Saturday, March 19, 2016

Android N Feature Spotlight: Apps Can Now Include A Settings Link On The App Info Screen




The system UI in Android has, for the most part, been sacrosanct. Apps can't just add new elements to the OS, but Android N looks to be loosening up that restriction a bit. We already posted about the ability to add Quick Settings tiles natively, and now it looks like Google is allowing developers to insert an app settings link in app info.
The app info screen is where you go to see permissions, notification status, data storage, and so on. It's a few levels deep in the settings, but you can get there from the recent app list too. It's one of my most common stop-offs in the Android settings. It's neat, then, that Google will let developers include a settings link. It will show up as a small gear icon that, when pressed, will open the app's settings.
Developers can enable this feature by adding a string to their manifest with the value android.intent.action. APPLICATION _PREFERENCES. You can see this in the Android N preview documentation provided by Google.

Friday, March 18, 2016

The iPhone might be getting an AMOLED screen as soon as next year


iPhone 7s AMOLED Display

Apple is expected to equip some of its future iPhone generations with AMOLED screens, and while the company is far from confirming such rumors, more and more reports provide indirect evidence that the AMOLED iPhone is near. The main suppliers that will deliver AMOLED panels to iPhone are expected to be Samsung and LG, and a new report indicates that Korean AMOLED panel makers are going to dominate global supply for the years to come.

Market research firm UBI Research said on Wednesday in a note to investors seenby Business Korea that South Korean AMOLED display manufacturers will make some 270 million units this year, or 95% of global shipments.
Samsung and LG are expected to rake in a record $14.22 billion this year, or 96% of international sales, with momentum remaining strong through 2020 – by then their market share might drop to 70% as other companies will also mass-produce such components.
Currently, it’s Samsung that’s the largest consumer of AMOLED displays, and the company is going to sell at least 47 million Galaxy-branded devices equipped with AMOLED panels in 2016. The Galaxy S7 series has the best smartphone display on the market, according to an expert, which happens to be an AMOLED display.
Apple, meanwhile, is rumored to use AMOLED screens next year, Business Koreanotes, for what would likely be a version of the iPhone 7s series. Samsung and/or LG are seen as the main beneficiaries of such an iPhone design decision.
The Korean site says that both companies have increased their investment in AMOLED panel production lines since the beginning of this year, in preparation for a potential demand growth.
In fact, in a different report, Reuters adds that LG Display on Thursday announced it will build a new production plant that will manufacture organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels for its lighting business.
The news site does not mention the iPhone or Apple, but LG Display did say that it plans to begin production with the new plant in the first half of 2017. In other words, LG might be preparing to make AMOLED screens for either the 2017 iPhone 7s or 2018 iPhone 8.
Reuters quotes UBI Research as well, which said that OLED light market will grow from $135 million this year to $1.6 billion in 2020.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Google Introduces Products That Will Sharpen Its Ad Focus


The new Analytics 360 products are Google’s attempt to surpass efforts by companies like Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce in creating marketing clouds that companies use to collect and manage data about customer behavior.
CreditGoogle

SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s skills in tracking people, figuring out desires, and placing ads revolutionized the world of marketing. Now it is adding even more technology muscle to its ad business.

On Tuesday, Google announced a package of products aimed at helping companies more efficiently figure out what potential customers are interested in and how to sell things to them.

The products, called Analytics 360, are Google’s attempt to surpass efforts by companies like Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce in creating marketing clouds that companies use to collect and manage data about customer behavior. A decade ago this was a haphazard affair for data enthusiasts, but increasingly it is an ordinary part of sales.

For Google, it is the main business. In the fourth quarter of 2015 the company had revenue of $21 billion, $19 billion of which came from advertising. While some of that is from individual ad purchases, an increasing amount comes from comprehensive marketing campaigns by big companies.

Analytics 360 involves figuring out someone’s habits over numerous screens, including desktop web surfing, television, and the web and app parts of smartphones. There are ways to tailor page designs for many of these screens, and place ads using both Google properties and third-party services. There are tools for figuring out the efficacy of ad campaigns and, this being Google, lots of advanced analytics tools in every component.

