iDigiWorld

The Voice of Emerging Digital media world and lifestyle

[digitaltrends-blog]

We’re a big fan of the HTC Vive. Full review here.

What do you guys think?

[idigiworld]

New trends keep been developed. What do you think of the new HTC Vive?

[digitaltrends-blog]

All your Nintendo dreams come true.

[binalalala]

#25 - book library

drank too much water after a meal, it doesn’t feel great

[binalalala]

27 - cart

new term starts soon

[binalalala]

29 - apartment listing

used randomlist for the address

[clutchingmypearlss]

The Social Media Strategy Plan

The Social Media Strategy Plan was definitely the most in depth part of the client project thus far. And based off the Hootsuite Module this is also the most crucial step in the social media plan, which is way I took an extensive amount of time making sure I had all the necessary details and information to provide the best strategies for my client.

Prior to providing the strategy, I was tasked with doing a social media audit that require that I go  into detail of what the organizations current state is from the audience analysis, internal analysis, and competitor analysis. With this information this will be beneficial to providing the most effective strategies for the organization especially if the current state of their social media could use improvement.

I believe that the strategies that I have come up with will be very beneficial to improving the organizations social media, but most importantly the advertising and presence of the organization on a wider scale if done correctly. There is great potential for the organization to not only continue there well thought out bran and persona, but to bring a differently approach to the material they are sharing with their audience. I hope that after this is all done, that my client actually implements the plan.

My biggest take away from this part of the project is that it is important to start building these strategies to lay the ground work for the success of the organizations goals and objectives. Once these goals and objectives are identified then it makes it easier to come up with a game plan to reach them.

[idigiworld]

iOS 13.3 provides parental control of how children communicate

Image source: pexels.com

The new Communication Limits feature is just one of many Screen Time iOS functions meant to limit the amount of time we are spending on our phones and our favorite apps, which also double as a means for parental control.

The new iOS 13.3 update brings parental controls to track and limit how much time your child talks on the phone, FaceTimes, or text messages, as well as control your kid’s contact list.

Communication Limits lets parents better manage how much time their kids spend on the phone by limiting how long they’re allowed to talk to their friends on the phone on a weeknight, for instance, or banning them from text messaging while they should be studying.

Screen Time keeps track of how much time you spend on your phone, how much is spent in specific apps, and even how many times you pick up your phone every day.

App Limits on Screen Time allow you to combine specific apps or certain app categories — such as social media apps — that you can choose particular time limits.

Parents can use the “Allowed Screen Time” feature to choose “everyone” or “contacts only” when it comes to who can communicate with your child via phone, FaceTime, text message, or iCloud.

[idigiworld]

Why deep-fakes are quickly becoming popular as Photoshop

Roman Mogylnyi, the CEO of RefaceAI, a startup based in Ukraine, said they have been working with machine learning since 2011, and pivoted to making their own apps based on deepfake tech in 2014.

“We thought we could do it better.” ReFaceAI has already worked with some film production companies — although Mogylnyi couldn’t say which ones — to use its technology to swap the faces of actors onto body doubles, at a cost far less than what it would have been to fly the actors back to set and reshoot the scenes in question.

Carica, an app based out of South Korea, is also developing deepfake GIFs and videos wherein a person can graft their face onto a popular reaction GIF to send to friends and family.

ReFaceAI has already released a photo-deepfake app called Reflect, and is on the verge of releasing both their own video-deepfake app, as well as a web service that will help detect deepfake videos.

Did you know you can make a deepfake video from the comfort of your own home, or on your phone? Download one of the plethora of face-swap or deepfake apps casually available from your local app store and you too can influence an election.

In fact, it’s going to become as commonplace as Photoshop, especially if the app developers working on deepfake tech have anything to say about it: We could soon see hyper-targeted ads with our own faces on them.

But in the hype and concern around deepfake technology, and its very real misuse, the simple truth is that this technology isn’t going away.

[idigiworld]

The Apple Car is proceeding with a patent that can eliminate blind spots

image source: www.patentlyapple.com

The patent, first reported by Patently Apple, is titled “Systems for improving side-mirror functionality of a vehicle.” Here’s how it works: The technology essentially projects images of the surrounding environment within the car’s blind spots onto the vehicle’s window or windshield.

While Apple’s patent seems to be the same type of concept of displaying blind spot footage to where the driver can see it, Apple applied for the patent in 2016 while Gassler’s invention was created in 2019.

