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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

The VR Experience That May Have Convinced Mark Zuckerberg to Buy Oculus

What do you do if you're thinking about spending $2 billion on a hot virtual reality company? Well, if you're Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you go experience cutting-edge virtual reality for yourself.

Weeks before Facebook announced that it had acquired virtual reality gaming headset manufacturer Oculus Rift, Zuckerberg made a private visit to Stanford University. He was there to see one of the country's leading virtual reality experts, Associate Professor Jeremy Bailenson.

Bailenson directs Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, where he conducts variety of virtual reality experiments designed primarily to understanding VR's impact on human behavior Read more...

More about Virtual Reality, Social Media, Facebook, Gadgets, and Oculus Rift

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Animate Creepy Fantasy Creatures for Our Vine Challenge

Bring your boogeyman and unicorns to life for this week's Mashable Vine Challenge. We want you to animate the swoops, chases, claws and roars of your favorite fantasy creatures.

You can sculpt your creatures using clay, or sketch them on paper and then morph them into 3D. Try painting legendary beasts from literature — the double-headed sea monsters and serpents, the centaurs and dragons. Or feel free to pull a Frankenstein and invent your own monster. It can be as big as a skyscraper or small enough to hide under a bed.

We used paper cutouts and plastic toys to make our Vine video, below. Read more...

More about Monster, Vine, Creature, Stop Motion Animation, and Social Media

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10 'Game of Thrones' Tumblrs for Your Daily Dose of Westeros

Through an Oculus, Clearly: Stop Freaking Out About Facebook

By now, we know that the reaction to a major Facebook acquisition among the chattering technorati follows a pretty simple script. It happened with Instagram in 2012, it happened again last month with WhatsApp, and it happened yet again Tuesday with the $2 billion deal for the virtual reality gurus at Oculus VR

First comes the stage where we all have a good laugh. Facebook bought what now? For how much? No. Seriously? What are they smoking in Menlo Park? The memes and jokes fly thick and fast. We comb our cultural history for anything that matches the pattern of an accurate predictionThe Oatmeal called itThe Simpsons called it Read more...

More about Facebook, Social Media, Dev Design, Gadgets, and Oculus Rift

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Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Instagram Hits 200 Million Users

It's a testament to Instagram's success that when Mark Zuckerberg revealed the photo-sharing service had crossed the 200-million-user milestone, it barely rated a mention.

The statistic arrived in the middle of an investor-relations phone call explaining why he had just purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion — or more than twice the price of Instagram. Zuckerberg's rationale: Facebook said it would be happy if Instagram hit 100 million users, and now they're at twice that. In other words, you can't always predict where these technologies are going

More about Facebook, Instagram, and Social Media

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Tumblr Adds Two-Step Authentication to Ward Off Hackers

As a part of an effort to ramp up security efforts and keep away hackers, Tumblr is the latest company to add two-step authentication to its social blogging platform.

Before Tuesday, all users were logging into the Tumblr the same way — whether their page attracted five views or 5 million. Now, the new login verification is like double-locking your door at night to decrease the chances of an intruder breaking in

Tumblr joins other services such as Gmail and Twitter that already offer the feature, which is now available via the user's settings.

"You know how you need two keys to launch a nuclear missile? Two-factor authentication works like that," a Tumblr blog post read. "One key is your password, the other key is your cellular phone, and you need both to access your Tumblr Dashboard." Read more...

More about Mobile, Security, Tumblr, Social Media, and Apps Software

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6 Twitter Accounts That Will Find You Free Music

Everything is better when it's free. Food is a little tastier, clothes look a little better and music sounds even sweeter

Thanks to a crowded scene and the rise of the digital age, there are plenty of ways to get your hands on free tunes. But how do you find all of them? Just turn to Twitter. Though it may be killing off its #Music feature, the social media site has a laundry list of accounts that scrounge up the latest free (and legal) music downloads

Though you're not going to get freebies from mainstream artists, you'll learn about a bevy of free tracks and streams from up-and-comers and familiar names. Read more...

More about Twitter, Music, Entertainment, Free Music, and Social Media

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