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Monthly Archives: January 2019
Roughly half of Instagram’s users 1 billion users now use Instagram Stories every day. That 500 million daily user count is up from 400 million in June 2018. 2 million advertisers are now buying Stories ads across Facebook’s properties.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Stories the last big game-changing feature from Facebook, but after concentrating on security last year, it plans to ship more products that make “major improvements” in people’s lives.
During today’s Q4 2018 earnings call, Zuckerberg outlined several areas where Facebook will push new products this year:
- Encryption and ephemerality will be added to more features for security and privacy
- Messaging features will make Messenger and WhatsApp “the center of [your] social experiences”
- WhatsApp payments will expand to more countries
- Stories will gain new private sharing options
- Groups will become an organizing function of Facebook on par with friends & family
- Facebook Watch will become mainstream this year as video is moved there from the News Feed, Zuckerberg expects
- Augmented and virtual reality will be improved, and Oculus Quest will ship this spring
- Instagram commerce and shopping will get new features
Zuckerberg was asked about Facebook’s plan to unify the infrastructure to allow encrypted cross-app messaging between Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as first reported by NYT’s Mike Isaac. Zuckerberg explained that the plan wasn’t about a business benefit, but supposedly to improve the user experience. Specifically, it would allow Marketplace buyers and sellers in countries where WhatsApp dominates messaging to use that app to chat instead of Messenger. And for Android users who use Messenger as their SMS client, the unification would allow those messages to be sent with encryption too. He sees expanding encryption here as a way to decentralize Facebook and keep users’ data safe by never having it on the company’s servers. However, Zuckerberg says this will take time and could be a “2020 thing”.
Facebook says it now has 2.7 billion monthly users across the Facebook family of apps: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. However, Facebook CFO David Wehner says “Over time we expect family metrics to play the primary role in how we talk about our company and we will eventually phase out Facebook-only community metrics.” That shows Facebook is self-conscious about how its user base is shifting away from its classic social network and towards Instagram and its messaging apps. Family-only metrics could mask how teens are slipping away.
At the end of last year, Grand Central Tech announced plans to work with the Milstein real estate family to transform a midtown Manhattan high-rise into a tech hub called Company. And startups remain an important part of the mix — in fact, Company is unveiling a list of 20 startups participating in this year’s GCT Startup-in-Residence program.
What does Startup-in-Residence mean? Well, Company CEO Matthew Harrigan said the program will continue to offer what it’s always offered — desk space, as well as access to events and amenities, for a select group of early-stage entrepreneurs. And participants don’t have to give up equity or pay rent.
The deal might seem too good to be true, but Harrigan argued that the startups make Company more appealing to its enterprise tenants: “We are retrofitting this building to look and feel and operate like a brand new building … but the one amenity that cannot be simply rolled out is people.”
He also said the program is only taking up 15,000 square feet of the building’s 150,000 total square feet.
“It sounds like an exceptionally generous offering and it isn’t,” he said. “It sounds like it doesn’t make a ton of business sense but that’s actually wrong … Fifteen thousand square feet of space to great early-stage founders helps establish a truly remarkable program and campus in New York City. Those resources are well spent.”
In the past, we’ve written about Grand Central Tech as an accelerator program, but Harrigan said, “We weren’t and aren’t an accelerator” — it just used “the nomenclature that’s known.” Now the program is taking on a more fitting name, though it sounds like the operations won’t be changing too dramatically.
“We typically have very sophisticated founding teams, giving them an ideal environment in which to work,” Harrigan said. “By and large, our companies are left to their own devices — we don’t presume to create a curriculum or some series of programming. It’s a somewhat passive approach, but we make sure all people in the community are linked up with each other.”
Also worth noting: This year’s class consists of 40 percent women founders and CEOs, and it covers industries like energy, mental health, e-commerce, biotech, adtech and food.
Here’s a list of the companies, with descriptions provided by Company (and edited by me for clarity and length). We’ve also written about a number of them before, so I’m including links to past coverage when possible.
- Dandelion Energy is a geothermal energy company that’s building a scalable and cost-efficient geothermal heating solution for the U.S. residential housing market. The company is a spin-out of Alphabet and Google X.
- Octave is a full-stack mental health provider, purpose-built to capitalize on evolving consumer habits and a new wave of interest in the space.
- Vowel is a multi-user enterprise voice platform operating in stealth. The company enables businesses to analyze, manage and drive actionable insights from audio data generated in the workplace/meetings.
- Nara Organics is a natural baby food company that is manufacturing the first biodynamic infant formula in the U.S.
- Twine Labs is a workforce analytics platform that’s creating a single source of truth on employee data across various disaggregated internal corporate databases. Data is then benchmarked against industry standards to help chief people officers gain vital, previously unavailable perspective.
- Taskade is a new workplace collaboration platform that enables more efficient team management and product workflows.
- Oova is a biomedical technology company for women’s health that uses smart connected devices to actively monitor hormone levels and help manage women’s fertility health. The company is a spin-out of Mt. Sinai.
- Summer is a next-generation student loan management and repayment platform providing users with a comprehensive view of their debt and targeted recommendations on how to alleviate it, which evolves based on their current life circumstances.
- Chartable is creating a new enterprise adtech and analytics platform for audio. It’s aiming to do something similar to what DoubleClick, App Annie, Flurry and others did when apps were first introduced.
- Particle Health is creating a new medical record data company, leveraging blockchain technology to enable a single health record tying together previously disparate information from a patient’s various doctors, and yielding valuable data insights in the process.
- Project OTC is a holistic new consumer brand targeting outdated over-the-counter brands and products such as antacids, Vitamin C/immunity support and headache relief. The company is operating in stealth.
- Moved is building a new concierge layer on top of the disorganized, disaggregated moving services supply chain. A user calls Moved, shares details and is given a concierge who manages the move and coordinates across all the various service providers, including the landlord or real estate owner.
- Hydra is a new network of membership-based wellness spaces in metropolitan areas that complements the growth of small format fitness classes and provides its members areas to refresh, regroup and recharge.
- GoodTalk is a new consumer app meant to distill and amplify one of the primary aspects of social platforms. For example, five experts on a given topic can form a chat thread, which other users of the app can view but not comment on.
