Facebook has made a feature that was previously exclusive to celebrities and public figures available to the general public — or at least to a few iPhone users who live in the United States — to let them live-stream video on its platform.
The feature is called Live Video, and it’s been used in the past by celebrities like Vin Diesel and presidential candidates like Donald Trump to broadcast to people who follow them on Facebook, almost like a direct-to-viewer news channel.
Now it will be available to anyone who wants to live-stream video to their Facebook friends. This not only bridges the gap between what celebrities and the public can do on Facebook: It also puts Live Video head-to-head with Periscope.
Periscope, which was acquired by Twitter in January, has always been available for anyone to use. Facebook’s focus on celebrities meant the two services didn’t overlap much; now they’ll have to compete for attention from the general public.
Live Video’s debut to the public isn’t the only thing Facebook announced today. The company also released Collage, a tool that makes it easy to share photos and videos in an interactive grid; and teased a new “tool built for mobile sharing.”
Collage seems a lot like the Layout app that allows Instagram users to create similar, well, collages. That app focuses on combining photos into a single image rather than grouping different media into one place, but it’s the same concept.
The new sharing tool is more novel. Facebook said in a blog post it’s “piloting a new design” that shows a drop-down menu when users tap the “What’s on your mind?” prompt at the top of the app “with a few people on iPhone and Android.”
Right now people can share status updates; photos and videos; check-ins; feelings; and Live Videos with the new sharing tool. Facebook says the update will give it the flexibility needed to “include new sharing features in the future.”
The whole thing looks a lot like Tumblr’s sharing menu, which asks people to choose among several different types of media before they can share something. That’s a marked departure from the much simpler mechanism available today.
A new report has found that television commercials are great at convincing people to download mobile apps — provided they show at the right time, send the right message, and don’t repeat every time people turn on their televisions.
Fetch, the company behind this report, discovered this connection between commercials and app installs by gathering data about when their clients aired television spots and how the rate at which people installed apps was affected. (A baseline was established by looking at installs five minutes before an ad aired.) The company wouldn’t identify studied apps due to confidentiality agreements.
Fetch said app installs rose between 56 and 74 percent when commercials aired, depending on how many times the ad was seen. This shows that “TV advertising can be the final tipping point to push potential app users to progress into their journeys to becoming app customers,” Fetch said, “because we’ve targeted the audience at precisely the time that they are more prone to installing the app.”
The company is referring to people’s habits of holding a smartphone or tablet in their hands while a television set operates in the background. Some companies have tried to take advantage of this trend by offering “second screen” apps that augment television viewing instead of hindering it; others use the giant screens to make people aware of apps they can download on the devices in their hands.
The effectiveness of television spots depends on several factors. First is when the commercials show: Fetch found that app installs rose 650 percent after ads were shown between midnight and 1am; a similar bump was seen during prime time between 6pm and 7pm. Frequency also mattered — people were most likely to download an app if they saw a commercial for it at least four times in two hours.
It’s not just that commercials drive app installs, either — these new users can also be quite valuable to developers. “For most app businesses, organic users are the highest value customers to the business,” Fetch’s head of data, Dan Wilson, said in an email. “Users acquired through TV tend to be closer to the organic users in average value than users acquired through paid mobile media channels.”
There are some drawbacks to the report. Many increases are expressed as percentages, which as I explained when Amazon touted its holiday shopping successes, don’t mean as much when people aren’t told the starting figure. It’s also not clear if these results would hold true for all businesses, or if there’s something about Fetch’s clients that makes them more likely to benefit here.
Wilson cited agreements requiring Fetch to keep company data anonymous when asked about specific companies’ increases following television spots. He did say that FetchMe, the tool used to conduct this study, is used to monitor more than 1 billion interactions each month across 100 countries. So at least we know this didn’t affect just a handful of companies during a short period of time.
People see advertisements all the time. But apparently there’s something about television sets that makes people care more about seeing an app there than they might if they saw it on a social network or in a banner ad shown on a Web page. Using a phone might not improve the television viewing experience, but having the television set provide background noise can apparently help app discovery.
Amazon is taking one of the best features from Oyster, the book-reading service that shut down in September, and making it available on its Kindle Fire devices.
Much of Oyster’s team joined Google in September to improve that company’s Google Books service. At the time, the company’s co-founders said they planned to “sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months,” and a note on the service’s website says that particular sun will finally set in January 2016.
In response to that news, I wrote a eulogy for Oyster’s willingness to experiment with new features while competing with Amazon and its control on bookselling. Among the things I would miss the most: A feature that reduced the amount of blue light shown by a device whenever someone wanted to read late in the night.
