Latest news with #Skylight
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Bluesky backlash misses the point
Bluesky is missing an opportunity to explain to people that its network is more than just its own Bluesky social app. In recent weeks, a number of headlines and posts have surfaced questioning whether Bluesky's growth is declining, if the network has become too much of a left-leaning echo chamber, or if its users lack a sense of humor, among other charges. Investor Mark Cuban, who even financially backed Skylight, a video app built on Bluesky's underlying protocol, AT Proto, complained this week that replies on Bluesky have become too hateful. 'Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,' he wrote in a post on Bluesky. That, he said, is 'forcing' people to return to X. This embedded content is not available in your region. Naturally, X owner Elon Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino have capitalized on this unrest, with the former posting that Bluesky is a 'bunch of super judgy hall monitors' and the latter proclaiming that X is the 'true' global town square. The debate around this topic is not surprising. Without a more direct push to showcase the wider network of apps built on the open protocol that Bluesky's team spearheaded, it was only a matter of time before the Bluesky brand became pigeon-holed as the liberal and leftist alternative to X. That characterization of Bluesky, however, is not a complete picture of what the company has been building — but it could become a stumbling block toward its further growth if not corrected. It's true that many of Bluesky's initial users are those who abandoned X because they were unhappy with its new ownership under Musk and its accompanying right-wing shift. After the November elections in the U.S., Bluesky's adoption soared as X users fled the platform headed by Trump's biggest individual backer. At the time, Bluesky was adding millions of users in rapid succession, climbing from north of 9 million users in September to nearly 15 million by mid-November and then 20 million just days later. That growth continued in the months that followed, as top Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton joined the app. Today, Bluesky has more than 36.5 million registered users, its public data indicates. It follows, then, that users' conversations around news and politics on Bluesky would help to define the network's tone as they became the dominant voices. Of course, that can spell trouble for any social network, as partisan apps on both the left, like Telepath, and right, like Parler, have failed to successfully challenge X. What's missing in this current narrative is the fact that Bluesky's social app is only meant to be one example of what's possible within the wider AT Proto ecosystem. If you don't like the tone of the topics trending on Bluesky, you can switch to other apps, change your default feeds, or even build your own social platform using the technology. Already, people are using the protocol that powers Bluesky to build social experiences for specific groups — like Blacksky is doing for the Black online community or like Gander Social is doing for social media users in Canada. There are also feed builders like Graze and those in Surf that let you create custom feeds where you can focus on specific content you care about — like video games or baseball — and exclude others, like politics. Built into Bluesky (and other third-party clients) are tools that let you pick your default feed and add others that interest you from a range of topics. If you want to follow a feed devoted to your favorite TV show or animal, for instance, you can. In other words, Bluesky is meant to be what you make it, and its content can be consumed in whatever format you prefer best. In addition to Bluesky itself, the wider network of apps built on the AT Protocol includes photo- and video-sharing apps, livestreaming tools, communication apps, blogging apps, music apps, movie and TV recommendation apps, and more. Other tools also let you combine feeds from Bluesky with other social networks. Openvibe, for instance, can mix together feeds from social networks like Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr. Apps like Surf and Tapestry offer ways to track posts on open social platforms as well as those published with other open protocols like RSS. This lets the apps pull in content from blogs, news sites, YouTube, and podcasts. The team at Bluesky may not be the ones directly building these other social experiences and tools, but highlighting and promoting the existence of this wider, connected social network benefits Bluesky's brand. It shows that not only is Bluesky more than just a Twitter/X alternative, it's just one app in a wider social ecosystem built on open technology — and that's bigger than just building another X. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Star
13-05-2025
- Business
- The Star
Can a US$700 calendar save your marriage?