- Otis is building a new investment platform to enable distributed ownership in fine art and collectibles.
- Snackable uses natural language processing to intelligently digest podcasts into “snackable” 30-60 second moments to enable easier social sharing of podcast content — something that has plagued the burgeoning podcast space.
- Lolli is building a new e-commerce platform that allows customers to accumulate Bitcoin rewards through simple brand and retail purchases by capturing the rebate/coupon value already broadly distributed throughout e-commerce.
- RaisedByUs is a nonprofit workplace social good program for companies that already includes Casper, Squarespace, Shutterstock, Seatgeek, Sailthru, Birchbox, MongoDB and DigitalOcean among others. RaisedByUs helps teams do meaningful, team-building, vetted volunteer work easily.
- Nesterly is a home-sharing platform that is working to bring affordable housing to the next generation by allowing senior homeowners to easily rent out their extra space.
- Bokksu is a subscription-based food company that curates exclusive artisan snacks in local markets and uses video and written storytelling to detail origin stories through an immersive customer experience.
As traditional enterprise companies like IBM, Oracle and SAP try to transform into more modern cloud companies, they are finding that making that transition, while absolutely necessary, could require difficult adjustments along the way. Just this morning, SAP announced that it was restructuring in order to save between $ 750 million and 800 million euro (between approximately $ 856 million an $ 914 million).
While the company tried to put as positive a spin on the announcement as possible, it could involve up to 4000 job cuts as SAP shifts into more modern technologies. “We are going to move our people and our focus to the areas where the new economy needs SAP the most: artificial intelligence, deep machine learning, IoT, blockchain and quantum computing,” CEO Bill McDermott told a post-earnings press conference.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It is precisely the areas that IBM has been trying to concentrate on its transformation over the last several years. IBM has struggled to make this change and has also framed workforce reduction as moving to modern skill sets. It’s worth pointing out that SAP’s financial picture has been more positive than IBM’s.
CFO Luca Mucic tried to stress this was not about cost cutting, so much as ensuring the long-term health of the company, but did admit it did involve job cuts. These could include early retirement and other incentives to leave the company voluntarily. “We still expect that there will be a number probably slightly higher than what we saw in the 2015 program where we had around 3000 employees leave the company, where at the end of this process will leave SAP,” he said.
The company believes that in spite of these cuts, it will actually have more employees by this time next year than it has now, but they will be shifted to these new technology areas. “This is a growth company move, not a cost cutting move every dollar that we gain from a restructuring initiative will be invested back into headcount and more jobs,” McDermott said. SAP kept stressing that cloud revenue will reach $ 35 billion in revenue by 2023.
Holger Mueller, an analyst who watches enterprise companies like SAP for Constellation Research, says the company is doing what it has to do in terms of transformation. “SAP is in the midst of upgrading its product portfolio to the 21st century demands of its customer base,” Mueller told TechCrunch. He added that this is not easy to pull off, and it requires new skill sets to build, operate and sell the new technologies.
McDermott stressed that the company would be offering a generous severance package to any employee leaving the company as a result of today’s announcement.
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Over the last several years, we’ve seen the typical search engine results page (SERP) change a great deal.
It was once primarily a list of blue links.
To that, we’ve seen direct answers added — sometimes replacing a list of links entirely.
We’ve seen video answers added, we’ve seen the advent of the local pack, the knowledge graph, and tools built directly into the top of the page (e.g., calculators).
And while it’s important to evolve for the changes we’re seeing today, what we really need to do is focus on what’s coming next.
The common thread that runs through all of these consumer options is data. The public-facing information about your business, website, products, services, and people within your company.
You need to identify all these points of data (sometimes also referred to as entities), catalog them, and mark them up so the engines and services can easily identify, consume, and trust the information they provide.
If you want to remain on the radar with consumers, this should be a critical focus moving forward.
Here are some of the changes we can expect to influence the SERP of tomorrow: in the immediate and not-to-distant horizon
1. Voice assistants and companion apps
In a very real way, this is our here and now.
This category can be best thought of as “voice and…” since it’s not only about voice assistants — and there is a less-than-clear path to ranking in voice search.
Voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant are being built into any number of third-party products, and it’s become increasingly important to figure out how to optimize to rank as the spoken answer.
You may not be focused on it right now, but consumers are focusing on it more and more every day, and there’s an opportunity for early marketing adopters to set the trends.
The biggest issue when optimizing for voice is that it’s a true black box. Every query teaches the system something new, which is then applied to the next query, and so on.
With none of the popular systems sharing any inside data with marketers at any depth, it’s tough to really understand the levers that move the needles in voice search.
Still, you need to dig in here and invest as consumers are becoming more comfortable with voice search and are turning to it with greater frequency.
What can you do today?
Research how you appear in voice search.
Buy a smart speaker and use it.
Get comfortable using the device so you can experience what consumers experience.
Use it to perform competitive analysis of how other businesses are included in answers. Learn what kinds of answers come back in instances relevant to your business.
2. Visual search
We saw several new devices come to market for the holiday shopping season, with both Google and Amazon offering stand-alone voice assistants with devices featuring screens.
Facebook has a standalone product as well, though its initial focus is more on connecting people and conversations, as opposed to search and discovery.
(One easy prediction here is that, at some point, Messenger may be integrated to enable chatbots to join conversations, opening marketing opportunities for businesses.)
Ranking in visual search results will follow a similar path to ranking for voice search. These devices are essentially expanded footprints for showcasing answers.
But as consumer adoption grows, new opportunities will present themselves.
Right now, the surest path to being showcased in visual search is by building, as best you can, a robust presence in voice search — by effectively managing your data.
What can you do today?
Buy a device that has a screen and search for your business and your competitors and their products. In fact, you could skip the smart speaker and just start with one of these devices.
The work, results, and lessons will be the same.
3. Augmented reality
Useful data, layered visually on top of our everyday view of the world around us — this space has been around for a while, and is poised for rapid growth as younger consumers find the newest apps and devices that utilize this technology.
To be included in augmented reality, your foundation must be good data.
All the data about your business, no matter how small, will need to be marked up. This allows services to consume it and overlay it in an augmented reality interface.