That’s the feature Amazon is rolling out to its Kindle Fire devices starting today. Amazon is calling the feature Blue Shade, and it’s included in an over-the-air update to the Android-based operating system that powers Amazon’s tablets. (That update, like many software updates nowadays, costs nothing to install.)
“Blue Shade uses specialized filters to limit exposure to blue light. It also offers warm color filters and the ability to lower the display brightness to an ultra-low level for comfortable nighttime reading—even in a dark room,” Amazon said in an emailed statement. “Customers can also fine-tune the color settings to their personal preference, with the device intelligently adjusting the color filtering so that at any color or brightness, the blue wavelength light is always suppressed.”
Tools which limit the amount of blue light cast off by a device are popular. A desktop utility called F.lux has been downloaded a reported 15 million times, and was popular on iOS devices until Apple told its development team to nix the app. Other software tools often include a “night mode” to serve a similar purpose.
“Studies have shown that evening exposure to blue light from tablets may suppress our bodies’ production of melatonin,” Amazon said in its press release, “which can prolong the time it takes to fall asleep, delay REM sleep, and reduce the level of alertness the next morning.” Blue Shade is supposed to fix that issue.
It will be interesting to see when Blue Shade makes its way to other platforms. Despite the popularity of its Kindle Fire tablets during the holiday shopping season, I suspect that the majority of Kindle users read on devices which don’t bear the Seattle-based company’s smiling logo stamped on their plastic chassis.
I asked an Amazon spokesperson whether and when Blue Shade might jump to other platforms but haven’t yet received a response. I’ll update this post if I do.
There are still some issues that might prevent people from reading e-books. Some might oppose Amazon’s business practices; others might fear the loss of comprehension suffered when reading an e-book instead of a physical book; and still others might not be interested in reading a book no matter the form it takes.
But now at least one of the best features introduced by a startup that ultimately failed to take down (or even stand toe-to-toe with) its Goliath won’t be cast aside. Here’s to hoping that features similar to Lumin and Blue Shade make their way to other reading platforms — iBooks, Pocket, Instapaper — in the near future.
Someone might think that Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday would be enough pseudo-holidays for the week following Thanksgiving. That person would be wrong. Another not-quite-holiday, Giving Tuesday, must be observed before we can stop marking the arrival of winter with open wallets.
I know about Giving Tuesday because Facebook told me about it. “It’s Giving Tuesday!” the social network said in an image depicting cartoon people holding up a giant, heart-clutching hand modeled after its Like button. “Today is a global day of giving back to our communities and the charitable causes we care about.”
The banner is innocuous enough. It drew attention to a day I wouldn’t have known about while prompting me to “see how others are giving back.” I might have ignored the whole thing if Facebook’s choice of words — “our communities” and “we care about” — didn’t make me pause to consider their implications.
Facebook has been a little creepier than usual lately. It keeps telling me that it cares about me, or that it thinks I’ll like a photo it plucked from social oblivion with its On This Day feature, which is supposed to compel me to share things I’ve already shared out of some prompted feeling of technological nostalgia.
Some have said these prompts are supposed to make people share more stuff on Facebook. The Wall Street Journal reported in November that this was the case based on Global Web Index statistics showing that users are posting to Facebook less even though they visit the social network several times throughout the day.
Jackdaw Research’s Jan Dawson agrees. “Ironically, Facebook needs real human beings to create content to make it a useful and meaningful service to use, and even though these are machine-based prompts, they still require humans to actually post something for their friends to see,” he said in an emailed response.
But the language used in these prompts has me considering another possibility: Facebook is using these images to humanize its service and seem more relatable, instead of like a cold, algorithm-driven social network that sucks content into its service in much the same way a mosquito draws blood from a person’s flesh.
That humanization could make it easier to share things with Facebook. People want to feel like they have an audience — being told that Facebook cares about “you and the memories you share here” could offer all the audience they need. Creepy? Yes. Effective? If it wasn’t Facebook would’ve already nixed the feature.
It is kind of funny that Facebook is testing these features now, while it’s also working to dehumanize the workers powering its M utility, which can be used for everything from finding a restaurant to sending parrots to a colleague’s office. The tool can do everything! But it relies on human workers for many functions.
Given that people are handing over their information to M and conversing with it the same way human beings always converse with digital facsimiles — with humor and candor not shared with actual people — it makes sense that Facebook wouldn’t call attention to the fact that it’s far different from Siri or Google Now.
This means Facebook is trying to humanize algorithms while it hides actual humans behind a veneer of artificial intelligence. (If only “algorithmize” were a word.) One convinces people to share more with the public; the other makes them more candid than they might be if they knew they were talking to a person.
