components used to build an electronic device. Generally, kits are composed of electronic components, a circuit diagram (schematic), assembly instructions, and often a printed circuit board (PCB) or another type of prototyping board. There are two types of kits. Some build a single device or system. Other types used for education demonstrate a range of circuits. These will include a solderless construction board of some type, such as: Components mounted in plastic blocks with side contacts, that are held together in a base, e.g. Denshi blocks Springs on a card board, the springs trap wire leads, or component leads, such as Philips EE electronic experiment kits. These are a cheap and flexible option Professional type prototyping boards, (breadboards) into which component leads are inserted, following documentation of the "kit". The first type of kit for constructing a single device normally uses a PCB on which components are soldered. They normally come with extended documentation describing which component goes where into the PCB. For advanced hobby projects, sometimes the kit may only consist of a printed circuit board and assembly instructions, and the purchaser may have to source all the parts independently; or, the vendor may provide hard-to-get or pre-programmed parts while expecting the purchaser to obtain the rest of the components. People primarily purchase electronic kits to have fun and learn how things work. They were once popular as a means to reduce the cost of buying goods, but there is usually no cost saving in buying a kit today. Some electronic kits were assembled to make complete complex devices such as color television sets, oscilloscopes, high-end audio amplifiers, amateur radio equipment, electric organs, and even computers such as the Heathkit H-8, and the LNW-80. Many of the early microprocessor computers were sold as either electronic kits or assembled and tested. Heathkit sold millions of electronic kits during its 45-year history. Home assembly of common consumer electronics items no longer provides a cost advantage over commercially manufactured and distributed devices. People still build kits for custom devices and special-purpose electronics for professional and educational use and as a hobby. Also emerging is a trend to simplify the complexity by providing preprogrammed or modular kits often provided by many suppliers online. The fun and thrill of making your own electronics have shifted, in many cases, from easy-to-comprehend applications and analog devices to more sophisticated digital devices. == Examples == The Altair 8800 (the first home computer) was also sold as a kit, as were the MK14, Sinclair ZX80, Sinclair ZX81 and Acorn Atom computers. Many S-100 bus system cards were sold only as kits. Building a Robot kit, most often with a micro controller inside, is now in fashion.
Facebook is an American social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms. It was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, along with his Harvard College roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The name Facebook derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. The service was initially limited to Harvard students before gradually expanding to other universities in North America. Since 2006, Facebook has permitted registration by individuals aged 13 and older, with the exception of South Korea, Spain, and Quebec, where the minimum age is 14. As of December 2023, Facebook reported approximately 3.07 billion monthly active users worldwide. As of July 2025, it was ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 23 percent of its traffic originating from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile application of the 2010s. Facebook can be accessed from devices with Internet connectivity, such as personal computers, tablets and smartphones. After registering, users can create a profile revealing personal information about themselves. They can post text, photos and multimedia which are shared either publicly or exclusively with other users who have agreed to be their friend, depending on privacy settings. Users can also communicate directly with each other with Messenger, edit messages (within 15 minutes after sending), join common-interest groups, and receive notifications on the activities of their Facebook friends and the pages they follow. Facebook has often been criticized over issues such as user privacy (as with the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal), political manipulation (as with the 2016 U.S. elections) and mass surveillance. The company has also been subject to criticism over its psychological effects such as addiction and low self-esteem, and over content such as fake news, conspiracy theories, copyright infringement, and hate speech. Commentators have accused Facebook of willingly facilitating the spread of such content, as well as overemphasizing its number of users to appeal to advertisers. == History == The history of Facebook traces its growth from a college networking site to a global social networking service. While attending Phillips Exeter in the early 2000s, Zuckerberg met Kris Tillery. Tillery, a one-time project collaborator with Zuckerberg, would create a school-based social networking project called Photo Address Book. Photo Address Book was a digital face book, created through a linked database composed of student information derived from the official records of the Exeter Student Council. The database contained linkages such as name, dorm-specific landline numbers, and student headshots. Mark Zuckerberg built a website called "Facemash" in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used photos from online face books, asking users to choose the 'hotter' person". Zuckerberg was reported and faced expulsion, but the charges were dropped. A "face book" is a student directory featuring photos and personal information. In January 2004, Zuckerberg coded a new site known as "TheFacebook", stating, "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many." Zuckerberg met with Harvard student Eduardo Saverin, and each agreed to invest $1,000. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook". Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College. Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes joined Zuckerberg to help manage the growth of the site. It became available successively to most universities in the US and Canada. In 2004, Napster co-founder Sean Parker became company president and the company moved to Palo Alto, California. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel gave Facebook its first investment. In 2005, the company dropped "the" from its name after purchasing the domain name Facebook.com. In 2006, Facebook opened to everyone at least or only 13 years old with a valid email address. Facebook introduced key features like the News Feed, which became central to user engagement. By late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 pages on which companies promoted themselves. Facebook had surpassed MySpace in global traffic and became the world's most popular social media platform. Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million ($373 million in 2025 dollars), giving Facebook an implied value of around $15 billion ($23.3 billion in 2025 dollars). Facebook focused on generating revenue through targeted advertising based on user data, a model that drove its rapid financial growth. In 2012, Facebook went public with one of the largest IPOs in tech history. Acquisitions played a significant role in Facebook's dominance. In 2012, it purchased Instagram, followed by WhatsApp and Oculus VR in 2014, extending its influence beyond social networking into messaging and virtual reality. The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018 revealed misuse of user data to influence elections, sparking global outcry and leading to regulatory fines and hearings. Facebook's role in global events, including its use in organizing movements like the Arab Spring and its impact on events like the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, highlighted its dual nature as a tool for both empowerment and harm. In 2021, Facebook rebranded as Meta, reflecting its shift toward building the "metaverse" and focusing on virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. == Features == Facebook does not officially publish a maximum character limit for posts; however, user posts can be lengthy, with unofficial sources suggesting a high character limit. Posts may also include images and videos. According to Facebook's official business documentation, videos can be up to 240 minutes long and 10 GB in file size, with supported resolutions up to 1080p. Users can "friend" users, both sides must agree to being friends. Posts can be changed to be seen by everyone (public), friends, people in a certain group (group) or by selected friends (private). Users can join groups. Groups are composed of persons with shared interests. For example, they might go to the same sporting club, live in the same suburb, have the same breed of pet or share a hobby. Posts posted in a group can be seen only by those in a group, unless set to public. Users are able to buy, sell, and swap things on Facebook Marketplace or in a Buy, Swap and Sell group. Facebook users may advertise events, which can be offline, on a website other than Facebook, or on Facebook. == Website == === Technical aspects === The site's primary color is blue as Zuckerberg is red–green colorblind, a realization that occurred after a test taken around 2007. Facebook was initially built using PHP, a popular scripting language designed for web development. PHP was used to create dynamic content and manage data on the server side of the Facebook application. Zuckerberg and co-founders chose PHP for its simplicity and ease of use, which allowed them to quickly develop and deploy the initial version of Facebook. As Facebook grew in user base and functionality, the company encountered scalability and performance challenges with PHP. In response, Facebook engineers developed tools and technologies to optimize PHP performance. One of the most significant was the creation of the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM). This significantly improved the performance and efficiency of PHP code execution on Facebook's servers. The site upgraded from HTTP to the more secure HTTPS in January 2011. ==== 2012 architecture ==== Facebook is developed as one monolithic application. According to an interview in 2012 with Facebook build engineer Chuck Rossi, Facebook compiles into a 1.5 GB binary blob which is then distributed to the servers using a custom BitTorrent-based release system. Rossi stated that it takes about 15 minutes to build and 15 minutes to release to the servers. The build and release process has zero downtime. Changes to Facebook are rolled out daily. Facebook used a combination platform based on HBase to store data across distributed machines. Using a tailing architecture, events are stored in log files, and the logs are tailed. The system rolls these events up and writes them to storage. The user interface then pulls the data out and displays it to users. Facebook handles requests as AJAX behavior. These requests are written to a log file using Scribe (developed by Facebook). Data is read from these log files using Ptail, an internally built tool to aggregate data from multiple Scribe stores. It tails the log files and pulls data out. Ptail data are separated into three streams and sent to clusters in different data centers (Plugin impression, News feed impressions, Actions (plugin + news feed)). Puma is used to manage periods of high data
Labeled data
Labeled data is a group of samples that have been tagged with one or more labels. Labeling typically takes a set of unlabeled data and augments each piece of it with informative tags called judgments. For example, a data label might indicate whether a photo contains a horse or a cow, which words were uttered in an audio recording, what type of action is being performed in a video, what the topic of a news article is, what the overall sentiment of a tweet is, or whether a dot in an X-ray is a tumor. Labels can be obtained by having humans make judgments about a given piece of unlabeled data. Labeled data is significantly more expensive to obtain than the raw unlabeled data. The quality of labeled data directly influences the performance of supervised machine learning models in operation, as these models learn from the provided labels. == Crowdsourced labeled data == In 2006, Fei-Fei Li, the co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, initiated research to improve the artificial intelligence models and algorithms for image recognition by significantly enlarging the training data. The researchers downloaded millions of images from the World Wide Web and a team of undergraduates started to apply labels for objects to each image. In 2007, Li outsourced the data labeling work on Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for digital piece work. The 3.2 million images that were labeled by more than 49,000 workers formed the basis for ImageNet, one of the largest hand-labeled database for outline of object recognition. == Automated data labelling == After obtaining a labeled dataset, machine learning models can be applied to the data so that new unlabeled data can be presented to the model and a likely label can be guessed or predicted for that piece of unlabeled data. == Challenges == === Data-driven bias === Algorithmic decision-making is subject to programmer-driven bias as well as data-driven bias. Training data that relies on bias labeled data will result in prejudices and omissions in a predictive model, despite the machine learning algorithm being legitimate. The labeled data used to train a specific machine learning algorithm needs to be a statistically representative sample to not bias the results. For example, in facial recognition systems underrepresented groups are subsequently often misclassified if the labeled data available to train has not been representative of the population,. In 2018, a study by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru demonstrated that two facial analysis datasets that have been used to train facial recognition algorithms, IJB-A and Adience, are composed of 79.6% and 86.2% lighter skinned humans respectively. === Human error and inconsistency === Human annotators are prone to errors and biases when labeling data. This can lead to inconsistent labels and affect the quality of the data set. The inconsistency can affect the machine learning model's ability to generalize well. === Domain expertise === Certain fields, such as legal document analysis or medical imaging, require annotators with specialized domain knowledge. Without the expertise, the annotations or labeled data may be inaccurate, negatively impacting the machine learning model's performance in a real-world scenario.