This could have a large impact on customer foot traffic, as all the information they need to make purchase decisions could be overlaid, for example, on a street-view map. (This enables them to know, say, which businesses are actually open, are having sales right now, currently have long wait times, and so on.)
Managing your business data in this space will be critical for success. Inclusion here is almost guaranteed, success will come from managing your data well.
What can you do today?
Grab your smart phone and try some of the apps in this article.
While you’re doing this, think about the impact of having your business data overlaid in that view you see.
Understand that managing your data is step one in being included in AR scenarios.
4. Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is a bit further out.
We will get there as companies like Oculus are working to bring more accessible products to market, hopefully broadening adoption.
As content options expand, so will search results within the experiences — and advertising opportunities along with them.
Currently, this remains firmly in ‘testing’ territory, meaning you should be watching the space and testing different devices.
Develop a good understanding of the consumer experience, and spot ways to potentially integrate your products and services.
What can you do today?
VR is a more expensive space, and still at such an early stage, so it’s tougher to create an action here.
Reading and understanding the industry remains important to watch for growth, but experiencing VR yourself is also key.
Find a demo at a local store, at least, or step up to something like the Oculus Go to explore this technology and discover opportunities.
The SERP of tomorrow will have many interfaces.
There are a lot of changes in front of us, and it’s easy to be discouraged or feel overwhelmed.
The good news is that all the work you’ve done to this point has prepared you for the next few steps needed to remain relevant and thrive.
Just keep an eye on how consumer trends are shifting, as that will tell you how fast you need to move.
Your first action, above all others, however, is to manage your business data.
No amount of research will make you more successful if you don’t take this action.
Create a list of all your digital entities and learn how to control them. Make a plan to execute on maintaining the accuracy of all that data. And finally, create workflows inside your business for maintenance work of that data.
Knowledge can be wasted through inaction.
Duane Forrester is VP of Industry Insights at Yext.
The post What will the SERP of tomorrow look like? Four changes to prepare for today appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
Photo-sharing app and social network Instagram was briefly taken offline on Monday afternoon, causing nothing of consequence to occur other than a brief respite from one source of the constant deluge of inconsequential information to which we all voluntarily submit ourselves.
The service died at about 4:20, tragically the very moment when millions of people were turning to the app, for the third time that hour, desperately hoping to pass the time until the end of the workday. At least this was the case on the west coast of the U.S., the only location we are considering at this time.
The app launched fine but did not refresh feeds, and users were unable to scroll past however many posts were already cached; stories, which are also cached, were accessible but couldn’t be posted. I was able to send messages, but others weren’t.
Amazingly, even the website went down, and hard. Visitors received a “5xx Server Error,” which is not common — usually a server knows which of the various error codes to return. It seems to be back now, though.
The outage appeared to end, for some anyway, at about quarter of five, which means many of us are still at our desks, if we’re lucky enough to have them. If you were affected, here’s hoping your half hour was spent productively.
An Instagram representative told TechCrunch that they’re aware of the issue and working to fix it.
Our full guide to streaming Super Bowl 53 for free online (and the Puppy Bowl and Kitten Bowl).
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Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.
It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.
Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention.
The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sown in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.
So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.
Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.
FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.
Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.
But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.
After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.
Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.
So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.
And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.
Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.
You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.
The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.
You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.
It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.
Y’know, like you smirked…
Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).
Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.
And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.
The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.
But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.
Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)
Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.
You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.
You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.
Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.
This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)
Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.
Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.
Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.
And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.
The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.
You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)
But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.
In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).
So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.
What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.
And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.
The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.
In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.
Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?
As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).
But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).
The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.
So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.
Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.
The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.
Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions” of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.
But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?
Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.
“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.
Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.
He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.
We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.
Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).
Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.
Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.
Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.
‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’
An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.
Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.
Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.
Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a non-profit that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.
Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)
Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.
Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.
But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.
Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.
EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.
Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.
So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.
Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.
Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.
A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.
What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.
And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.
Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)
Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.
It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.
The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.
Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.
If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.
You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.
How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.
Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.
Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.
But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)
In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.
Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)
So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.
Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.
Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.
Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.
And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.
“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.
Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.
Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.
As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.
Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)
Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.
And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.
Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.
Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?
But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.
Apple has registered new iPad models in the Eurasian Economic Commission reference database. The Moscow-based commission keeps a product database pretty much like the FCC in the U.S. And it sounds like Apple is about to launch a new iPad mini 5 and an updated entry-level iPad.
That database has shown information on new Apple products in the past — MySmartPrice first discovered today’s new filings. There are two different filings that both mention new tablets that run iOS 12.
The first filing mentions five different models, while the second one mentions two different models. Usually, each configuration gets a different model number depending on storage and LTE capabilities.
It lines up with previous rumors that mentioned a new iPad mini and a new cheap iPad for early 2019. Ming-Chi Kuo expects an updated iPad mini with a 7.9-inch display. The device hasn’t been updated for years and many believed that Apple would stop updating it. But if you still like that form factor, Apple may have something new for you.
When it comes to the normal-size iPad, Apple last updated the 9.7-inch iPad in March 2018. While all eyes are on the iPad Pro, many people are still looking for the cheapest iPad they can get. And the $ 329 9.7-inch iPad is a good deal. Apple usually updates that model every year.
Today’s filings don’t say what those devices will look like, unfortunately. It’s unclear if Apple is going to reduce the bezels of those devices, add a Face ID sensor or switch to USB-C.
Microsoft and Verizon Media – formerly Oath – recently announced a new partnership making Bing Ads the single global platform for all search advertising campaigns on the AOL and Yahoo networks.
Read more at PPCHero.com
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- Core Web Vitals & Preparing for Google’s Page Experience Update
- Conversion modeling through Consent Mode in Google Ads
- The search dilemma: looking beyond Google’s third-party cookie death
- The FDA’s Decision to Pause J&J Could Help Defeat Covid-19


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EK Water Blocks, a well known liquid cooling equipment makers from Slovenia, have released its new GPU water block terminal, the EF-FC Terminal Rotary 90°.
Geforce GTX 1080 with high-end AiO liquid cooling
MSI has teamed up with EK Water Blocks for its latest MSI Geforce GTX 1080 30th Anniversary graphics card which will come with an all-in-one liquid cooling system.