It is a healthy reminder that while Google has thousands of the world’s smartest people and works on things like self-driving cars, flying robots and computers that can beat humans at the world’s hardest games, more than anything it is a company about advertising and marketing.

It was a pioneer in personalizing both web searches and the ads that go with them, but over time it has drawn significant competition.

Oracle has spent over $3 billion acquiring companies and hiring staff members for the marketing cloud-computing service it started last year. Adobe, once known for its graphics software, last year got $1.4 billion of its $4.8 billion in revenue from its marketing cloud and is racing to add analytic technology to its offerings.

Last month, Salesforce, a pioneer in online software, said its marketing cloud revenue grew 29 percent, to $654 million. Numerous start-ups have been created by former Googlers and others for things like tailored web pages and data “journeys” that follow customers, or the marketers trying to figure out what to sell them and when.Google’s new effort is particularly focused on mobile.

“Mobile is about moments, shorter and more fragmented. It’s important we string these together,” said Paul Muret, the vice president for display, video and analytics at Google. “We need to understand the desires of consumers in each point in time to understand their context and intent.”

How well that works will be interesting to watch. The kind of artificial intelligence research like DeepMind, a Google project that last week won a contest with the world’s foremost human player of Go, “is a broad area of investment at Google,” he said. “We of course are taking advantage of this in our marketing technology.”

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Google unveils Google Analytics 360 Suite with a new DMP, landing page testing tool and more


The suite, designed for enterprise-level companies, consists of six products that can be used together or on their own and integrate with AdWords and DoubleClick.

google-analytics-360a-1920

Google is unwrapping a suite of products aimed at bringing simplicity to the often laborious work of unifying and syndicating marketing and advertising data across channels for large organizations. It’s not necessarily a novel effort — Oracle, Adobe, even Facebook’s Atlas are in this mix — but the suite’s native integrations with AdWords and DoubleClick make it particularly noteworthy for search marketers. Dubbed Google Analytics 360 Suite, the package offers a mix of brand-new and rebranded solutions for the enterprise.
First, a rundown of what’s new:
A data management platform: Google Audience 360 (in beta) is the company’s long-awaited data management platform (DMP) that early reports had been calling DoubleClick Audience Center. A DMP has been the arrow missing from Google’s advertising technology quiver (or layer of the stack if we’re sticking with ad tech lingo).
Here’s what we know so far about Google Audience 360: It, of course, natively ties to DoubleClick and AdWords, but it also integrates with other DSPs, so marketers can build audience segments in the DMP and target them across ad exchanges. Like most other DMPs, it can also be used to ensure advertisers are not bombarding the same audiences with remarketing ads across multiple exchanges — one feature is a universal impression cap control. Marketers will be able to import their own first-party data, bring in third-party data and leverage Google’s trove of data to develop audience segments for campaign targeting.
In the same way AdWords and DoubleClick advertisers can build audiences in Google Analytics and easily bring them into Google ad systems, audiences built in Google Audience 360 will be readily available to advertisers. (What I’m still not clear on is whether advertisers will continue to build site or app activity-based audiences in Analytics, or if all audiences will be housed in the DMP if an advertiser is using both products. Analtyics can pass data to Audience 360, but I’ve asked Google to clarify more and will update here when I hear back.)
Just as with existing DMP integrations (think Oracle/BlueKai), search advertisers will be able to target audience segments in Google RLSA campaigns and use those segments on the Google Display Network. And when a CRM is integrated with Audience 360, email lists for Customer Match targeting, for example, can be accessible and updated in real-time.
“We are moving to one-to-one marketing models at scale,” said Paul Muret, Google VP of video, display and analytics by phone. (This is what Facebook calls people-based marketing.)
On-site testing tool: Unlike the DMP, the new site testing tool named Google Optimize 360 (in beta) will likely come as a surprise. Many search advertisers already use homegrown testing and personalization tools or easy-to-use solutions like Optimizely. This new product sounds much like the latter, with the ability to execute A/B landing page tests without having to code anything, yet Muret also added that “a lot of enterprises have homegrown systems, and this is made to integrate with those and give them control over how they do their own processes for content personalization.”
Marketers will be able to test offers, layouts and funnel flows against audience segments.
Muret stressed the integration piece here, too. The testing tool can be tied automatically to Audience 360 and to DoubleClick and AdWords for campaign testing.
Enterprise-wide data analysis and visualization: ​Also new is Google Data Studio 360 (in beta). Built on the Google Docs framework that allows users to update and collaborate on reports and dashboards in real time, the Data Studio is meant to unlock enterprise marketing information and provide easy tools for presenting it in ways that are actually meaningful. 
“Sharing and collaboration are really important across cross-functional teams and across product areas,” said Muret. “Right now people are stuck emailing around spreadsheets and getting blocked by gatekeepers of the data. [Business units] need to be able to liberate this data and make accessible to the larger organization.”
The Data Studio sits atop the Suite and can integrate data across all of the various products and pull from other data sources as well.
Now for the sort-of-new to simply rebranded products:
Tag manager: Google Tag Manager 360 is technically a brand-new product, Google explains, because the existing Google Tag Manager is just a feature of Google Analytics. The new standalone product is built from the existing tag manager. “It offers simplified data collection and powerful APIs to increase data accuracy and streamline workflows,” according to the blog post. What those APIs will do that’s different from the Google Tag Manager API, however, is not quite clear, yet.
Enterprise analytics: Google Analytics Premium is getting renamed Google Analytics 360. No new updates are being announced at this time, but several “exciting new capabilities” are on the horizon, says Google.
Attribution: Since acquiring media attribution firm Adometry in 2014, Google has made the service available as a standalone product and integrated it into Google Analytics Premium users. Now called Google Attribution 360, the product will continue to offer attribution insights across channels, devices and systems, including offline campaign information, such as when TV spots air. Advertisers can send conversion attribution results to their search and display campaigns for bidding optimization.

