There’s been quite a sense of anticipation, if not excitement, among podcasters about Apple’s announcement last week on some significant enhancements the company is making this autumn to its podcast app for iPhones and other iOS devices. The big change in the app is potentially a game-changer for podcasting as it will provide podcasters with basic analytics functionality to offer evidence of listening behaviours by subscribers (where they paused in a podcast, how much of it they listened to, did …
Category: Mobile
WhatsApp has been getting a bit of stick this past week with news of changes to its terms and privacy policy that will allow the messaging service to share your usage behaviours and other data with Facebook. […] by coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook’s systems, Facebook can offer better friend …
Chatbots are all the rage at the moment. These clever computer programs (algorithms, to be more precise) are popping up everywhere online to help you with mundane tasks from getting a weather forecast or currency exchange rate to travel planning to online shopping. Organizations everywhere are experimenting with these useful bits of technology, with varying degrees of success as part of the learning process (remember what happened to Microsoft’s Tay earlier this year?). If you use Siri on your iPhone, …
The Championships, Wimbledon 2016 started yesterday, June 27, and run until July 10. During these two weeks of intense competition, Wimbledon and the competing players will be names and brands in an event that will not only be on television screens large and small across the globe in real time and recorded, but also available and accessible on myriad devices, from smartwatches to big-screen PCs, almost anything that can connect to the global internet any time anywhere. To be sure, there’s …
Augmented reality will be a huge part of our individual and collective experiences in the not too distant future. Our daily lives will be like a journey in virtual reality except in actual reality, immersively overlaid with personalized information that we will engage with, where everything we do is part of a giant contest that awards points to reward behaviours and actions. This is a future vision that I think is persuasively presented in a high-definition video (embedded below) that …
Last week, mobile operator Three UK announced it will block advertising on its network in a trial taking place in mid June. Three’s action marks a new milestone in long-running arguments about online advertising between the online advertising industry, individual web publishers, and consumers who are the targets for much of that content. There’s growing opinion – authenticated, so to speak, by the increasing use of software to block online advertising – that a large proportion of advertising delivered primarily …
Like robots, artificial intelligence and machine learning, one topic getting a lot of attention at the moment is chatbots. Much of the news and commentary about these relatively simple computer programs have been on the negative side – Microsoft’s Tay, for instance, and the blanket coverage of the conversational meltdown that happened within days of the chatbot’s public trial in March. Not a good pointer to the utility and value of such algorithms! (I noticed, btw, that the Tay URL …
Facebook and Twitter are no longer simply text platforms but mobile video channels battling to turn consumers away from TV
Catching up this weekend with news and information in Inoreader, my RSS reader of choice on every device I use, I selected a good dozen or so stories to blog about when time permits. They all join a long list of in-draft posts that, by the time I really do get moments to complete and publish them, the attention opportunities will probably be long past. So I’ll share some of the actual stories directly in this aggregate post that might …