With 140mm and 280mm radiators
Following the success of its earlier released XLC Predator AIO liquid CPU coolers, EK Water Blocks has now announced two new models that will be coming with 140mm and 280mm radiators, Quick Disconnect Connector and new 140mm EK-Vardar fan(s), the EK-XLC Predator 140 and EK-XLC Predator 280.
Teams up with EK Water Blocks
In addition to plenty of Pascal-based notebooks, MSI brought a rather interesting desktop graphics card to the Gamescom 2016 show in Cologne, the liquid-cooled GTX 1080 "30th Anniversary Edition".
Turns the Radeon Pro Duo into a single-slot card
EK Water Blocks has announced that its full-cover water block for Radeon Pro Duo is now available and allows users to both include the AMD Radeon Pro Duo into their own liquid cooling loop but also turn it into a single-slot graphics card.
Ready when Radeon Pro Duo launches tomorrow
EK Water Blocks has teased its newest full cover water block designed for AMD's latest flagship dual-GPU graphics card, the AMD Radeon Pro Duo.
Performance Series kits
EK Water Blocks has launched its new Performance Series liquid cooling kits which include all the components needed for a custom liquid cooling loop.
Including one for connecting seven graphics cards
EK Water Blocks has launched no less than four new EK-FC Terminals, which allow users to easily connect multiple liquid cooled graphics cards as well as simplify the making of a custom loop liquid cooling system.
The EK-FB ASUS M8E Monoblock
After releasing a liquid cooling monoblock for the small Asus ROG Maximus VIII Impact motherboard, EK Water Blocks has now launched a new all-in-one monoblock meant to be used with the Asus' flagship Intel Z170-based Republic of Gamers Maximus VIII Extreme motherboard, the EK-FB ASUS M8E Monoblock.
New dual and serial pump setup
EK Water Blocks, a well known liquid cooling specialists from Slovenia, have expanded its Revo range of pumps and pump tops with the new XTOP Revo Dual D5 PWM pump top with two EK-D5 PWM liquid cooling pumps.

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California Lakewood Mall was looted during massive gang fight today. As a group of people jumped a female, people began to loot the Lakewood Mall Macy’s when they realized security was busy trying to stop the fight. Some reports are saying the mall looks destroyed now.
The sad part about the video is that it seemed like no one cared that the female was getting jumped. Even when people where kicking her in the head, everyone just watched or began looting Lakewood Mall stores like Macy’s.
This was a crazy and sad incident all around. Lakewood Mall got looted and had a gang fight all at the same time. Imagine picking today to go shopping Macy’s there.


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Dairy body hails ACCC Coles’ action
THE Queensland Dairyfarmers' Organisation has welcomed news the ACCC has started legal proceedings against Coles supermarkets for alleged unconscionable conduct.
The QDO said it was a further demonstration of the urgent need for action to shield the dairy industry from the impacts of the supermarket milk price war, which has been led by Coles supermarkets.
The ACCC announced this week it alleges Coles "developed a strategy to improve its earnings by obtaining better trading terms from its suppliers..." with one way being "through the introduction of ongoing rebates to be paid by its suppliers in connection with the Coles Active Retail Collaboration program".
The ACCC alleges "that, in a number of cases, threats were made when suppliers declined to agree to pay the rebate".
QDO president Brian Tessmann said the allegations would sound familiar to Gympie region and Queensland dairy farmers, whom had been raising similar concerns for more than three years.
"From day one, when Coles first slashed the price of its store-brand milk to $1 per litre on Australia Day 2011, QDO has been very vocal in our concerns that this discounting of milk was unfair and robbed the fresh milk value chain of sufficient value to be sustainable," Mr Tessmann said.
"We have raised very serious concerns about unconscionable conduct, predatory pricing and loss-leader marketing tactics, where milk is priced so cheaply in order to not just attract customers, but also to grow the market share of their own brand."


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Sony Pictures is seeking a partner to grow its Crackle streaming service, after years of lagging online video rivals
Sony Pictures Television is looking for a strategic partner to grow its streaming video service Crackle, which has struggled for years to compete in the fast-growing online video market.
The Culver City-based studio has hired investment bank Moelis & Co. to explore potential deals to sell a stake in Crackle, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment.
Moelis began reaching out to companies, including other streaming services and entertainment firms, on Monday, the knowledgeable people said.
It is not clear how big of a stake Sony is willing to sell, or what price the Japanese-owned company will seek. Sony is in the early stages of searching for an investor but hopes to complete the process in the next couple of months.
Sony does not want to sell the whole service, the people close to the situation said.
Crackle, which is available for free and makes money from advertising, has been part of Sony since 2006, and is considered an important part of the studio’s digital video strategy. However, the service has been overshadowed by video giants such as Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, which are spending billions of dollars on original movies and shows.
“Crackle is a tremendously valuable asset for us, and ... we feel there is room for greater growth for our [over-the-top] business,” Sony Pictures Television Chairman Mike Hopkins said in a note to staff obtained by The Times. “With the right partner — one that could bring additional content or users or leverage existing assets for advertising and promotion — we feel we can expand Crackle’s audience and significantly increase revenue.”
A Sony Pictures spokesman declined to comment.
The Crackle move is part of a broader effort by Hopkins, the former Hulu boss hired last year by Sony Pictures Entertainment Chief Executive Tony Vinciquerra, to remake the studio’s television business so it can better adapt to the changing entertainment industry.
The studio last month merged its television networks, home entertainment and distribution businesses under one executive, a restructuring that resulted in layoffs. It also created a new direct-to-consumer unit to house Crackle and other streaming holdings, including animation outlets Animax and Funimation. The digital division is run by Sony executive Eric Berger.
Crackle was hit with about a dozen layoffs in May when the service consolidated its ad divisions as part of Sony Pictures’ broader push to streamline. Crackle has about 130 employees, according to the company. The studio does not disclose revenue figures for Crackle.
Sony wants to double or triple Crackle’s traffic annually, and executives have decided that making a deal with another company would be the most efficient way to spur growth, the sources said. Crackle currently draws 5 million monthly unique visits.
Sony Pictures, owned by Tokyo-based electronics giant Sony Corp., is considering multiple options to boost the service’s standing.