On a Thursday morning in March, my family needed to accomplish three things at exactly the same time. My husband had to board a plane to return from a business trip in London. I had agreed to moderate a panel discussion about how the cost of child care in New York City is harming the local economy. And someone had to sign our daughter up for a first-come-first-served preschool programme that typically fills its seats within 90 to 120 seconds of their online release at 10am. We had not properly accounted for this overlap through our shared Google calendar. Our snafu echoes across continents and generations, an age-old problem with a newish name: the mental load. It's the tedious, all-consuming work of planning our lives, made all the more tedious when young children are in the mix and free time seems to shrink to fleeting glances. Enter the digital calendar, which aims to make invisible work very, very visible. We received ours five to seven business days after our Thursday morning meltdown. We had identified our problem – essential information for our household was being shared only in snippets of conversation or haphazard Google calendar invites instead of one central place – and searched for a solution with a monthly installment payment. The Skylight Calendar, which can cost US$170 to US$630 (RM735 to RM2,726), depending on size, all with an optional US$79 (RM341) annual subscription fee to unlock special features, would make our scheduling conflicts impossible to ignore. The company took US$30 (RM129) off some of its calendars for Mother's Day. Our various appointments, early-morning calls and evening drinks would be beamed 24 hours a day, in all their colour-coded glory, from the Skylight's commanding position in the middle of our hallway. About 888,000 families own a Skylight, its co-founder Michael Segal, who has two children under 2, told me. The Hearth, one of the first entries into the category of supersize calendars that you can hang on a wall, was created by three working mothers and is itself a supersized version of the Skylight. It sells for US$700 (RM3,029), with a US$9 (RM38) monthly fee, though the company also ran a sale for Mother's Day, offering 15% off for Mother's Day. In an undated image provided by Hearth, the Hearth Display. The Hearth was created by three working mothers. — Hearth via The New York Times The idea behind the product, said Susie Harrison, one of Hearth's co-founders, was to 'externalise the primary caregiver's brain, and put that into a system that everyone could see'. I wanted to know how other families used their calendars, and spent the next few weeks talking with the tools' power users and sceptics: most partnered, all straight, with family budgets that could comfortably include a digital calendar. They were all ages 35 to 50, in the thick of raising young kids and juggling career demands. I wanted to know if these families felt that the money had been worth it, if they had finally found a technological solution to an analogue problem at the heart of human nature: that we cannot read our spouse's minds, to know when they scheduled our kid's next dental appointment or gymnastics class. Or, I wondered, had the purported fix uncovered new friction points, hiding in familiar gendered expectations of who does what to keep a household running. The 'calendar partner' I reached Linda Caro on a Friday morning, as she was preparing for a transcontinental flight. Caro and her husband are both flight attendants, working opposite schedules, and they are both technically based in New York City despite living in Redlands, California, with their two children, 10 and 13, who attend different schools. She unwrapped the Skylight last year on Christmas morning, a gift from her husband who had noticed that putting some of their events on a whiteboard calendar – and then taping their kids' school calendars into a semicircle around it – wasn't really working. 'It was my system; nobody else really understood it,' she said. But, she told me, she quickly became 'obsessed' with her Skylight, and joined Facebook and Reddit groups for other die-hard users. 'It's like something we wish we could have invented ourselves,' she said. (Caro is such an enthusiastic user that she recently became an unpaid ambassador to the brand, allowing her to dispense 15% off discount codes to friends, for which she said she receives a small commission.) She gave her two sisters, who live nearby, access so they could see when she would be flying and could help pitch in on child care. The kids can now check the calendar to track their parents' flight numbers. Caro even created an alert on the calendar to remind her husband to do the laundry – a move that some husbands might see as overbearing but that Caro said hers was on board with. Still, Caro is the only person in the family consistently adding events to the Skylight. 'That's something we can work on,' she admitted. It is hard to avoid the dynamic of one spouse becoming the 'calendar partner', a phrase that sent a chill down my spine when Allison Daminger, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained it to me recently. We talked about the remedy that many families land on when trying to redistribute household labour: using the skills they have learned at work to help run their family life. 