Apple may be closer to getting involved in the automotive market with a new patent that is meant to eliminate a car’s blind spots.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted last year that the Apple Car would launch around 2023 to 2025, and the newly released patent could prove to be a step into that direction for an Apple Car to hit the market.

As recent as April, Reuters reported that Apple was in discussions with companies who create the sensor technology in autonomous vehicle systems.

Digital Trends reached out to Apple to comment on the patent, and we’ll update this story once we hear back.

There’s also some facial recognition technology involved, with a camera mounted on the windshield facing toward the driver that would be able to detect the driver’s face and facial features.

[idigiworld]

Amazon Echo Studio review: The best Echo speaker yet

image source: @digitaltrends​

Amazon echo studio review db 2 Along the Studio’s circular topside are control keys, including the Action button for manually calling Alexa (in case you don’t want to call the speaker with the “Alexa” command), volume keys, and my personal favorite, a mute key that turns that rainbow-blue Alexa LED Darth Vader red, assuring the speaker is not listening to you.

Alexa things Before we get to the audio goodies, for those new to the smart speaker world, it’s worth talking about just how much Amazon’s Echo line, including the Studio, can do.

Amazon Music steps up You can’t talk about the Echo Studio without mentioning Amazon Music, as both parts are important to Amazon’s plans to cut into the lead of Spotify and Apple Music.

Amazon’s Alexa app makes it easy to adjust basic audio preferences, control playback, and connect to other devices, from an Echo subwoofer to other Echo speakers for a multiroom speaker system.

[idigiworld]

Now Amazon Alexa will alert you to take your medicine

“We want to make it easy for people to get the information they need and to manage their healthcare needs at home while maintaining the privacy and security of their information, and hope this feature is a step toward that vision.” Giant Eagle customers have access to these new features beginning today and can set the service up by enabling the Giant Eagle Pharmacy skill and linking their Amazon Alexa account.

After set-up, customers can give Alexa commands like “Alexa, manage my medication” or ask, “Alexa, what medication am I supposed to take right now?” “We’re thrilled to help our Giant Eagle Pharmacy patients more easily integrate prescription management into their everyday lives with the introduction of the Giant Eagle Pharmacy skill,” said Jim Tsipakis, Giant Eagle Senior Vice President of Pharmacy, in the announcement.

“We’re passionate about making care as accessible as possible for our patients, and this unique collaboration with Amazon has enabled us to utilize voice technology to do just that.” Digital Trends reached out to Amazon to find out if the company plans to roll out this feature to partner with other pharmacies beyond Giant Eagle, but have not yet received a response.

Amazon announced that it has partnered with Giant Eagle Pharmacy locations to provide its customers the option to create medication reminders that will prompt participants to take their medicine at a particular time of the day, or even request prescription refills.

[idigiworld]

How to stay safe and avoid scams while chasing online deals on Black Friday

Experts warn that most holiday shopping scams can occur right in your email inbox or on authentic-looking sites, especially during the deal-crazy Black Friday weekend.

“We expect to see a rise in phishing and malware attacks as hackers use them for the holiday season and holiday topics,” Adrien Gendre, chief solution architect at the leading email security provider, Vade Secure, told Digital Trends.

How to tell if a Black Friday website is legit Aside from emails, you could also be duped this Black Friday by fake sites promoting shopping discounts and deals.

Don’t get phished: Avoiding Black Friday email scams Gendre said that there are a few things to look out if you’re worried about being scammed through email.

For the upcoming Black Friday holiday shopping weekend, Gendre’s advice is to slow down and be practical when reading your emails.

With more and more people looking for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals online, it’s essential to know how to stay safe from scams.

It’s important to note that hackers nowadays use actual logos and verbiage from real companies to trick people into thinking an email is legitimate.

[idigiworld]

Disney+ introduces the much requested sought Continue Watch feature

image source: @digitaltrends​

Disney+ has been making a concerted effort to remedy them one by one: On November 22, it addressed a feature that was a prerequisite to the Continue Watching list — the ability to show a progress indicator on episodes or movies that were partially watched.

This is the same system that Netflix uses, but because Netflix releases an entire season at once, a show won’t leave your Continue Watching list until you’ve completed the most recent season.

So the only way to know if a new episode has been added is to look for the show in your Continue Watching feed or check the show’s landing page now and then.