The studio, for example, may partner with another advertising-supported streaming service to increase the number of shows produced for Crackle and drive more users to the service. It could also forge a deal with a media and entertainment company with a robust film and TV library, or a telecommunications firm with direct access to millions of mobile phone and broadband users, the people close to the situation said.
The company has been contacted by three or four interested parties in recent months, the people said.
Sony bought Crackle 12 years ago, when it was a video-sharing site called Grouper, for $65 million. The name changed to Crackle in 2007.
Crackle’s original shows include “The Oath,” a crime drama executive produced by rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, and “SuperMansion,” an offbeat stop-motion animated superhero series by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios (“Robot Chicken”).
Crackle was previously best known as the home of Jerry Seinfeld’s popular webseries “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” which premiered on the service in 2012. However, the show moved to Netflix last year as part of the Los Gatos, Calif., tech and entertainment giant’s larger content deal with the legendary comedian.
4:25 p.m.: This article was updated with additional background on Crackle.
This article was originally published at 1:05 p.m.
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The Adidas Yeezy Boost 700 MNVN "Honey Flux" has a release date.
Kanye West started a dad shoe crazy back in 2017 and that craze has managed to keep its trend-worthy status over the last few years. Chunky shoes are still very much that wave and sneakerheads are still going to Yeezy for their dad shoe needs. One silhouette that has always provided those vibes is the Adidas Yeezy Boost 700, which also comes in the MNVN variation. With "700" written in big typography across the side, the MNVN model has proven to be a unique addition to Kanye's Yeezy library.
Now, the sneaker is set to be released in a "Honey Flux" colorway which can be found below. This is a shoe that is perfect for the Fall season as we are given a mustard yellow upper with black and silver highlights. Overall, it's a clean model that will appeal to the Yeezy fans who have stuck by this silhouette for years.
If you are hoping to get your hands on these, you will be able to do so as of tomorrow, Monday, September 20th for a price of $220 USD. Pairs will be released at a plethora of retailers, so be sure to keep your eyes out at your local stores for all of the latest details.


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Yahoo! has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Maktoob.com, the leading online community in the Arab world, with more than 16.5 million unique users.
“This acquisition will accelerate Yahoo!’s strategy of expanding in high-growth emerging markets where we believe Yahoo! has unparalleled opportunity to become the destination of choice for consumers,” said Yahoo! chief executive officer Carol Bartz. “Access to information and communications tools can positively impact people’s lives in many ways, and with the acquisition of Maktoob.com and our investment in the region, the Arab world will soon get a Yahoo! experience in Arabic with relevant local language content, programming and services.”
Internet users in the region will benefit from the combination of Yahoo!’s popular products and services with Maktoob’s compelling local content, which today reaches one in three people online throughout the Arab world. This acquisition will extend Yahoo!’s current offerings by adding capabilities to deliver relevant Arabic-language content and services, as well as Arabic versions of Yahoo!’s popular Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail services. Maktoob.com is accessed by users in countries that include UAE, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
While Internet usage in the Middle East has grown more than tenfold since 2000, most markets are still in the early stages of adoption. According to the World Bank, there are more than 320 million Arabic speakers worldwide, while less than one per cent of all online content is in Arabic.
Upon completion of the deal, the remaining Maktoob Group companies – including Souq.com, cashU.com, Araby.com, and Tahadi.com – will operate under a new entity called the Jabbar Internet Group, managed by Samih Toukan. Yahoo! and the Jabbar Internet Group will continue to have a strong commercial relationship going forward, which will include the promotion of Jabbar companies on the Maktoob.com portal.
Financial terms were not disclosed.


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|By Business Wire||
|November 29, 2012 04:22 PM EST||
SocialVibe, the pioneer in engagement advertising, has partnered with AnchorFree, the world’s most popular app for safe and secure web browsing, to deliver an improved consumer experience and powerful brand interaction to an even larger audience on the web and in mobile.
AnchorFree’s HotSpot Shield safe browsing app has over 100 million monthly user sessions and more than 3.2 billion monthly page views across PCs, Macs, iPhones and Android devices. It is currently ranked as the No. 36th most trafficked online service according to Quantcast.
With the addition of AnchorFree, SocialVibe continues to expand its market-leading engagement advertising platform into new content and partner verticals, delivering better results through deeper engagement for both brands and agencies. The partnership with AnchorFree empowers SocialVibe to serve engagement advertising to an additional 25 million unique consumers per month, adding significant reach to SocialVibe’s current audience of 101 million U.S. consumers.
“We are very pleased to announce our partnership with AnchorFree. It is our goal to help align the interests of brands and consumers by continuing to bring engagement advertising to new channels and touch points. This partnership is an important part of that effort and extends our reach as a digital advertising partner for brands and agencies,” said Chris Rooke, senior vice president of business development at SocialVibe.
“Through our partnership with Social Vibe we see a strong medium for driving value to advertisers, while maintaining a good user experience for our users,” said Baglan Nurhan, vice president of revenue & ad ops at AnchorFree.
SocialVibe combines the power of an extensive network of premium online and mobile partners, a large, 750x500 rich media ad unit, and innovative new placements such as value exchange and interstitials to deliver proven results for brands and marketers. This combination is one of the most powerful in digital advertising, driving industry leading results like five to 10 times the engagement of display, 60 seconds time spent, 80 percent-plus completion rates and more than 15 percent lift in key brand metrics including consideration and purchase intent.
SocialVibe is a next-gen digital ad-tech company that powers engagement advertising for some of the world’s top brands. In today’s online landscape where consumer attention is hard to capture, SocialVibe’s interactive ads deliver better results through deeper engagement by delivering an improved consumer experience and more powerful brand interaction. As a pioneer and recognized leader in engagement marketing, SocialVibe enables advertisers to reach consumers where they are most passionately engaged across the web and mobile, including social, social gaming, content, music, video, Wi-Fi, travel and sports. SocialVibe is based in Los Angeles, with offices in New York, Chicago and London. For more information, visit socialvibe.com or engage with us on twitter.com/socialvibe
AnchorFree believes in placing consumers in control of their personal information online. The company’s mission is to enable secure access to the world’s information for an addressable market of 5 billion people who access the Web through computers or mobile devices. AnchorFree does this through Hotspot Shield, the world’s most popular app for safe browsing, which has been downloaded by more than 100 million. Hotspot Shield secures all Internet communications, protects the user’s identity online, and provides universal access to all Internet content. Hotspot Shield is available for PC, Mac, Apple iOS, and Android platforms at AnchorFree.com and HotSpotShield.com AnchorFree is a privately held, venture-backed company based in Mountain View, Calif.