'You don't always want to go from a day of back-to-back Zoom meetings and then go home and have a check-in meeting with your partner,' said Daminger, the author of the forthcoming book What's On Her Mind: The Mental Workload Of Family Life . But that's exactly what several couples told me they do. Who knows when trash day is? The uncluttered calendar represents true logistical nirvana, said Eve Rodsky, who helped bring the idea of the mental load to the masses with her 2019 book, Fair Play , and accompanying deck of cards, each with its own task, used by couples around the country to divvy up their responsibilities. Rodsky has put the system to work in her own home. Her husband is in charge of every aspect of the trash in their home – from noticing when the garbage bags are running low and restocking them to sorting the recycling to picking a cadence for when the trash is taken out. Owning every aspect of a task, a practice Rodsky has coined CPE, for conception, planning and execution, is the only way to truly lighten the mental load, she says. And you can't calendar your way out of that. 'My biggest fear is the disappointment people are going to have when they think this amazing new shiny app will solve their gender-equity issues,' she said. Daminger said she had been approached by some entrepreneurial digital calendar founders who wanted her advice on how these tools might help moms in particular. 'I often end up being a buzzkill,' she said, 'where I say, 'I'm not sure this is actually going to change the underlying dynamic'.' Ruth de Castro, who has two teenagers and works in technology, understands that dynamic well. Her marriage had long felt unequal, but absorbing Rodsky's work on the mental load was the final straw that led to her divorce, de Castro said. 'I didn't have language for why keeping all those things in my brain was driving me crazy,' said de Castro, who lives in California's East Bay and works in technology. When she was still with her husband, she debated buying a Hearth – 'I was like, Do I really need this thing? It's 600 bucks,' she recalled – but took the plunge after she mixed up some dates and missed her daughter's ballet recital. She uses the Hearth to help ease the scheduling burden of co-parenting her two teenagers with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. It's actually simpler now that she doesn't have to hope that her partner will add important appointments to the calendar. 'You can buy something really aesthetic and nice,' she said. 'But if you're not consistent as a parent, it's almost like another thing you have to micromanage.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
7NEWS
07-05-2025
- 7NEWS
Skylight WiFi Digital Picture Frame: The ultimate gift to stay connected through photos
If you're still searching for a thoughtful, last-minute gift for Mother's Day, then this Skylight 10-Inch WiFi Digital Photo Frame offers a beautiful and effortless way to keep loved ones connected, no matter the distance. And it's currently on sale for $169, normally $245 on Amazon Australia. With its stylish black frame, intuitive touchscreen, and WiFi-enabled capabilities, this device transforms the simple act of sharing photos into a heartfelt daily ritual. Know the news with the 7NEWS app: Download today Setting up the Skylight frame is refreshingly simple. Just plug it in, connect to WiFi, and choose a unique Skylight email address. From there, friends and family can instantly send photos to the frame from their phones — no apps, subscriptions, or complicated installations required. It's a seamless experience designed for users of all ages, making it especially meaningful for those who may not be on social media but still want to stay close to family memories. The vibrant 10-inch colour touchscreen with a 1280x800 resolution brings every photo to life in crisp, vivid detail. Whether it's a fun selfie from the kids, snapshots from a recent holiday or family trip, or a throwback memory, the Skylight frame turns everyday moments into a rotating gallery of joy. The frame also supports cloud-based storage, removing the need for SD cards and ensuring space never runs out. Skylight's thoughtfully designed features add to its charm. Gift Mode allows users to preload the frame with photos and a personal message before it's even opened, making it a memorable and ready-to-enjoy present straight out of the box. Offline mode lets users view existing photos without a WiFi connection, though internet access is needed for uploading new images. More than just a gadget, the Skylight frame acts as a bridge between generations. It's a sentimental gift for grandparents who want to see their grandchildren grow, a fun and thoughtful surprise for long-distance friends, or a touching reminder of special moments for someone who just needs a smile. Shoppers have given the digital photo frame, a 4.5-star rating at Amazon Australia. 'Nice and clear photos on display. Love it how it displays all different photos in all orders,' one impressed shopper wrote. 'Excellent quality. Photos look fabulous and such a wonderful gift for my husband. Love that I could pre-load images,' another shopper added. 'Quality product, we ended up buying two,' a third reviewer wrote.
