Twitter doubles character limit to 280

The tweets of your friends, frenemies, favorite celebrities, and hate follows can now be twice as long. Twitter has begun testing 280-character limit to tweets. The social network claims only nine percent of all tweets right now are exactly 140 characters and that users have to edit their initial thoughts to fit under the original limit. Twitter claims it hopes to lessen the burden on “languages impacted by cramming,” which is most languages except for the likes of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, and have people tweet more. Now, we can’t say whether this will improve the quality of tweets or not. The 140-character limit was initially set to reflect SMS message length.

This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu

— jack (@jack) September 26, 2017

Source: The Verge

Dyson gets into electric car business

Heathcliff O’Malley

Dyson’s latest project might seem a bit outside its wheelhouse but when you think about it, the technology company has always been in the business of cleaning our air of pollutants. And so the company is turning its sights to electric vehicles as announced by James Dyson, the company’s founder and chief engineer. Dyson is set to unveil a battery-powered electric vehicle by the year 2020. It’s supposedly going to be a “radical and different” type of car.

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Microsoft to improve OneDrive’s web UI and sharing options

Microsoft’s Ignite 2017 event is in full swing and at the conference the company is introducing some important changes to its OneDrive cloud storage service. One of the new things is a cleaner user interface. You can now see what content you share with others through a new people card and information pane, and the folder interface gets a new look, too. If you open a file on the web version of the service, it’ll now open in edit mode instead of read mode.

Aside from the cosmetic change, Microsoft is also improving the sharing options for Office, Windows, and Mac. Office 2016 is getting a new sharing pane in the near future that will let OneDrive users share documents to specific people or those part of an organization. Mobile clients will also get these updates so sharing on-the-go is possible. You also get notifications within the mobile app and desktop apps when files have been shared. And for file support, ZIP files can now be seen in the web view, and DRM or IRM files get full support on the service. A self-service recovery feature will also be activated when things like mass deletes, file corruption, ransomware, and other data loss scenarios happen. There are tons of other new features, which you can see at this link.

American Express launches Cobalt credit card aimed at millennials

"Cobalt is a card designed by millennials for millennials. This generation enjoys a very social lifestyle and seeks out a wide variety of experiences", said Megan McKee, Vice President, New Product Development for American Express Canada. "With this Card, Canadians get rewarded for the purchases they're already making, whether it's their daily coffee and subway ride to work, or their nights in with takeout and friends."

The Cobalt Card, a new style of credit card designed specifically to meet the needs of millennial consumers in Canada. The new card is uniquely designed with the social lifestyle of young professionals in mind - a generation whose spending habits reveal a passion for food, travel and entertainment. 

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