Commercial skipping
Commercial skipping is a feature of some digital video recorders that makes it possible to automatically skip commercials in recorded programs. This feature created controversy, with major television networks and movie studios claiming it violates copyright and should be banned. == History == After the video cassette recorder (VCR) became popular in the 1980s, the television industry began studying the impact of users fast forwarding through commercials. Advertising agencies fought the trend by making them more entertaining. For many years, video recorders manufactured for the Japanese market have been able to skip advertisements automatically, which is done by detecting when foreign language audio overdub tracks provided for many programmes go silent, as advertisements were broadcast with a single language only. The first digital video recorder (DVR) with a built-in commercial skipping feature was ReplayTV with its "4000 Series" and "5000 Series" units. In 2002, the main television networks and movie studios sued ReplayTV, claiming that skipping advertisements during replay violates copyright. Later, five owners of ReplayTV represented by Electronic Frontier Foundation and attorneys Ira Rothken and Richard Wiebe countersued, asking the federal judge to uphold consumers' rights to record TV shows and skip commercials, claiming that features like commercial skipping help parents protect their kids from excessive consumerism. ReplayTV ended up filing for bankruptcy in 2003 after fighting a copyright infringement suit over the ReplayTV's ability to skip commercials. === Commercial skipping software === In addition to the DVR devices which existed in the private market since the late 1990s, towards the mid-2000s, due to the significant advances in home computers, Home theater PCs started gaining popularity in the private market and many users began using their Home theater PCs in their living room for entertainment purposes. Following this, many DVR programs were developed, including popular programs such as Windows Media Center, which contained all of the features of the DVR devices in addition to advanced features such as HDTV and the use of Multiple TV Tuner Cards. Some independent developers began developing independent software capable of skipping the commercial segments when playing recorded videos, and permanently removing the commercial segments from recorded video files. By 2014, many DVR programs such as Windows Media Center, SageTV and MythTV had the capability to skip commercials segments in recorded TV broadcasts after installing third-party add-ons such as DVRMSToolbox, Comskip and ShowAnalyzer, which use various advanced techniques to locate the commercial segments in the video files and save their locations to text files. The text files can also be fed into programs such as MEncoder or DVRMSToolboxGUI which can delete the commercial segments from the recorded video files. A few third-party tools such as MCEBuddy automate detection and removal/marking of commercials. One of the weaknesses of commercial skippers is that, operating automatically, they may misidentify program material as a commercial. Some programs like MCEBuddy provide the ability to fine-tune commercial detection for groups of files (e.g. by channel or country) and provide tools to manually fine-tune commercial segments for individual files. In May 2012, the US Dish Network began offering a DVR with what it calls AutoHop. The device would automatically skip commercials when displaying programming that the viewer had previously recorded with the PrimeTime Anytime feature. It does not skip ads on any live programs. US broadcasters were angered at the news, and FOX embarked on legal action. Most, but not all, of Fox's claims were dismissed; ultimately an agreement was reached whereby AutoHop would only become available for Fox stations seven days after a program is transmitted; terms of the settlement were not disclosed. == The future of TV advertisements == The introduction of digital video recorders and services with skipping and fast-forward capabilities enables viewers to avoid viewing interruptive advertisements in recorded programs, either manually or automatically. While advertising separate to television shows can be skipped, advertising in TV shows themselves ("product placement") cannot be skipped. Streaming services such as Hulu show shorter advertisements with a countdown timer and tailored to the viewers interests, asking interactive questions like "Is this ad relevant to you?".