Open to third parties, à la carte pricing

In all, there are six products in the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Each of these solutions will be available for purchase à la carte, and setup will be customized depending on which products a company chooses. Each product is also open, meaning all integrate with non-Google, third-party products. This has been an outstanding question in regard to the DMP, in particular, with some wondering if Google would wall it off to its own ad platforms.
Google built this as an “open system because we recognize marketers want to use other products,” explained Muret, “But we don’t believe they are getting a good view of cross-device/cross-channel, and are not able to take action immediately. [These products are] easy to use and collaborative. We are happy to have other tools in the mix, but are very excited about our positioning.”
A dashboard in the Suite is customized depending on which products are in use, and access can be tailored at the user level.
google analytics suite 360

Use cases and integration scenarios

As an example of ways the company is focusing on making it easy for marketers to take action immediately, Muret pointed to dynamic remarketing. “We are trying to make it much easier to remarket at scale” with the integration of Audience 360 and Analytics 360 with DoubleClick and AdWords.
Another area of focus — though no new specific capabilities are being announced — is cross-device tracking and targeting. For example, advertisers using both Google’s DMP and Attribution will be able to manage search and display remarketing efforts across devices in Audience 360 and track attribution across devices in Attribution 360 without having to do much beyond the initial product setups.
The issue with any of these integrations is that with efficiency comes a lack of independent measurement and verification. The question is how many enterprise clients will be willing to sign onto the entire 360 experience, giving their data over and relying on Google for measurement.
Current Google Analytics Premium and Adometry customers will be the first to be invited to start beta testing the new products in Suite 360. The Adometry and Google Analytics Premium brands will eventually be retired.
Early Google Analtyics 360 test clients have included Progressive, L’Oreal Canada and Google-owned Nest.

Making a More Empathetic Facebook



The company’s compassion department researches ways to make confrontations and breakups a little easier online.


