Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 144
May 30, 2017
Reddit Users Can Now Add Their Location to Posts
Mobile users of online discussion forum Reddit will be able to let people know where they’re located.
Reddit, the self-labeled “front page of the internet,” has partnered with location check-in app Foursquare to use its data to power a new Reddit feature debuting today that lets users add their location to any post.
The new feature helps Reddit users add “content and interest” to their posts beyond the usual discussion of politics and pop culture by its 250 million users, Mike Harkey, Foursquare’s vice president of business development, said in a blog post announcing the partnership. He gave the example of users tagging their locations when posting food photos or discussing trips to their local parks. “Think of location in Reddit as an extra emphasis — at-the-ready like the perfect punctuation, or headline,” Harkey wrote.
For Foursquare, the deal marks the latest step in the company’s evolution from a social media app to its more recent incarnation as a “location intelligence” company. Foursquare has previously licensed its database of more than 90 million mapped locations—public places like stores, restaurants, or museums—to companies such as Uber and Airbnb, and the company also began offering up its mobile notification system to developers earlier this year.
Foursquare also pointed out that the location-tagging feature is optional, which is not surprising considering that many Reddit users prefer to remain anonymous on the site. Mobile users who enable location services will simply see a drop-down menu with options for tagging a location.
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The move marks Reddit’s latest attempt to increase engagement as the site moves closer to the model of a mainstream social network. In March, Reddit started rolling out public profiles for its users and, last year, the company finally released mobile versions of the site with iOS and Android apps. Adding location-tagging is another way for Reddit to appear more like other social media sites, with some people noting recently that Reddit is beginning to look more and more like Facebook and Twitter.
Reddit has seen quite a few changes since co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman returned to the 12-year-old company in 2015, after interim CEO Ellen Pao stepped down in the wake of a user revolt over her firing of a popular Reddit employee. In addition to the site’s new features, the company’s makeover has seen crackdowns on online harassment and spam, with Ohanian shutting down two popular forums frequented by the “alt-right,” a group often associated with white nationalists and other racist groups.
Source:
http://fortune.com/2017/05/30/reddit-location-tags-foursquare/
Top Media Publishers Drive 86% Growth in Video Views on Facebook
In the fast-paced world of online video, it is critical that stakeholders – whether that’s creators, media publishers, brands, marketing teams, or advertisers – have access to the most relevant data so they can build those insights into their production, and distribution strategies. But how do you determine the right strategies for your brand, and what data do you need at your fingertips to make those mission-critical decisions?
As part of our quarterly deep-dive into the insights that matter in online video, Tubular’s new ‘State of Online Video Report Q1 2017’, highlights the data on total social video performance across all the video distribution platforms that Tubular tracks. You’ll be able to utilise our observations on brands or media & entertainment, specific industries of interest, or our Q2 2017 predictions to inform your own video strategy.
The report covers the growth, sizing and benchmarking insights that matter based on total social video performance in Q1-2017 across the main video platforms. In addition, we also turned the spotlight on some different publishers, and different industry verticals and platforms to see what kind of content was really resonating with online video viewers.
In terms of video consumption on Facebook, we took a look at the top 2000 creators uploading content to that site, and found that media publishers were generating an incredible number of views and engagements. The top 2000 media companies active on Facebook saw a 86% increase in social video views in Q1 2017, compared to Q1 2016. The research also highlighted the fact that these publishers saw a 73% increase in likes, shares, and comments year-on-year, and that video uploads from the top 2000 media companies had increased by 109% over the same time period.
Source: Top Media Publishers Drive 86% Growth in Video Views on Facebook http://tubularinsights.com/top-media-publishers-facebook-video/#ixzz4iayDlIaL
©TubularInsights.com, All Rights Reserved
Microsoft is taking aim at digital artists with substantial Surface Pen updates
Just a few days ago, Microsoft announced an upgrade to its Surface Pro touchscreen computing device (Redmond hates when you call it a “tablet”). You might have missed it because not a whole heck of a lot has changed. The Surface Pro now has the latest 7th-gen Intel processors, extended battery life up to 13.5 hours, and a swanky new keyboard covered in Alcantara, a material that feels a bit like suede, but is made from polyester and polyurethane to make it durable. What has significantly changed, however, is the Microsoft Surface Pen, and that could be a big step forward for Microsoft in its current efforts to court the creative class.
