Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, February 20

• People love GIFs — but turning GIFs into ad dollars is taking some time: About 15 months ago, Tenor was trying to get its GIF search engine onto as many phones as possible. So it did the logical thing — it partnered with businesses that were already on a lot of phones. The startup, which offers a universal GIF keyboard that you can download to your phone, also signed deals with Messenger, iMessage and Kik to put its technology inside their messaging apps so users could easily search through Tenor’s library of GIFs (which are short looping video clips), and send them off to friends inside of private conversations. The deals appear to have worked: Tenor, which rebranded in October from Riffsy, says people are using its GIF search engine 200 million times per day, up from 50 million daily searches 15 months ago. It has 200 million monthly active users, a number that has also quadrupled in the same amount of time. As people are sending more and more messages, they’re sending more and more GIFs. But despite user growth, Tenor is still dealing with the same question Recode was asking 15 months ago: Are GIFs a real business? Tenor CEO David McIntosh remains adamant that they are, though his company still isn’t making any revenue despite all the messaging deals. As of October, Giphy, a competitor recently valued at $600 million, wasn’t bringing in any revenue, either. Turning those views into dollars may still be a ways off. McIntosh says that Tenor has just 22 employees, and needs to build out a sales organization. It also needs to create interest in what McIntosh believes is a new kind of targeting. “The challenge is that this is a brand-new format that has to be invented,” he said. “There’s no ad inventory today around marketers that want to purchase against emotion, and have assets that they want to buy against.”

• These University of Washington professors are teaching a course on bullshit: Two University of Washington professors are teaching a course to help students “think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences,” according to the introduction to the course. The 160-seat seminar, titled “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data,” begins in late March and continues for roughly 10 weeks. Members of the general public can follow the course syllabus, including readings and recordings of lectures, at the course’s website. At the end of the course, students should be able to “provide your crystals-and-homeopathy aunt or casually racist uncle with an accessible and persuasive explanation of why a claim is bullshit,” according to the syllabus. One area of big problems: Big Data (one of the buzzwords of the century, which at its simplest refers to big sets of data, but has likely also been overhyped in its potential for revolution). He said he noticed methods of statistics meant for smaller data sets being applied to “big” data sets with millions or billions of examples, where it’s easy to force a correlation that isn’t necessarily accurate. He also observed situations where machine-learning algorithms were “overfitting” data. Basically, you can have an algorithm that so specifically matches a particular data set, meaning it reflects even errors or noise, it fails when applied to another data set where you would otherwise expect it to work. You would normally want an algorithm that is sufficiently general to fit more than one data set. The syllabus went viral after it was posted last month, according to a Friday story in Stat News — the instructors’ email inboxes were overflowing, and some book offers were even made. The course reportedly filled all open seats within the first minute of online registration at UW.

• Expedia and Amazon Double Down on Britain: As politicians and businesses wrestle with potential changes to U.K. border controls, one of the world’s largest online travel booking companies has decided to add hundreds of new staff in London, and it’s not alone in looking to expand. Expedia Inc. will expand its U.K. office by 138,000 square feet, or to roughly twice the size of its existing space, and has signed a new lease that runs until 2030, according to a company statement. The company currently has about 1,400 staff at its London hub. Amazon.com Inc. is also hiring for its U.K.-based voice-recognition technology, cloud computing centers and Prime Air division, it said in a statement. The moves come as the U.K technology industry frets about the fallout from the nation’s decision to leave the European Union by 2019, even as global tech companies continue to consider London the region’s major hub.