In 2011, amidst backlash over rising cyberbullying, Facebook hired a small team of researchers from University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University to figure out how to give users a greater sense of control. In March 2011, based on their recommendations, Facebook rolled out a social reporting tool to help users resolve conflicts among themselves, by allowing them to engage directly with other people over objectionable content. If a person found a photo offensive, for example, they could send a pre-populated message that read, “Hey, I didn’t like this photo. Please remove it.”
“This was for the photos Facebook had no capacity to address,” said Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the science director for Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, who worked on the project from the beginning. “They’d report a photo of people drinking at a party, and Facebook wouldn’t be able to help them because it didn’t violate the Terms of Service.”
“Our thinking was, how do we get people to work it out themselves rather than appeal to Facebook for mediation?” she added.
That was the beginning of Facebook’s compassion department, a unit within the company that makes suggestions to the engineers about ways to help users use the site with greater emotional intelligence. The department’s new tool was a measured success; 85 percent of the time, the person who posted the photo took it down or sent a reply. In surveys asking about the interactions, 65 percent of respondents felt positive about the person sending the message, while 25 percent feel neutral.
Over time, the team tinkered with the messages. They found that using names, for example, tended to be more effective: “Hey John” worked more often than a simple “Hey,” and phrases like signifying humility or vulnerability, like “please” or “this bothers me,” took the edge off the confrontation. Today, one of these prepopulated message reads, “Hey John, this is a bad photo of me and I don't want people to see it. Would you please take it down?”  
A number of other changes over the years have been based on the research of the compassion department. Ending relationships got easier, for example. “Hide” and “unfollow” options made it easier for people to remove objectionable content from their feeds.
Tools like these help users “to see that just because they’re online, they still have the ability to walk out of the room,” said Pamela Rutledge, the director of the media psychology research center at Fielding Graduate University. “By making people feel more in control of their lives, it influences their sense of identity and resilience.”
While features like these were well generally received, the compassion team has had some misses over the years. Heated comment wars underneath news articles, for example, are one area they’ve struggled to address. In a bid to help users resolve public confrontations, the team briefly experimented with an option for users to bring in a mediator. If two friends were fighting over their political beliefs, for example, and things are getting heated, they could choose to notify a third friend to intervene and help settle the argument.
“The idea came from psychology literature that said if you bring in an ally, someone who was unbiased, you’d be able to resolve the interpersonal conflict,” Simon-Thomas said. But testing revealed that the tool largely went unused, so it never rolled out to the general public.
And for a long time, the compassion team grappled with the idea of introducing a “Dislike” button, a frequent request for users who wanted to show sympathy for friends who posted about difficult times.
“It was very carefully thought about for a lot of really good reasons,” Simon-Thomas said. “We looked at the contexts where people would dislike something, like if your grandma died, but what we were seeing was users using hearts to express ‘I care and I support you.’ So that’s what we advised them to build.”
And they listened. Last month, Facebook unveiled its emoji reactions — thumbs-up, love, haha, yay, wow, sad, and angry. The Pixar story artist Matt Jones designed the stickers and, in an effort to capture the nuances of human expression, he based them on Darwin’s book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals.  
The progression from the “like’ button to these stickers is a pattern that repeats itself across Facebook: Many of the features we use today are more nuanced, meticulously thought out iterations of previous models. For example, the memorialization tool—introduced in 2009 to ensure the privacy of Facebook users who die— now allows users to choose a "legacy contact" to make one last post on the deceased’s behalf when they die, as well as manage the account. When you end a relationship, a new feature called breakup flow limits photos, videos and status updates from a former flame as opposed to “hiding” them forever. There are more resources addressing the problem of cyberbullying, such as Brackett’s new project, inspirED, a Facebook community for educators to develop and share anti-bullying resources.
Indeed, the goal has never been to eradicate all negativity from Facebook with algorithms, but rather to create an environment where people can grow from the negative things they see online, Simon-Thomas said.
“Sometimes we ask ourselves, ‘How can we create a better experience than real life? Or do we even want to be?’” she said. “People suffer and feel lonely in this world. That’s part of life.”
That’s why Facebook gives us options — do you want to block the offensive person? Hide them? Or send them a polite message asking them to cease?
“They’re trying to model altruistic behavior and allow people to control their threads,” Rutledge said, “without using a bunch of algorithms that make presumptions about what we want to see.”