[idigiworld]

How Apple used stunning outdoor ads for AirPods Pro Surprise Reveal

Apple created towering images of dancers for the AirPods Pro reveal, across Japan, Milan, Singapore, Paris, UAE, China and London storefront. Apple

Would they stay in your ear? (Conan O’Brien doubted it.) Would they hold a charge? Would they really replace the wired earbuds that had been an iconic part of Apple’s aesthetic since the iPod’s “Silhouettes” campaign launched in 2003? The answer, in case you haven’t walked down a city street, worked in an open-plan office or seen a high schooler in the past year, was yes. Bold advertising for the AirPods Pro would get a premium placement no product had gotten before: massive outdoor ads across the fronts of Apple’s most dramatic retail spaces.

AirPods proved a massive success for Apple and quickly became the dominator in the emerging category of wireless earbuds. When Apple launched AirPods three years ago, there was some understandable skepticism from consumers about the wireless devices. First, giant and unbranded images of dancers appeared on 16 outdoor boards and across the facades of 17 Apple Store locations in major global markets. Apple and creative agency TBWA\Media Arts Lab revealed the AirPods Pro through a two-phase outdoor campaign.

So when it came time to launch the device’s first real evolution, AirPods Pro, Apple was in an enviable position. After the AirPods Pro were announced, the images—some more than 40 feet in height—were updated to include the new devices in the dancers’ ears. Instead of just selling (and laboriously explaining) a piece of technology, the brand could focus on unveiling a piece of culture. Breaking from tradition, there would be no keynote address from CEO Tim Cook announcing the new earbuds. But that wasn’t the only change from the brand’s longtime marketing playbook.

Another way the campaign highlighted freedom from limitations was in how it broke the edges of its outdoor boards and other out-of-home placements, with dancers’ arms and legs extending beyond the usual borders of each medium. For the outdoor boards, media agency OMD specifically looked for placements that would allow for extensions, including one that extended 15 feet outside the edge of a placement on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Because of the widely different placements—both in terms of specs and surfaces—adding the AirPods Pro into the ads for the second phase required a labor-intensive plan for each ad. In some, the earbuds could be added through a relatively simple visual patch over the original image. In others, the entire towering piece of creative had to be replaced entirely.

[idigiworld]

' Dreams ' of an AI Become an Immersive Art Exhibit, New York

Machine Hallucinations, an AI-created art exhibit in Manhattan, attempts to convey the vastness of big data.

My personal challenge was, ‘How can we learn what machines learn?’ So this was a way of putting a camera in the mind of a machine and finding the memory points and connecting them to create a dream. Founded by art advocates Tati Pastukhova and Sandro Kereselidze, Artechouse opened its first exhibit in Washington, D.C. in 2017 followed by another in Miami last year. “That’s why I’m always focusing on cities more than personal or global data.” The images dissolve into numbers indicating the color of every pixel, then flow through what is essentially a maze of random equations, modeled after brain neurons in a structure called a neural network. Through reality-bending graphics that ripple across the walls, Machine Hallucinations traces Anadol’s own process of training a machine learning system, from data collection to image recognition to a point where the neural network can create its own art, of sorts.

At the same time, a second neural network tries to fool the first by feeding it fake images of New York skyscrapers mixed in with the real ones. Anadol first used an algorithm to scrape more than 100 million publicly available photos of New York buildings from social media, search engines and various archives. Once the second network could successfully deceive the first, Anadol used it to generate imaginary skylines for New York. The group chose Anadol for its latest project based on his previous work with data and AI, which he first began to explore about five years ago. The attempts begin as random blobs of pixels but morph into more building-looking shapes as the second network learns from the first network’s feedback.

“I’m super inspired by cities as a whole; they are like living institutions, living entities—I feel like a city literally has veins, has a heart,” Anadol said. That awe-inspiring quality was part of what Turkish new media artist Refik Anadol sought to spell out—in a medium of appropriately grand scale—with his new exhibition. The system estimates the odds that a given image is a real photo of a New York skyscraper, tweaking the equations each time until it forms an image-recognition algorithm. This whole setup is called a generative adversarial network (GAN), and it’s responsible for most AI-generated art—as well as the production of misinformation called deep fakes.