How people react to these efforts depends on their disposition. Some people are more comfortable when a service tries to humanize itself; others, like me, are just kind of weirded out that a digital behemoth wants me to think it’s human. Either way it seems like Facebook is trying to blur the lines between machine and person in ways that allow it to get the most out of its billion-plus users.
Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment. (And here all these images keep telling me that the company cares about me.) I’ll update this post if someone at the company emails me back and offers an on-the-record statement.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan plan to give away 99 percent of their shares in the social networking company — which are collectively worth somewhere around $45 billion — throughout their lives.
Zuckerberg revealed the news in a letter to his daughter published on Facebook. She is expected to arrive some time this month; Zuckerberg announced in November that he plans to take two months of paternity leave after she is born.
In the letter, Zuckerberg said that he plans to remain Facebook’s chief executive for “many, many years to come” but that he and Chan also believe that these issues are “too important to wait until you or we are older to begin this work.”
The couple wishes to “join people across the world to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation” by focusing on “personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities.”
“We’ll share more details in the coming months once we settle into our new family rhythm and return from our maternity and paternity leaves,” he said. “We understand you’ll have many questions about why and how we’re doing this.”
Zuckerberg, like almost a hundred other billionaires, previously agreed to give away half of his wealth by signing on to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-started Giving Pledge in 2012. It’s not clear if the two promises are related.
There was a time, back in the early 90’s, in the days of AOL, You’ve Got Mail, and dial-up modems, when something of a utopian future and/or shared delusion existed around the Internet. We’d envisioned it as the realization of the EPCOT dream — a connected world with no borders in which we’d be able to reach, interact with, and learn from one another without barriers. In reality, a look at nearly any comments section will quickly zap much of your remaining optimism about the benefits of this so-called open forum.
However, education startup PenPal Schools is looking to make good on those early promises by bringing back one key component that technology seems to have eclipsed: the human element.
The startup offers an online platform used by over 70,000 pen pals in over 90 countries that connects students and individual learners with pen pals in other states or countries. It’s free and built for use by any and everyone who wants to participate in an exchange, whether it’s through a class at school or on an individual level. The goal of the service is to provide students with coursework that will expand their education while also providing insight into the culture, lives, and learning process of students in another region.
“We see our program as oftentimes so eye-opening for students, and it’s their first glimpse into culture and understanding a way of life so different from our own,” says PenPal Schools founder Joe Troyen, adding that the startup recently rolled out a suite of new apps and features for the education platform that reinforces a mobile-first strategy that takes into account the limited Internet connectivity throughout the world’s many classrooms.
Pen pal exchanges have been a great way to connect people from across cultures for decades, and it’s on the foundation of exchanges like those that society built early universities and formal education. Troyen says the platform his startup has developed is no different from the collaborative exchanges of yore, except that technology has allowed for innovation focused on the education aspect. “[One] big innovation is curriculum. We connect students to not only write back and forth to each other as they did in the old days, but also to learn together through online, interactive courses,” he says.
Beyond textbooks and news articles
PenPal Schools offers several courses that focus on current events, culture and traditions, and the historical struggle against discrimination. In these courses, learners are paired up with a pen pal from another state or country who is taking the same course. Through correspondence that revolves around a guided curriculum, learners can exchange ideas and perspectives around certain topics and content.
Troyen gives me the example of Brendan from New Jersey and Moneer from Kabul, Afghanistan. Through their guided exchanges, they discussed news items and current events where they live. One of the topics of conversation? Ongoing U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Because their personal experiences with the war in the Middle East are dramatically different, Brendan began to view the war in a new light. On the flip side, Moneer got some insight into the way the war is perceived by many in the United States and helped Brendan gain a new understanding of what, exactly, U.S. troops were doing in Afghanistan and why they were doing it.
The obvious question is this: how, exactly, does PenPal Schools improve upon the age-old, time-honored tradition of simply writing letters? Surely there are other places connecting pen pals digitally in the name of swapping knowledge. How’s this any different? While there are other sites matching up pen pals, the PenPal Schools difference lies in the way in which they’re leveraging technology and simplicity to create the best platform for both connecting and learning.
“PenPal Schools is the first to combine high quality curriculum and the best technology with multi-week 1-to-1 pen pal exchanges, which all adds up to a great experience for learners,” says Troyen. “We’re focused on providing a simple, fun experience with the kind of support students and teachers can’t find anywhere else.”
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Or, in this case, in the completion rate. While most online courses see a completion rates under 20 percent, the average rate for PenPal Schools is at 88 percent, the company tells me.
