As Twitter continues to look for ways to monetise its platform beyond basic advertising, it is building more tools for businesses that turn Twitter into more of a utility that helps them do their jobs.
Today at CES, Twitter said it’s going to make it easier for publishers to better understand what sort of content is resonating with its readers on the social network though a new kind of analytics dashboard, and, in a separate dashboard, to better track real-time information around events and especially to track events that are coming up.
Together, the two tools underscore how Twitter continues to plug away at building out a richer experience for organizations that use Twitter not just as part of their marketing but for wider business activities, and simply for getting work done. That directly feeds back into Twitter’s advertising business, of course: the more essential the platform feels to an organization, the more likely they are to spend money on using it.
That advertising business has been slowly but surely continuing to grow: today Kay Madati, Twitter’s VP of content partnerships, said that premium video ads account for half of the company’s ad revenue now. He also noted that the company’s had eight consecutive quarters of growth in daily active usage, although that statistic doesn’t tell the whole story, with recent quarters indicating that the company continues to struggle with overall user growth.
The concept for a new Twitter publisher dashboard would offer insights and analytics that can better inform organizations’ content strategies.
Keith Coleman, Twitter’s VP of Product (pictured right), clarified the dashboard is still very much an “early concept.”
However, the idea is to offer publishers an easy way to see who on Twitter is reading and engaging with their content, when they’re viewing it, and what content is working best.
The goal is to allow publishers to better optimize what they produce to make it effective, the company said.
Events, meanwhile, is also going to be getting a boost of attention. Twitter is working a dashboard that will show what events are coming up, including breaking news events.
For example, an event like the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas would be the type of the event that would appear on this dashboard.
This, in turn, can link up with a new kind of conversation format that the company is preparing to roll out: when users now write Tweets, Twitter will provide some more context to them around the Tweet by including, for example, a location underneath their Twitter handle that could better explain what is going on so that a single statement makes more sense to casual readers who haven’t been following all of the person’s previous Tweets:
Twitter’s wider focus on events is not new, of course: the company has long described itself as the town hall and town square for the world, providing real-time conversations about what is going on. Twitter’s long been trying to harness that in a more actionable way for ordinary users by way of hashtags, and in a more organised way for organizations. Efforts at events calendars stretch back to as far as 2017.
The thinking behind the events dashboard will allow the publishers to figure out – in advance – how they want to participate in that conversation on Twitter — either in terms of the content that they publish, or (more hopefully, perhaps) through advertising and promoting content.
Twitter, also discussed how the events would appear on Twitter, explaining that it’s trying to making it easier for newcomers to the network to follow events, without the need of a knowing the hashtag.
“We know people want to come to see what’s happening. And particularly, they want to come to Twitter to see what’s happening when events are unfolding in the real world,” said Coleman, speaking on stage at CES this morning.
“If you think about the experience of actually following that – it’s hard. You have to follow the publications, you have to follow the journalists, you have to follow the attendees whose names you don’t even know. You don’t have all the hashtags,” he said.
The events section will organize this information for you, so you can “tune in” to the live events, without having to know who or what to follow.
While the analytics dashboard is likely to be something that would be accessed through media.twitter.com and aimed at publishers and others using Twitter in a business context, events will have a wider remit: it will be pinned to the top of the timeline, in Explore and accessible through Search, Coleman said.
Source: TechCrunch
A new drone from the NIMBUS group at the University of Nebraska can fall out of a plane, parachute down, fly to a certain place, dig a hole, hide sensors inside it and then fly away like some crazy wasp. Robots are weird.
The goal of the project is to allow drones to place sensors in distant and hostile environments. The system starts on a plane or helicopter, which ejects the entire thing inside of a cylindrical canister. The canister falls for a while, then slows down with a parachute. Once it’s close enough to the ground it pops out, lands and drills a massive hole with a screw drill and leaves the heavy parts to fly home.
Drones can only fly for so long while carrying heavy gear, so this ensures that the drone can get there without using battery and escape without running down to empty.