[idigiworld]

Ban on political ads on Twitter is not a big deal, advertisers say

Twitter's decision doesn't carry the sting that would happen if other platforms had made the same move.Illustration: Trent Joaquin; Sources: Getty Images, Twitter

"Frankly, I just don't think Twitter earned that much political advertising as the other major platforms — such as Facebook and Google — to start with." Digital advertisers behind presidential campaigns could hear a similarly blasé response. On Twitter, you could talk to people’s profiles or handles, but you never really knew if you were talking to individual voters—which is what these campaigns are all about. Issue-based advertisers could be hurt Even though political advertisers might not be sweating the incoming changes, those running campaigns at the fringes of politics—so-called “issue-based” advertisers—certainly are. Twitter’s decision to completely ban political ads will force it to draw even firmer lines around who can and cannot be an issue-based advertiser, meaning that the gripes they’re currently having on Facebook are likely to come to Twitter as well, Briscoe said.

“We’re going to see cases where they feel like they shouldn’t be caught up in the policy, but it’s going to become a headache for them to launch any sorts of ads.” While running ads that mention “elections” or “running for office” might be easy to flag as a political ad, those about issues like civil rights, healthcare or immigration fall into more of a grey area. Organic engagement Meanwhile, Richie Alicea, digital director behind Republican candidate Joe Walsh’s campaign, told Adweek that the return on advertising on Twitter, in his experience, has been “negligible”—especially when candidates can leverage their already-existing Twitter audiences through organic engagement, rather than paid reach. On other platforms like Facebook, political advertisers can upload a voter file list–names and addresses—that needed to be reached—and have the confidence that someone’s real name and address were affiliated with a particular Facebook profile.

Greenfield pointed out that Twitter generated less than $3 million during the 2018 midterm elections, likely due to the platform’s inability to demonstrate a return on investment for political campaigners, he said. When Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced—in a series of tweets, naturally—that the platform would no longer accept political ad dollars in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential race, the responses were mixed. Others, like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, argued that it’s not within the wheelhouse of private companies to “censor politicians and the news.” The only people shrugging off Twitter’s decision, it appears, are political advertisers themselves.

[idigiworld]

Now you can buy Patrón Tequila with the Instagram Swipe

Drizly, Instacart and ReserveBar will fulfill the Patrón purchases.Illustration: Trent Joaquin; Source: Patron

Patrón has become the first brand of alcohol you can order from Instagram. The 30-year-old brand partners with MikMak, a digital video business agency, to let users of Instagram simply click on the Instagram Stories ad to order Patrón for distribution in 48 states. Patron and MikMak are partnering with three third party partners— Drizly, Instacart and ReserveBar — to make these purchases. At retail, consumers will be questioned about their identity, and when they are processed, staff will have to test the purchaser's ID before they can distribute the alcohol.

This technology demonstrates that Instagram continues to become a shopping site, and how alcohol (and beer) brands are growing e-commerce activities and developing strategies to meet customers on digital platforms. "It's really about using modern technology to tell a handcrafted story for us," said Adrian Parker, global marketing director at Patrón. "We are a tequila company, not a technology company. This is just the beginning, a small step into the future [ of ] how you're going to interact with the spirit brands."

Source: Patron

The brand has set new goals, hoping to make up 20% of its e-commerce market by 2030. Parker said making alcohol shoppable through Instagram Stories is just the first step to get there— Patrón is also looking to use technologies such as augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality to communicate with customers. The ad units for this experience will include different versions of its creative, with one focusing on education about the product, while another centers on the “experience” of how people actually drink Patrón.“Tequila is one of the highest growing in the space, and one of the least understood,” he said. MikMak provides additional information, such as contributing to the cart and average order price, as well as insights into the viewer that swips up the ad to deliver consumer segmentation.

Nevertheless, Patrón does not collect credit card information because the transactions were issued and executed by Drizly, ReserveBar or Instacart. Patrón aims to calculate the normal KPIs including clicks, willingness to buy and speed of conversion. Patrón is also not going to sell a product out of inventory to MikMak. Parker often views it as a developer of the customer partnership. According to Tipograh, this is an opportunity to find out some of the pain points that alcohol companies are experiencing in building up their ecommerce business, such as what kind of advertising works to capture the attention of a customer and market a product that is already in inventory.

Rachel Tipograph, founder and CEO of MikMak, considers the entry into ecommerce by the alcohol industry on a path close to that of fashion. You want your digital shelf to be constantly owned, you want creative optimization, "Tipograph said. Instagram is now turning into the new digital shelf.