Almost every iPhone on the planet is encrypted; almost no Android phones are


iPhone Vs Android Phone Encryption

Android fragmentation isn’t just annoying for users, it’s also bad for their security. If you want proof of this, then look no further than the following statistic: Roughly 95% of all iPhones are encrypted right now while only 2% of Android phones can say the same. The reason for this is simple: Google did not start mandating full-disk encryption on flagship devices until Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which still has a painfully low share of the Android smartphone market. As a result, the vast majority of Android devices in the world lack this crucial security protocol.
Here’s a graphic that shows how many Android phones and iPhones are encrypted:
That is obviously not good.
Google has pledged for years to improve Android’s fragmentation issues but so far it’s made little concrete progress in getting device manufacturers and carriers to get their devices upgraded in a timely fashion. Some recently discovered code in the first Android N developer preview suggests that Google has started to separate its mobile operating system into two pieces: The core OS and the user interface that OEMs modify to add their own apps and features.
Splitting these two components could theoretically allow Google to quickly push out important updates to the core OS while also letting OEMs push out changes to their own apps and overlays without worrying about how they will affect the platform’s overall functionality. We’ll have to wait and see whether this change leads to a massive increase in the percentage of encrypted Android phones, however.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Google Play will soon let you try out games directly from search


Plus, a new indie showcase and easier mobile game streaming

(Google)


Google is announcing a slew of new features for Play Games today, and the coolest might actually be a new type of ad. It might not sound particularly exciting — Google has given the new ad format the drab title "search trial run ads" — but the feature now makes it possible to try out games immediately after searching for them. You simply search for a game using Google, then tap the "try now" button that appears in the results, and you can play a 10 minute demo of the game without installing anything. (Google launched a similar, though much more limited type of ad demo back in December.) The new search ads are expected to start popping up on Android "in the next few weeks."

Google Play Games
In an attempt at courting inventive smaller developers, Google is also introducing a new section of the Play store that it's calling "indie corner." Essentially, it's a regularly updated collection of the best indie games on the platform, as curated by Google. According to Ben Frenkel, product manager on Play Games, while the main criteria for inclusion is the quality of the game — "Number one, it has to be a good game," he says — Google is also looking to highlight titles that utilize different Play features, like leaderboards or achievements. "We want them all to be case studies for what you can do on the platform," Frenkel says of the games that will be included.
The majority of the announcements from Google today are developer-focused; the news comes directly from the company's "developer day" event at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. But several, like the new search ads, have implications for players. Among these is a new API that lets developers add both video recording and live streaming functionality to any game. Those videos, both recorded and streamed, can then be broadcast on YouTube using what Google says is "a few simple steps." The API will be available some time in the next few months.

Microsoft adds ability to call phones to Skype for Web


Microsoft is adding new capabilities to its Skype for Web, as well as its Skype for Business services. Skype for Web users can now call cell phones and landlines directly.


Microsoft has updated its Skype for Web offering with the ability to call mobile phones and landlines.

skypeforwebphonecalls.jpg

Users can make international calls directly from Skype for Web to cell phones or landlines using Skype credits or subscriptions, company officials said on March 14.
To access Skype for Web, users can go to Skype.com or web.skype.com and sign in and connect. Skype for Web, which is still in beta, alleviates the need to download the Skype app before conferencing and/or instant-messaging others.
Microsoft also added the ability to watch a YouTube video directly from inside Skype for Web via a video link. The ability to add people to a conversation, even if they're not on Skype is another feature Microsoft has brought to Skype for Web, execs said. And if users are signed into Skype for Web, they now will receive notifications even if they're in another tab or app.
In other Skype news -- though on the business side of the house, not the consumer one -- Microsoft last week expanded the availability of its PSTN conferencing to 17 additional countries, bringing the total number of countries where PSTN conferencing is available to to 32. Microsoft officials say that number will be nearly 100 by the end of June 2016. PSTN conferencing is public switched telephone network conferencing.
There's a new Cloud Connector Edition of Skype for Business Server coming in April. The Cloud Connector Edition will allow users to connect existing phone lines/number to Office 365 using optimized, preconfigured virtual machine images.
In addition, Microsoft and conferencing equipment vendors also launched a new initiative, codenamed "Project Rigel" to bring the Skype Meeting experience that will be featured onMicrosoft Surface Hubs -- whenever they are finally available-- to any meeting room with a display or projector. Via Project Rigel, Windows 10 devices will be able to control Skype for Business online meetings and remotely connect users starting in the second half of 2016.