"Once customers get a year into their IoT deployments, they start to realize that they may have been shortsighted in the ways they built out their deployment and the key thing I see a lot of people looking at is - how can I take equipment data, pull it back in an IoT solution and show it in a dashboard," stated Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Dec. 9, 2016 09:30 PM EST Reads: 1,275
What happens when the different parts of a vehicle become smarter than the vehicle itself? As we move toward the era of smart everything, hundreds of entities in a vehicle that communicate with each other, the vehicle and external systems create a need for identity orchestration so that all entities work as a conglomerate. Much like an orchestra without a conductor, without the ability to secure, control, and connect the link between a vehicle’s head unit, devices, and systems and to manage the ...
Dec. 9, 2016 08:00 PM EST Reads: 1,014
An IoT product’s log files speak volumes about what’s happening with your products in the field, pinpointing current and potential issues, and enabling you to predict failures and save millions of dollars in inventory. But until recently, no one knew how to listen. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Dan Gettens, Chief Research Officer at OnProcess, discussed recent research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and OnProcess Technology, where MIT created a new, breakthrough analytics model for ...
Dec. 9, 2016 07:45 PM EST Reads: 695
IoT is rapidly changing the way enterprises are using data to improve business decision-making. In order to derive business value, organizations must unlock insights from the data gathered and then act on these. In their session at @ThingsExpo, Eric Hoffman, Vice President at EastBanc Technologies, and Peter Shashkin, Head of Development Department at EastBanc Technologies, discussed how one organization leveraged IoT, cloud technology and data analysis to improve customer experiences and effici...
Dec. 9, 2016 06:45 PM EST Reads: 5,141
Everyone knows that truly innovative companies learn as they go along, pushing boundaries in response to market changes and demands. What's more of a mystery is how to balance innovation on a fresh platform built from scratch with the legacy tech stack, product suite and customers that continue to serve as the business' foundation. In his General Session at 19th Cloud Expo, Michael Chambliss, Head of Engineering at ReadyTalk, discussed why and how ReadyTalk diverted from healthy revenue and mor...
Dec. 9, 2016 06:15 PM EST Reads: 1,762
The 20th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. Cloud Expo, to be held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, brings together Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, Containers, Microservices and WebRTC to one location. With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal ...
Dec. 9, 2016 05:30 PM EST Reads: 2,366
In this strange new world where more and more power is drawn from business technology, companies are effectively straddling two paths on the road to innovation and transformation into digital enterprises. The first path is the heritage trail – with “legacy” technology forming the background. Here, extant technologies are transformed by core IT teams to provide more API-driven approaches. Legacy systems can restrict companies that are transitioning into digital enterprises. To truly become a lead...
Dec. 9, 2016 05:30 PM EST Reads: 478
The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to simplify and streamline our lives by automating routine tasks that distract us from our goals. This promise is based on the ubiquitous deployment of smart, connected devices that link everything from industrial control systems to automobiles to refrigerators. Unfortunately, comparatively few of the devices currently deployed have been developed with an eye toward security, and as the DDoS attacks of late October 2016 have demonstrated, this oversight can ...
Dec. 9, 2016 05:15 PM EST Reads: 1,465
You have great SaaS business app ideas. You want to turn your idea quickly into a functional and engaging proof of concept. You need to be able to modify it to meet customers' needs, and you need to deliver a complete and secure SaaS application. How could you achieve all the above and yet avoid unforeseen IT requirements that add unnecessary cost and complexity? You also want your app to be responsive in any device at any time. In his session at 19th Cloud Expo, Mark Allen, General Manager of...
Dec. 9, 2016 05:15 PM EST Reads: 1,886
Bert Loomis was a visionary. This general session will highlight how Bert Loomis and people like him inspire us to build great things with small inventions. In their general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Architect at IBM Bluemix, and Michael O'Neill, Strategic Business Development at Nvidia, discussed the accelerating pace of AI development and how IBM Cloud and NVIDIA are partnering to bring AI capabilities to "every day," on-demand. They also reviewed two "free infrastructure" pr...
Dec. 9, 2016 04:45 PM EST Reads: 1,303
As data explodes in quantity, importance and from new sources, the need for managing and protecting data residing across physical, virtual, and cloud environments grow with it. Managing data includes protecting it, indexing and classifying it for true, long-term management, compliance and E-Discovery. Commvault can ensure this with a single pane of glass solution – whether in a private cloud, a Service Provider delivered public cloud or a hybrid cloud environment – across the heterogeneous enter...
Dec. 9, 2016 04:45 PM EST Reads: 1,867
"Dice has been around for the last 20 years. We have been helping tech professionals find new jobs and career opportunities," explained Manish Dixit, VP of Product and Engineering at Dice, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Dec. 9, 2016 03:30 PM EST Reads: 1,244
Extracting business value from Internet of Things (IoT) data doesn’t happen overnight. There are several requirements that must be satisfied, including IoT device enablement, data analysis, real-time detection of complex events and automated orchestration of actions. Unfortunately, too many companies fall short in achieving their business goals by implementing incomplete solutions or not focusing on tangible use cases. In his general session at @ThingsExpo, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products...
Dec. 9, 2016 03:15 PM EST Reads: 988
"ReadyTalk is an audio and web video conferencing provider. We've really come to embrace WebRTC as the platform for our future of technology," explained Dan Cunningham, CTO of ReadyTalk, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at WebRTC Summit at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Dec. 9, 2016 03:15 PM EST Reads: 875
The many IoT deployments around the world are busy integrating smart devices and sensors into their enterprise IT infrastructures. Yet all of this technology – and there are an amazing number of choices – is of no use without the software to gather, communicate, and analyze the new data flows. Without software, there is no IT. In this power panel at @ThingsExpo, moderated by Conference Chair Roger Strukhoff, Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation; Alan Williamson, Principal...