“Battery powered drones have very short flight times, especially when flying with a heavy load, which we are since we have our digging apparatus and sensor system. So to get to distant locations, we need to hitch a ride on another vehicle,” said NIMBUS co-director Carrick Detweiler to Spectrum. “This allows it to save energy for return trips. In this video we used a much larger gas powered UAS with multiple hours of flight time, but our same system could be deployed from manned aircraft or other systems.”
The drone can even sense if the ground is too hard for digging and choose another spot, allowing for quite a bit of flexibility. Given that these things can land silently in far-off locations, you can imagine some interesting military uses for this technology. I’m sure it will be fine for us humans, though. I mean what could go wrong with a robot that can hide things underground in distant, unpopulated places and escape undetected?
Source: TechCrunch
This light makes the smart home even more accessible. Installed as any other ceiling downlight, the June AI downlight features Amazon Alexa through integrated JBL speakers. There’s a light in there, too.
The idea is great: make the smart home invisible. Instead of having an Amazon Echo sitting on a table, this device sits in a person’s ceiling doing the job of a normal light. But when called upon, it can play music, control devices or anything else possible with an Echo.
“This integration of technologies easily and affordably converts any house into a functional, seamless smart home,” says Jeff Spencer, Acuity Brands Lighting vice president and general manager, Residential, in a released statement. “Being located in the ceiling creates a unique advantage enabling Juno AI to deliver not only intelligence through simple voice commands, but also exceptional lighting and sound.”
Devices like this will continue to appear as Amazon and Google expand their reach by working with more developers and hardware makers. At this point, both companies are seemingly more interested in licensing their services than selling their own devices.
Source: TechCrunch
The former Trump campaign chair keeps getting in trouble thanks at least in part to subpar digital security.
Source: Wired
The 15-inch Spectre x360 is bringing OLED back to laptops after its disappointing disappearance last year. It looks just as stunning as before, and this time it’s paired with one of the most powerful 2-in-1s you can buy.
The post HP Spectre x360 15 AMOLED hands-on review appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Last night an Associated Press tweet claimed that, in placing blame for the government shutdown, “it takes two to tango.” Twitter thought otherwise.
Source: Wired
Collaboration tools tend to be geared towards workers who are sitting at a desk for much of the day, but there are plenty of shift workers, also known as first line workers, who rarely use a computer, but still need to communicate with one another and management. Microsoft released several new features today aimed at including these workers.
In a blog post announcing the new features, Emma Williams, Microsoft corporate vice president for modern workplace verticals, wrote that there are two billion such workers. By making the product more mobile-friendly and linking to existing enterprise employee management systems, Microsoft can make Teams more relevant for shift employees.
For starters, Microsoft is making mobile Teams more flexible to meet the needs of a variety of shift worker jobs. Some might need to record and share audio messages, while others might need to share their location or access the camera. Whatever the requirements, Microsoft has started with a Firstline Worker configuration policy template, which IT can customize to meet the needs of various worker types.
The mobile tool also includes a navigation bar, which allows workers to add the tools they use most often for easy access. The idea is to make it as simple as possible to access the tools they need, given that these workers tend to be on their feet or on the move a good part of the day.
Photo: Microsoft
Next, the company has released a new API to help IT connect Teams to existing workforce management systems. The Graph API for Shifts enables first line managers, who are responsible for setting up worker schedules to share data between a company’s workforce management system and Teams, allowing employees to get all of their shift information in one tool. This will be available in public preview later in the quarter, according to the company.
Finally, the tool now includes a new Praise feature, designed to let managers recognize good work by their employees by issuing badges with messages like “Thank you” and “Problem solver.”
The company wants Teams to be more than a tool for knowledge workers. These new features provide a way to include workers that are sometimes left out of these kinds of collaboration tools. The new features also help Microsoft compete with a number of startups who trying to attack the same problem.
These include Crew, a startup that scored a $35 million Series C round just last month, and has raised almost $60 million, and Zinc, which also takes aim at the deskless worker, and has raised $16 million, according to Crunchbase.
Whether Microsoft can appeal to both the knowledge worker and the first-line variety in the same tool remains to be seen, but these updates are clearly an effort to take on this space.