A social flaw - How strangers could access your Facebook account



PORTLAND, Ore. — Open the Facebook app on your phone and you’ll likely be prompted to enter your mobile phone number. 
Facebook encourages users to add your phone number to your account so you can reset your password and find friends. But the feature has a flaw that could allow strangers to take over your Facebook account.
“I feel very uncomfortable,” said Heber Thurston.  The Portland man found himself in control of a stranger’s Facebook profile.
“What if he’s a business owner and I’ve got certain documents that no one should have?” asked Thurston. 
The trouble started after Thurston bought a brand new cell phone.  Thurston tried to change his Facebook password by using his new number. 
“Bang, this guy’s Facebook shows up!” said Thurston.  “I got all his stuff from days and days.”
The previous owner had his Facebook account linked to a phone number and never changed it.  Thurston was reassigned the number.  It allowed him to access another man’s Facebook profile.
“We regret the inconvenience and encourage people to keep their contact information up to date, including deleting old phone numbers from their account,” said a Facebook spokesperson.
A lot of people forget. 
“If you signed up for Facebook in 2005- we don’t really correlate that your phone number is still on there,” said Travis Smith of Tripwire.
Smith says there could be problems with any social media that is tied a phone number.  If a user forgets about the account and changes phone numbers, someone else could eventually take it over. 
“It’s the same thing as when you are changing addresses and you have your bank statements and credit card statements going to your address,” explained Smith.  “You want to change your address before you move.”
Smith suggests users avoid entering your phone number when prompted.
“If they don’t absolutely need it, don’t put it in there.”

Monday, March 14, 2016

It's A Myth: Closing Apps Will Not Save Your iPhone Battery Life



That'll teach you to leave home without an iPhone charger. 

The Washington Post reports that an Apple exec has confirmed that there's no truth to the theory that closing open apps on your iPhone will prolong battery life. In fact, going in to shut down apps further drains the battery, since apps have to be reloaded later.

The revelation came in an email exchange between Apple Senior Vice President Craig Federighi and a customer named Caleb. Federighi confirmed that apps don't affect iPhone battery life when they're not active — they freeze when not in use. That differs from many Android phones, like the Samsung Galaxy, which do benefit from shutting down running apps. 

As the Post notes, disabling location services or the Background App Refresh feature can help you avoid battery depletion. 

Beyond that, the best solution may be to simply bite the bullet and start traveling with a charger. We'd never dream of asking you to stop using your camera as a mirror or reconsider cyber-tracking your Uber driver's every move.
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Useful Android 6.0 Marshmallow tips and tricks

Useful Android 6.0 Marshmallow tips and tricks

Since you're reading these lines, chances are you're among the lucky 2 percent of Android users who happen to have Marshmallow running on their smartphone. You've either received an update to Android 6.0, or you're simply a Nexus user. Either way, you might be wondering what happens next; you might be in need of advice with making the most of Google's software. Well, wonder no more, as we're here to assist.

Below you'll find 9 tips and tricks in Android 6.0 – tips and tricks that can actually be useful and aren't just for show. You know, things like tweaking the user interface, browsing the file system, or taking advantage of the new camera shortcut. Just keep in mind that some of these tricks might be unavailable on your particular device. And don't be mad at us for that – manufacturers who put their own custom interface layers on top of Android might choose to disable certain features. If a trick doesn't work for you, do let us know in the comments. Also, feel free to share any other neat Android 6.0 Marshmallow tips that we may have missed.