Dec. 9, 2016 02:45 PM EST Reads: 648
Businesses and business units of all sizes can benefit from cloud computing, but many don't want the cost, performance and security concerns of public cloud nor the complexity of building their own private clouds. Today, some cloud vendors are using artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify cloud deployment and management. In his session at 20th Cloud Expo, Ajay Gulati, Co-founder and CEO of ZeroStack, will discuss how AI can simplify cloud operations. He will cover the following topics: why clou...
Dec. 9, 2016 02:45 PM EST Reads: 1,048
Video experiences should be unique and exciting! But that doesn’t mean you need to patch all the pieces yourself. Users demand rich and engaging experiences and new ways to connect with you. But creating robust video applications at scale can be complicated, time-consuming and expensive. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Zohar Babin, Vice President of Platform, Ecosystem and Community at Kaltura, discussed how VPaaS enables you to move fast, creating scalable video experiences that reach your aud...
Dec. 9, 2016 02:42 PM EST Reads: 267
WebRTC is the future of browser-to-browser communications, and continues to make inroads into the traditional, difficult, plug-in web communications world. The 6th WebRTC Summit continues our tradition of delivering the latest and greatest presentations within the world of WebRTC. Topics include voice calling, video chat, P2P file sharing, and use cases that have already leveraged the power and convenience of WebRTC.
Dec. 9, 2016 02:15 PM EST Reads: 1,788
"At ROHA we develop an app called Catcha. It was developed after we spent a year meeting with, talking to, interacting with senior citizens watching them use their smartphones and talking to them about how they use their smartphones so we could get to know their smartphone behavior," explained Dave Woods, Chief Innovation Officer at ROHA, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Dec. 9, 2016 02:15 PM EST Reads: 829
20th Cloud Expo, taking place June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Cloud computing is now being embraced by a majority of enterprises of all sizes. Yesterday's debate about public vs. private has transformed into the reality of hybrid cloud: a recent survey shows that 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy.
Dec. 9, 2016 11:45 AM EST Reads: 2,384


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Google turned 15 today. The company celebrated by unveiling a new version of their algorithm. Meanwhile, a judge issued a ruling that a class-action suit that against Google's targeted ads can proceed.
The class-action lawsuit concerns Gmail. When you use Gmail, Google scans your emails for keywords which determine what text ads you'll be served. The lawsuit says that that scanning is a kind of wiretapping.
This seems like a good example of privacy concerns run a bit amok. Gmail's a very useful, putatively free service. Rather than paying Google money, we pay by consenting to be advertised to. We give away a sliver of our privacy to algorithms that can show us diaper ads if our emails are filled with the word "baby.' It's the price of free, and it's not a bad price. Equating that kind of disinterested, impersonal surveillance to a wiretap feels like a misunderstanding of technology. It'll be interesting to see where this lawsuit goes.


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While the Blu-ray Disc Association may not have made any official noises about the existence of 4K Blu-ray discs, a leak from a disc manufacturer reveals that they're on the way—and they pack 100GB of delicious data.
TechRadar reports that disc manufacturer Singulus has stated that it will provide "the machine technology for three-layer Blu-ray Discs with a storage volume of about 100GB." So, that machine, called BLULINE III, can comfortably sling a 4K movie onto a single disc.
The big—and unanswered!—question, though, is whether or not current Blu-ray players will be able to play the discs. At best a software of firmware update would be required; at worst, a new Blu-ray player. Let's wait and see. [TechRadar]
Image by /pitzyper! under Creative Commons license


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Hyenas, the new spacefaring shooter from the team behind Alien Isolation, launches its alpha test tomorrow on PC.
On July 14 at 6 a.m. PT/9 a.m. ET, Hyenas will launch its very first alpha session for players to try out the new game from Creative Assembly. The alpha will be sticking around for PC players for just a few short days, wrapping up early next week on July 18 at 1 a.m. PT/4 a.m. ET.
The only catch with this new alpha session is that it’s limited to PC users in North America. Creative Assembly has stated that the alpha test for Hyenas will be coming to Europe at some point in the near future, as well as other regions and console platforms, and to register for access you can head over to the official Hyenas website (opens in new tab).
The minimum specs for the Hyenas alpha are fairly steep, but Creative Assembly did preface this by saying the system requirements were high due to the fact that’s this is an early alpha test. You’ll need 10GB of RAM, 5GB of VRAM, and a modern quad core processor running at at least 2.5Ghz.
If the team behind Alien Isolation didn’t immediately sell you on Hyenas, maybe this will: it’s a slick new fast-paced shooter set in space, riffing off the ongoing billionaire space race. It’s also incorporating PvPvE elements, which basically sounds like Hunt: Showdown in space (and that sounds bloody brilliant).
We won’t have to wait too long till full release either, as Hyenas is slated to launch next year for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. Considering Creative Assembly’s brilliant pedigree, covering work on the excellent Alien Isolation to Halo Wars 2, this is definitely one game to watch.
Check out our full Hyenas preview for more of what to expect from the wild new shooter from one of the best developers out there.


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GLOBAL: SABMiller begins global campaign for Grolsch
The global marketing push will focus on a symbol inspired by the Grolsch logo, known as "the Mark", said SABMiller, which acquired the lager brand in February 2008 for EUR816m (US$1.2bn).
Marketing campaigns will initially be launched in Poland, followed by Russia, a spokesperson for the brewer told just-drinks today (1 October). Financial details were not disclosed.
"Ultimately we expect most markets to implement the global positioning and the campaign, although the specific in country execution may have slight differences and will depend on scheduling with respect to current creative," said the spokesperson.
Commenting on the inspiration behind the campaign, Ronald van Amerongen, international brand director for Grolsch, said: "We wanted to find a way to move Grolsch from a brand with the iconic Swingtop, to a brand which is a global icon in itself."
SABMiller announced in August that it would begin selling Grolsch in 500ml cans and screwcap bottles in Russia, at a cheaper price to the iconic swingtop version, which will continue to be imported to the country.