The Surface Pen no longer comes bundled with the Surface Pro, but it has gotten performance bumps in almost every column of its spec sheet.
One of the most-notable upgrades is the shortened latency of 21 milliseconds, which is twice as fast as the previous model. According to professional illustrator Clint Baker, responsiveness is key for being able to capture the nuance of an artist’s style. “I want drawing on a digital format to feel just like drawing on paper or canvas,” he told me via email.
Baker says he does about 70 percent of his illustration work digitally using a stylus. He’s currently using a Wacom Cintiq, which is one of the standard setups in the illustrating profession. The large, pro-grade Cintiq displays keep the response rate down around 12 milliseconds, but Microsoft’s Surface Pen is actually faster than Wacom’s more-portable Cintiq displays, which are more comparable in terms of size and price and have a response rate around 25 milliseconds. Apple, not surprisingly, doesn’t disclose the latency of its Pencil.
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Pressure sensitivity is another area where the Surface Pen has jumped in performance. It now recognizes 4,096 different levels of pressure, up from 1,024 in the previous model. Baker says this is another important feature. “So much personality comes out in line quality—and that has to do a lot with pressure.” Even the high-end Wacom Cintiq drawing displays only claim 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity.
The Surface Pen now recognizes the angle of the stylus for controlling line shape and shading. This feature is popular in the Apple Pencil. Microsoft also claims to have reduced the parallax performance, meaning the line you draw will appear closer to the tip of the pen as you move along. The glass of the screen can sometimes make you feel as though you’re separated from the drawing, which can be distracting.
Microsoft has also announced some updates to its pen-based software, like a new Whiteboard app, which acts as a space for collaborated drawing and note taking. The virtual “pencil case” can also now help brushes and Pen settings commute with you between apps.
Source:
http://www.popsci.com/microsoft-surface-pen-artists#page-6
Kik App Debuts Digital Currency Amid Bitcoin Boom
Messaging app Kik Interactive is the latest and potentially most well-established company to delve into a quirky new form of fundraising — creating its own digital currency.
Kik, based in Waterloo, Canada, unveiled plans for an “initial coin offering,” a process by which it sells tokens that can be used to buy services on its platform. The idea is that as more and more people use Kik, the value of those tokens, called “Kin”, will rise in value.
Interest in coin offerings is high, thanks to surging prices of bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Called ICOs, they give a wide range of people the chance to invest in a company or any other endeavor early on. While unregulated, they have proved popular, with investors spending around $330 million on tokens over the past year, according to data compiled by cryptocurrency blog The Control. Earlier this month, cloud-storage startup Storj raised almost $30 million in five days via an ICO.
Kik, which has raised about $120 million (in real money) from investors including Tencent Holdings Ltd., could serve to add a new layer of legitimacy to the process.
“Kik will be the largest install base of cryptocurrency users in the world,” Chief Executive Officer Ted Livingston said. “Kin, on day one will be the most-used cryptocurrency in the world.”
The move comes as Kik finally reveals how many people actually use its app regularly each month: 15 million. That’s a far-cry from the 300 million total registered users number it was sharing around this time last year.
Kik has traditionally been most popular among teens because, unlike Facebook Inc.’s Messenger or WhatsApp, they don’t need a phone number to use it. Growth has been tough in the past few years though, as teenagers get smartphones earlier and Kik users switch to Facebook apps once they leave high school.
Kik plans to gift a certain amount of Kin to each user. They’ll be able use the new currency to buy games, live video streams and other digital products. The company’s goal is to attract new merchants to sell on the platform, creating a snowball effect where Kin becomes more valuable and more sellers pile onto Kik, increasing its popularity.
“We will create an economy where millions and millions of mainstream consumers are earning in a cryptocurrency for the first time ever,’’ Livingston said. “They’re going to want to spend in that same cryptocurrency as well.’’
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Scribd says it has over 500,000 subscribers paying $8.99/month for ebooks, audiobooks, and now news
Scribd’s $8.99/month subscription service started out with only ebooks. Over time, it’s expanded to audiobooks, sheet music, documents, magazines — and, as of Tuesday, newspapers. “Select articles” from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, as well as some archival content from the Financial Times, will now be available to Scribd subscribers.