In taking courses through PenPal Schools, students receive weekly assignments replete with instructional texts, videos, and prompts designed to kick-start the conversation. From there, pen pals communicate via a chat-like interface. There’s no limit to the number of students who can take a course at a time, and students from all over the world can participate. For security reasons, classroom students are paired with other classroom students while individuals are paired up with other individuals. No personally identifying information is exchanged or revealed, and pen pals are always matched with someone close to his or her own age.
For now, all communication is written, but looking forward, Troyen says that PenPal Schools plans to offer video messaging and collaborative tools. That seems fairly logical, considering the penetration mobile chat apps (WhatsApp, Snapchat, Kik, Facebook Messenger, etc.) have had in the last couple years, especially as many of those apps attempt to integrate ways to follow and discuss the news directly from those digital conversations.
“We’ll continue to focus on asynchronous communication because it’s easier for teachers to coordinate, works across time zones, enables students to learn at their own pace, and meet the needs of learners who may not always have reliable internet access,” says Troyen.
Pulling a “TOMS Shoes” for education
Speaking of access, not every student or school has the funds available to participate in such a country-scaling education platform. Yet, if money is the main barrier to entry, PenPal Schools wouldn’t be nearly as potent as it would limit the diverse background of students.
Troyen also mentions that the plan going forward is to offer premium courses for a fee. While all of PenPal Schools’ original courses will remain on offer for free, these courses will offer premium features and content with the help of partners like textbook publishers. The fee structure will be designed around the concept of “buy one, give one”, meaning that when someone pays the fee for a premium course, a student who may not otherwise have access to the funds necessary to enroll will be able to participate.
And participation certainly seems to be enjoying some seriously mounting interest. Troyen tells me that just last week, nearly 200 new teachers from more than 20 different countries enrolled in PenPal Schools. The vast majority of PenPal Schools’ growth comes through word-of-mouth amongst teachers, making educators by far one of its most valuable assets.
The startup’s monetization strategy also involves partnerships with well-known education publishing companies, with PenPal Schools collaborating to create courses that compliment the learning process from teacher instruction, textbooks, and other interactive lessons. (For example, you’d gain access to a specific PenPal Schools course when purchasing a new set of textbooks for a class.) Beyond that, the startup also wants to move into new subjects to generate additional revenue.
Although the current crop of courses focus on history, culture, and current events, Troyen says PenPal Schools will soon offer new classes for persuasive writing and language-learning. And in the future, PenPal Schools courses could expand to non-traditional subjects, like music and cooking.
Amazon is touting a record holiday shopping weekend thanks to the increasing popularity of its tablets, e-readers, streaming devices, and other hardware. Yet, the company still refuses to offer basic information about how many units it has sold, making it difficult to tell exactly how large its device business has grown.
The company said in a press release today that the most popular items sold through its online marketplace on Black Friday were the Kindle Fire and the Fire TV Stick. It also said that Amazon Echo, its smart speaker, was the best-selling product that cost more than $100. Kindle e-readers are also said to have surged in popularity.
These claims follow layoffs at Lab126 (the division of Amazon responsible for the company’s hardware) said to be the result of the Fire Phone’s spectacular flop. The division was also reorganized, and its parent company halted development on some of its more ambitious projects, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Since then Amazon has released a $50 tablet, which has become the most popular device in the product line’s history. The company even sold the devices in a six-pack, making it clear to consumers that they could buy a half-dozen Amazon tablets as gifts for the same price as one tablet from another company.
Then there’s the Fire TV Stick, which costs just $39 and promises access to all the streaming services a person might ever want to peruse. That’s more than Google’s Chromecast, but thanks to Amazon’s decision to pull that product from its virtual shelves, that $39 price tag probably seemed like a steal to shoppers.
It’s no surprise these products were the top-selling items on Amazon over the holiday weekend. Both are cheap devices with a recognizable brand that people can gift to their loved ones without breaking the bank. Tis the season to rake in customers with great deals, after all, and nobody’s better than Amazon at that.
Yet the fact remains that we have no idea what any of this actually means for the company. Just look at its claim that it sold six times as many Fire TV products this holiday shopping weekend as it did during the same weekend last year. Does that it mean it sold 6 million this year? How about 42 million? Nobody knows!
Other claims, like its devices being the most popular items on its website, are also dubious. When a store offers as many products as Amazon does, it’s likely that shoppers are buying a wide array of items instead of focusing on specific products. The popularity of Amazon’s hardware could’ve been a direct result of that hardware’s cheapness and Amazon’s willingness to plaster it all over its site.
All of which means that Amazon’s might as well have said “We had a record holiday shopping weekend!” and ended the press release there. That’s about as much information as we got, and until the company nixes its culture of secrecy, we’re unlikely to ever know for sure exactly how many people buy its products.
An Amazon spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