Since acquiring Netherlands-based Grolsch, SABMiller has talked up the brand's international potential. It currently sells 3m hectolitres worldwide.
"The new campaign will help to deliver this by bringing Grolsch's unique character to life in a charismatic and intriguing way," said van Amerongen.
As part of the global campaign, consumers will be directed to a website, not yet launched, named the-mark.org.
While Budweiser lager will be available in stadiums at this summer's FIFA World Cup, SABMiller has secured a deal with the football body to exclusively supply hundreds of thousands of fans at screenin...
SABMiller is to begin selling Miller Genuine Draft on draught in pubs and bars across Scotland....
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In agreeing bilaterally to that geo-blocking, the operator of the Steam platform, Valve and five PC video games publishers unlawfully restricted cross-border sales of certain PC video games that are compatible with that platform.
Acting on information received concerning geo-blocking of certain PC video games on the Steam platform according to users’ geographical location, the Commission began an investigation. By decisions of 20 January 2021, it found that the operator of the platform, Valve and five games publishers, namely Bandai, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax, infringed EU competition law.
The Commission found that Valve and the five publishers had participated in a group of anti-competitive agreements or concerted practices which were intended to restrict cross-border sales of certain PC video games that were compatible with the Steam platform, by putting in place territorial control functionalities during different ,periods between 2010 and 2015, in particular the Baltic countries and certain countries in central and Eastern Europe.
Valve brought an action before the General Court of the European Union, seeking to have the decision annulled in so far as it related to it.
In its judgment delivered today, the General Court dismisses the action. The General Court finds that the Commission established to the requisite legal standard the existence of an agreement or concerted practice between Valve and each of the five publishers having as its object the restriction of parallel imports through geo-blocking of keys enabling activation and, in certain cases, use of the video games at issue on the Steam platform. That geo-blocking sought to prevent the video games, distributed in certain countries at low prices, from being purchased by distributors or users located in other countries where prices are much higher.
Thus, the geo-blocking at issue did not pursue an objective of protecting the copyright of the publishers of the PC video games, but was used to eliminate parallel imports of those video games and protect the high royalty amounts collected by the publishers, or the margins earned by Valve.
In response to a number of arguments put forward by Valve, the General Court also rules on the relationship between EU competition law and copyright. In particular, it observes that copyright is intended only to ensure for the right holders concerned protection of the right to exploit commercially the marketing or the making available of the protected subject matter, by the grant of licences in return for payment of remuneration.
However, it does not guarantee them the opportunity to demand the highest possible remuneration or to engage in conduct such as to lead to artificial price differences between the partitioned national markets.
Such partitioning and such an artificial price difference to which it gives rise are irreconcilable with the completion of the internal market.
Nor has Valve managed to cast doubt on the overall categorisation of the collusive conduct at issue as being sufficiently harmful to competition and as a restriction by object by referring to the alleged pro-competitive effects of the geo-blocking at issue.
PRESS RELEASE No 147/23
Luxembourg, 27 September 2023
Judgment of the General Court in Case T-172/21 | Valve Corporation v Commission


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City National Bank…
Sponsors Veritage Miami
In just a few weeks, thousands of wine, beer, spirits and food lovers from across South Florida will gather for VeritageMiami – a four-day event that offers plenty of fun and excitement, while benefiting the South Florida community.
“City National Bank is proud to be the presenting sponsor of VeritageMiami,” said Jorge Gonzalez, the bank’s president and CEO. “This is an excellent opportunity to highlight Miami’s culinary scene and top sommeliers, notable chefs, prestigious wineries, winemakers and breweries with our community.”
Gonzalez added that City National Bank has a deep commitment to community service through sponsorships, corporate donations and the volunteer efforts of its employees. In 2011 and again in 2013, CNB was also honored as “Community Bank of the Year” by the South Florida Business Journal and received the “Outstanding Community Service Award” from the same publication in 2012. Readers of the Daily Business Review also voted City National Bank the Best Community Bank.
This year’s VeritageMiami lineup begins with a Craft Beer Tasting at Wynwood Walls on Wednesday, April 9, where guests will pair treats from local restaurants with 100 craft beers and micro-brews. The celebration continues on April 10, at a Fine Wine Tasting at the Village of Merrick Park. More than 65 wine producers and importers will showcase 300 wines, which guests will sample and pair with delights from some of Miami’s most celebrated restaurants.
On Friday, April 11, the popular Interactive Dinner will take place at the InterContinental Miami, headlined by Alberto Cabrera of Bread + Butter, Todd Erickson of HaVen South Beach, José Mendín of The Pubbelly Group, Giorgio Rapicavoli of Eating House and César Zapata of The Federal Food, Drink & Provisions.
VeritageMiami will wrap up with an Auction & Wine Dinner on the diamond at Marlins Park on Saturday, April 12. Guests will enjoy dinner, award-winning wines, and an after-party, along with an auction to benefit United Way of Miami-Dade.
Since its inception, VeritageMiami has raised more than $12 million for the community. All proceeds support United Way’s work in education, financial stability and health. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.veritagemiami.com.


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CORRECTED-UPDATE 1-Mexico factory exports dip for third month straight in March
(Corrects second-to-last paragraph to show that February monthly growth is compared to January, not March) MEXICO CITY, April 26 (Reuters) - Mexico's factory-made exports slumped in March, falling for the third month in a row, data showed on Tuesday, as weak global demand dragged on Latin America's No. 2 economy. Manufactured exports fell 2.8 percent in March from February in seasonally adjusted terms, the national statistics agency said. Mexico exports mostly manufactured goods like cars and televisions to the United States, its top trading partner, and many shipments are parts used in American factories. Weakness in U.S. output has weighed on Mexican growth since last year. Non-oil consumer imports fell 1.2 percent in March compared with February in a sign domestic consumption that has helped buoy the Mexican economy could be flagging. A separate report showed the Mexican economy grew 0.2 percent in February compared to January, lifted by the expansion of the services sector while industry contracted. Mexico posted a $1.956 billion trade deficit in March when adjusted for seasonal swings. In non-seasonally adjusted terms, Mexico posted a trade surplus of $155 million . (Reporting by Michael O'Boyle; Editing by Meredith Mazzilli)
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