Jillian D’Onfro

That’s a 100 million bump for Messenger, a 150 million pop for Groups, and a 100 million surge for WhatsApp since Facebook’s last update in March. That’s three months ago.

What do Ronald Williams, Jim McNerney, and Kenneth Chenault have in common? 

They are the three most popular board directors at the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. 

RJ Andrews, who runs the Info We Trust blog, mapped out the board member overlap at DJIA companies.

The research is based on Bloomberg data and includes common board members only. 

After living in New York for five years, I recently moved to San Francisco. Neither city is clearly superior, but there are some distinct differences …

The Cooper Review

The Cooper Review

by Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher) TC

As my flight out of Beirut reached cruising altitude, and the seat buckle lights flickered off, I leant back in my chair and wondered if I had, in fact left the country just in time. Admittedly, it wasn’t quite an ‘Argo-esue’ escape from another Middle Eastern country, but labelling a controversial government minister on a conference stage as an “idiot” maybe wasn’t the wisest of moves. Beirut is not a town known for its placid history, after all. Furthermore, my comment had made the front page of the Beirut Daily Star the next day. Perhaps it was just as well that I left the next day.

But the trip was worth it. Beirut is rapidly shaping up to be a powerhouse for startups in the Middle East. It has many of the key elements: a highly entrepreneurial culture; incubators and accelerators; venture capital; some gradually favourable government policy and access to growth funding. The exits and the ‘PayPal mafias’ may be a ways off but its a beginning. In part because it is the most liberal state in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa)region, and has a western-style banking system bequeathed to it by the French a long time ago, Lebanon is uniquely poised to generate startups which aim both at the Arab world and the wider world at large.

A very interesting chart about the cloud war btw Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and many others vendors As a consumer, or company many different options to host your Data and Business  

By: Jonathan Wai and Jenna Goudreau
In order to determine a school’s overall smarts, Jonathan Wai, a Duke University Talent Identification Program researcher, analyzed the average standardized test scores that schools report to US News. (Those that did not report scores are not included.) If you’re looking for exclusivity, academic excellence, and exposure to the brainiest students in the US, you may want to check out the universities below

 Here are the smartest private colleges in America:

The European Parliament has passed a historic vote to break up US tech giant Google.

The EU doesn’t actually have the power to break up the company, but it does send a message to Google that the EU is unhappy with its business practises. 

Legislators in Strasbourg voted 458 to 173 in favour of the proposal.

The European Parliament has never voted to break up a company before, making this a historic decision. The antitrust commission is concentrating on four areas of investigation:

• The way Google displays its search services compared to its competitors.
• How Google uses content from other websites.
• Google’s dominance over advertising on search terms.
• Restrictions that surround how advertisers can move their campaigns to other search engines.