Source: TechCrunch
This year’s CES, one of the biggest consumer tech showcases in the world, continues Wednesday. Join us for live updates from the show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Source: Wired
Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Elections, has been fined £15,000 in a UK court after pleading guilty to failing to comply with an enforcement notice issued by the national data protection watchdog, the Guardian reports.
While the fine itself is a small and rather symbolic one, given the disgraced political analytics firm went into administration last year, the implications of the prosecution are more sizeable.
Last year the Information Commissioner’s Office ordered SCL to hand over all the data it holds on U.S. academic, professor David Carroll, within 30 days. After the company failed to do so it was taken to court by the ICO.
Prior to Cambridge Analytica gaining infamy for massively misusing Facebook user data, the company, which was used by the Trump campaign, claimed to have up to 7,000 data points on the entire U.S. electorate — circa 240M people.
So Carroll’s attempt to understand exactly what data the company had on him, and how the information was processed to create a voter profile of it, has much wider relevance.
Under EU law, citizens can file a Subject Access Request (SAR) to obtain personal data held on them. So Carroll, a U.S. citizen, decided to bring a test case by requesting his data even though he is not a UK citizen — having learnt Cambridge Analytica had processed his personal data in the U.K.
He lodged his original SAR in January 2017 after becoming suspicious about the company’s claim to have built profiles of every U.S. voter.
Cambridge Analytica responded to the SAR in March 2017 but only sent partial data. So Carroll complained to the ICO which backed his request — issuing an enforcement notice on SCL Elections in May 2018, days after the (now) scandal-hit company announced it was shutting down.
July 4, 2017: I filed with the UK Information Commissioner with concerns about Cambridge Analytica’s failure to answer questions about our data
May 5, 2018: ICO issues Enforcement Notice to comply with disclosure requests under criminal penalty
Jan 9, 2019: CA/SCL pleads guilty
— David Carroll
(@profcarroll) January 9, 2019
The company pulled the plug on its business in the wake of the Facebook data misuse scandal, when it emerged SCL had paid an academic with developer access to Facebook’s platform to harvest data on millions of users without proper consents in a bid to create psychological profiles of U.S. voters for election campaign purposes.
The story snowballed into a global scandal for Facebook and triggered a major (and still ongoing) investigation by the ICO into how online data is used for political campaigning.
It also led the ICO to hit Facebook with a £500,000 fine last year (the maximum possible under the relevant UK data protection law). Although the company is appealing.
The SCL prosecution is an important one, cementing the fact that anyone who requests their personal information from a U.K.-based company or organisation is legally entitled to have that request answered, in full, under national data protection law — regardless of whether they’re a British citizen or not.
Commenting in a statement, information commissioner Elizabeth Denham said: “This prosecution, the first against Cambridge Analytica, is a warning that there are consequences for ignoring the law. Wherever you live in the world, if your data is being processed by a UK company, UK data protection laws apply.
“Organisations that handle personal data must respect people’s legal privacy rights. Where that does not happen and companies ignore ICO enforcement notices, we will take action.”
The Daily Beast reports that at today’s hearing, at Hendon magistrates court, the court was told that the administrators of Cambridge Analytica and its related companies had now provided relevant passwords to the ICO. Cambridge Analytica had previously failed to supply these passwords.
This means the regulator should be able to gain access to more of the data it seized when it raided the company’s London offices in March last year. So it’s at least possible Carroll’s SAR might eventually be fulfilled that way, i.e. by the regulatory sifting through the circa 700TB of data it seized.
However Carroll told TechCrunch he’s hoping for a faster route to get to the truth of exactly what the company did with his data, telling us there’s still “a March court event that could yield our end goal: Disclosure”.
“Why would they rather plead guilty to a criminal offense instead of complying with disclosure required by UK DPA ‘98. What are they hiding? Why has it come to this?” he added.
“Testing the Subject Access Request in this way is an important exercise. Do regulators and companies really know how to fully execute a Subject Access Request? How about when it escalates to a matter of international importance?”
Source: TechCrunch
Commentary: I haven’t eaten beef in a decade, and the new fake meat at CES comes close enough to cow to gross me out. That’s actually a compliment, I think.
Source: CNET
(@profcarroll)