Gizmodo
06-05-2025
- Gizmodo
Amazon's Best-Selling Skylight Smart Touchscreen Calendar Hits Record Low Price
Calendars are what make the whole world function, or at least my world. If I don't immediately put something in my calendar the moment I learn about it, I can almost guarantee you I will forget it or double book myself. But even though I log something into a calendar, doesn't mean I'll remember. It's buried in an app on my phone that goes back into my pocket, out of sight and out of mind. This Skylight Calendar fixes that. It's a 15-inch digital wall planner with an interactive display. You can see your whole week, month, or year at a glance and right now it's 13% off. For a limited time, you can save $40 when you pick up this touchscreen scheduler for just $280. The Skylight calendar is easy to set up. Just connect it to Wi-Fi and you can automatically sync it to Google, iCloud, Outlook, Cozi, or Yahoo. Or you can chose to add events directly through the Skylight app. See at Amazon The display can be either wall-mounted or freestanding right on your countertop. It shows off all your events and to-do's in HD, making it a perfect addition to any kitchen, hallway, or home office. Brightness is automatically set and can adapt to the environment you put it in. You can choose between displaying in either portrait or landscape. It operates via touchscreen so it's easy to add new plans, even without your phone nearby. And it can even be set to show the current temperature and forecast for future events. Lighten Your Mental Load Where the Skylight Calendar really shines is for families, partners, and roommates—anyone living with others. Access everyone's schedule right from one view so you can see if the whole family can make the invite you just got. Tune in and see your husband just agreed to dinner plans with the Joneses down the block this Saturday night. You can even use the calendar to organize a chore chart for everyone living in the house. Or even integrate your calendar with meal planning so you everyone will always know what's for dinner. Color code everything logged in the calendar by family member. This way you can easily tell where everyone needs to be and when. Everyone's calendars syncing in one place. For a limited time, the Skylight Calendar is being sold at a discount through Amazon. Save yourself $40 when you pick yourself up this 15-inch touchscreen family scheduler today for just $280. See at Amazon
CNET
06-05-2025
- CNET
Save Up to $100 on Skylight Frames and Give the Gift of Digital Photos This Mother's Day
If you're on the hunt for the perfect last-minute gift for Mother's Day, then look no further. We all take tons of digital photos, but do we ever really get the chance to appreciate them? Printing photos is so last century, so this year treat your mom to a digital photo frame. The Skylight Frame is available in a few different sizes and finishes, and right now, Amazon will sell you one with up to $100 off. Unlike analog static frames, Skylight doesn't include just one picture in its frames. Instead, once you buy the frame, you can continually send new pictures to it; they'll show up right away and light up your gift receiver's day. First, you plug the frame in and sign in to Wi-Fi. You'll then need to choose an email address to associate with the frame. Once that setup is done, you can start sending pictures to the frame over email or using Skylight's app. The pictures will then start to appear automatically on the frame. Your giftee can use the frame's touchscreen to switch between pictures. Using Gift Mode, you can handle all this setup ahead of time, so photos will be preloaded on the frame when it gets unwrapped and plugged in. Hey, did you know? CNET Deals texts are free, easy and save you money. Keep in mind that there are a couple of sizes on offer here, with the smaller 10-inch model joined by a massive 15-inch version. There are different finishes for you to consider, too. The specific deals are as follows: Unfortunately, we can't promise that these prices will be available for long, so consider ordering mom's gift soon to make sure you lock these discounts in. Looking for a Mother's Day gift but not sure where to start? Check out these deals so you can nab the best possible gift. Why this deal matters Choosing the perfect Mother's Day gift can be difficult, but this is your chance to put a raft of photos at their fingertips with these digital frames. All you need to do is choose the right one for your mom.