And Scribd says there are quite a lot of subscribers: The service now has over half a million paying subscribers, paying $8.99 a month, and the company is profitable. I was so surprised by the subscriber number that I asked CEO Trip Adler to repeat himself; it’s true, he said: “We have a $50 million revenue run rate.” The San Francisco–based company now has more than 110 employees.
Newspaper content was a “natural addition” for Scribd, Adler said. The most popular forms of the content on the service are, in order, ebooks, audiobooks, and documents. Magazines were added last fall. Scribd used to also include comic books and graphic novels in its service, but stopped including them because there wasn’t enough reader interest. It also switched from a completely unlimited content model to one that offers access to three ebooks and one audiobook per month. (Documents, magazines, and newspapers are unlimited.)
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Judging by Scribd’s stated membership numbers, the switch in business model appears to have worked. The numbers seem impressive and are not something that I would have predicted a couple years ago when the ebook subscription site Oyster shut down — especially considering that Amazon keeps adding more reading offerings to Prime.
Scribd won’t be focusing on breaking news from the papers it partners with. Instead, it’s looking for longer, more evergreen content that “fits in with a book kind of experience,” Adler said. “We’re going for the longer-form content that might actually take a few minutes to read, has a longer shelf life, and will be interesting beyond the first day it comes out.” The newspaper content — along with Scribd’s other content — is organized by interest.
Each of the newspapers is making a fixed number of articles available to Scribd; Scribd editors choose which ones to include on the service. Some of the publishers are being paid a flat licensing fee; others are paid by the read.
“People have been talking for a long time about how to monetize journalism and we think we’ve come up with a really interesting answer,” Adler said. The newspapers included for now are the big names that aren’t having as much trouble monetizing as smaller papers, but Scribd may include more papers in the future. “We think, if we can offer all these different newspapers together for one subscription price, we can return more money to journalists that way.”
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Trudeau asks Pope to apologise to indigenous people for decades of child abuse by the church
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has urged Pope Francis to visit Canada and issue an apology to the indigenous people over the Catholic Church’s role in a school system where aboriginal children were abused for decades.
Trudeau has pledged to completely accept the government’s failure in not acknowledging the century-long “dark chapter” in the country’s history.
The Canadian PM was in the Vatican on Monday, 29 May, as part of his trip to Italy for the G7 summit. “I told [the pope] how important it is for Canadians to move forward on real reconciliation with the indigenous peoples and I highlighted how he could help by issuing an apology,” Trudeau told reporters.
The residential schools were set up to take children away from their families and incorporate them into mainstream Canadian society. They were typically run by Christian churches on behalf of Ottawa from the 1840s to the 1990s. The last one closed in 1996.
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The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report, which was released in December 2015 after interviewing families of victims, states that around 150,000 were forcibly sent to live in church-run boarding schools, where they were forbidden to speak their language or practise their own culture.
The torture was so cruel that many endured physical and sexual abuse. At least 3,201 student lost their lives at the schools. The report also said that it was possible that many more deaths went unrecorded.
The TRC, which has called the residential school system “cultural genocide”, asked for a papal apology as part of a national reconciliation framework to heal the sufferings of the survivors.
The Vatican has not commented on the development, but said that the meeting with Trudeau was “cordial” and lasted about 36 minutes.
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It added that the talk “focused on the themes of integration and reconciliation, as well as religious freedom and current ethical issues” but did not directly mention about the apology.
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Google is offering new Google Play Music subscribers four free months
Google is running a deal on its music streaming service and storage locker Google Play Music. Typically, the site offers up a 90-day free trial when you sign up, but it’s now giving new subscribers an extra month of free time.
The service allows users scan up to 50,000 songs from their music library, and listen to custom radio stations on their computer or mobile device. Users who use the free tier have to contend with ads, but subscribers who pay $9.99 (or $14.99 for a family account) can avoid ads, listen to over 35 million songs, download music to listen offline, and get access to YouTube Red.
Google has offered similar deals in the past, and Android Police notes that it’s not clear how long the deal will remain active. At the very least, it’s an opportunity to check out the service if you’ve never tried it, and you can always cancel your subscription when your four months are up.
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Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/28/15707130/google-play-music-four-free-months-deal
