Here’s a wonderful discovery.
Onavo’s VPN allow Facebook to monitor user activity across apps, giving Facebook a big advantage in terms of spotting new trends across the larger mobile ecosystem. For example, Facebook gets an early heads up about apps that are becoming breakout hits; it can tell which are seeing slowing user growth; it sees which apps’ new features appear to be resonating with their users, and much more.
This is such a shame. I actually used to use Onavo back in the day when their VPN would actually crunch the size of images to save data on your plan. I heavily use Facebook Ads for clients (and sometimes myself) and this is not a good thing. No company should ever have access to everything a person does online.
Don’t believe me? Check out Gizmodo’s write up on the subject.
Sites are evaluated by examining a sample of pages from the site. Depending on how many violations of the Better Ads Standards are found, the site will be evaluated as having a status of Passing, Warning, or Failing. The evaluation status of sites can be accessed via the Ad Experience Report API. Site owners can also see more detailed results, such as the specific violations of the Better Ads Standards that were found, via the Ad Experience Report in Google’s Search Console. From the Report site owners can also request that their site be re-reviewed after they have addressed the non-compliant ad experiences.
This is a welcome change. Any web page that automatically plays music, a video with the sound on, or otherwise invades my personal space shouldn’t be on the web, as far as I’m concerned. That being said, I do work in advertising and make money from digital ad placements. I think the digital ad experience should enhance a user’s visit to a website, not take away from it. I’m glad to see Google moving this direction.
The day many, many people have been waiting for is here: the new iMac Pro from Apple is available for order. With a base model of $4,000, it’s no surprise that the configurations escalate quickly. I priced out an ideal setup for myself and here’s what I got:
- 2.5GHz 14-core Intel Xeon W processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.3GHz
- 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 ECC memory
- 4TB SSD
- Radeon Pro Vega 64 with 16GB of HBM2 memory
- Magic Mouse 2 + Magic Trackpad 2 – Space Gray
- Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad – US English – Space Gray
All that came down to $10,948.00. Granted I did skip the Final Cut Pro X pre-installed, but I may rethink that now that Apple has added support for VR and HDR video editing.
Because the product is grounded in full-funnel analytics, Simply Measured gives social teams better intelligence to reach the right people, content marketers insight to create more relevant materials and digital agencies opportunities to win new business and foster client loyalty.
Sprout Social is a truly amazing service. So for them to announce this week that they’ve acquired Simply Measured to increase the value of their social analytics couldn’t be a better early Christmas present. It’s also amazing to see that the market is expected to grow to $9.54 billion by 2022.
Source: Sprout Social Acquires Social Analytics Firm Simply Measured
Amazon and Apple are beginning to run out of time if they still intend to release a Prime Video app for the Apple TV in 2017 as previously promised. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced in June that the streaming app would be available on the company’s set-top box by the end of the year, giving Apple TV owners a direct path to watching TV shows and movies available from the popular service.
“Amazon is coming to the TV app and all Apple TVs later this year with Amazon Prime Video,” Cook said at Apple’s WWDC keynote, before rattling off a string of original Amazon shows including Mozart in the Jungle, Man in the High Castle, and Transparent.
You have to wonder what’s taking so long if Time Cook was confident enough to announce the “partnership” so long ago.
Source: The Verge
Version 4.3 of CARROT Weather for iOS launched today, bringing a ground-up redesign of its Apple Watch app that offers power and flexibility in a beautifully designed package. CARROT Weather’s story isn’t that it had an old, out-dated Apple Watch app that’s now finally become modern.
Source: CARROT Weather Adds Powerful, Redesigned Apple Watch App
Astronomers have confirmed that an object that recently passed by our planet is from outside our Solar System — the first interstellar asteroid that’s ever been observed. And it doesn’t look like any object we’ve ever seen in our cosmic neighborhood before.
Source: The first asteroid we’ve seen from outside our Solar System is totally bizarre
If at first you don’t succeed
I really tried to like the Facebook Events app when Facebook announced it last year. It just didn’t provide a ton of value for the events I was interested in. Let’s hope that this version will be a vast improvement.
Source: Facebook relaunches Events as a Foursquare-like app called Local – The Verge