Schlagwort: 039

Facebook Is Developing A Video App For Your Set Top Box

Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty Images

Facebook is developing a video app that's coming soon to Apple TV and other streaming devices.

On Tuesday at the Code Conference in Dana Point, California, Facebook announced that it&039;s developing a standalone video app for cable set top boxes.

The app will be available on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Samsung Smart TV, and it will roll out “soon,” according to the company. Users will be able to watch videos, both live and otherwise, shared by friends and publisher pages, as well as videos recommended by Facebook. Last year, the company debuted a feature that would allow users to stream Facebook video to TV, but the new app will be native to televisions and streaming devices.

As the social network runs out of space for ads in its news feed, longer videos and Facebook&039;s own premium content may be a way for it to compete for the $70 billion annually spent on television ads.

According to Recode, Facebook is in discussions with media companies to license TV shows rather than produce them in-house. Facebook is the second-largest seller of digital ads behind Google. Recode reports that these videos would likely be upwards of 10 minutes in length. Facebook has already adjusted its News Feed algorithm to promote videos that are longer than 90 seconds.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that video is the format at the heart of what Facebook is and what it does. The company is currently promoting Facebook Live with a national ad campaign, and despite controversy surrounding the product and how it&039;s used, Facebook may soon start playing 15-second ads in the middle of publishers&039; livestreams. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook has told publishers it will share that ad revenue with them.

The news comes as Apple is also considering producing original shows and films. Both Apple and Facebook will be entering a competitive field ruled by Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which have the advantage of already being major players. Apple isn&039;t likely to become a direct competitor against Netflix or Amazon, but it&039;s unclear what Facebook&039;s ambitions are or how much it will spend on licensed video content.

Facebook currently serves users video ads on the web and in its mobile app, but the company said the TV app will not serve ads when it launches. Facebook declined to say whether it will license content or create proprietary shows for the app and what role ads will play in its programming.

Facebook bundled announcement of the TV app with the release of several new features in the news feed: videos on the social network will now automatically play with sound, vertical videos will now “look better on mobile” thanks to small tweaks, and users will be able to minimize videos to watch them as they scroll.

View Video ›

Facebook: video.php

Quelle: <a href="Facebook Is Developing A Video App For Your Set Top Box“>BuzzFeed

Here’s Who Drops The Most Cash On Candy Crush And Clash Of Clans

Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images

If you were wondering how games like Candy Crush and Clash of Clans rake in millions of dollars, look to Norway and North Dakota. That&#039;s where the games&039; power players live.

In a recent study, “iPhone&039;s Digital Marketplace: Characterizing the Big Spenders,” researchers at the University of Southern California analyzed receipts from 776 million iPhone transactions totaling $4.6 billion from March 2014 to June 2015, and found that geography and gender play big roles in who&039;s buying digital goods from the App Store and iTunes.

USC

Researchers also found that in-app purchases account for 61%, or a whopping $2.8 billion, of all in-app purchases made through Apple&039;s stores. They defined in-app purchases as “bonuses or coins in games, for example,” but also included subscriptions within an app to services like Netflix or Apple Music.

The researchers used six categories to sort the various purchases people made on their iPhones: “applications (apps), songs, movies, TV shows, books, and in-app purchases.” Purchasing an application, for instance, means paying to download an app and is separate from in-app purchases.

Farshad Kooti, one of the authors of the study and now a data scientist at Facebook, said, “The purchasing gap surprised us. I didn&039;t expect in-app purchases to dwarf all other kinds of media so vastly.”

What&039;s even more startling is that of those in-app purchases, 59% of them were made by only 1% of the 26 million people surveyed. That means this relatively tiny group was spending about $1.65 billion. By comparison, the bottom half of people who bought things in Apple&039;s digital stores accounted for less than 2% of the total purchases.

Among the people studied, nationality was a determining factor in who spends the most in Apple&039;s digital stores. Overall, Scandinavia had the highest concentration of “big spenders,” the term researchers used for the 1% of people who spend almost 60% of the money. The researchers also noted that Greek, Turkish, and Romanian users were more likely to be fall into that category. People in the United States were not as prone to making in-app purchases, but of all the states, North Dakotans were the most likely to do so.

Kooti hypothesized that the reasons for the skew are counterintuitive: “People in the US are more likely to have credit cards, which are what you use to purchase things in the App Store, but since everyone has one, that leads to more casual app users and players than hardcore ones. People outside the US, by contrast, are less likely to have credit cards, so if they’re playing these games and have entered their credit card information, they&039;re likely to be much more serious about gaming and spend more money per person.”

Gender also played a big role in who made a purchase and from what apps. Big spenders were 55% men and 45% women. Of the five most popular games, men heavily favored the war games Clash of Clans, Game of War, and Boom Beach. Women, by contrast, were more into Candy Crush Saga and the farmer-themed Hay Day.

Overall median spending during the time period studied was $31.10 among women, and among men it was $36.20. Peak age for spending was in the mid-30s for men, and mid-40s for women. Kooti hypothesized that, like gamers outside the US who have credit cards, older people who commit to familiarizing themselves with an iPhone game and playing it might be more likely to spend money because of the effort they&039;ve already put into the endeavor.

A breakdown of in-app purchases based on gender and age.

USC

The apps these people spent money on are familiar names: Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga have been among the most-downloaded and top-grossing apps for years. After Candy Crush became popular, some people got hooked and couldn&039;t stop buying lives and power-ups to feed that addiction. That obsessive gameplay has lured players into spending sprees that earned the games&039; creators millions.

It&039;s also worth noting that the same company, Supercell, is behind Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, and Hay Day. The company seems to have optimized in-app purchases: there were 330% more purchases in Candy Crush Saga than in Clash of Clans, but the amount per transaction for the latter were much higher, leading to 210% more revenue for the war game.

The app market remains risky, though. Researchers found that around just 0.1% of the apps measured took home 71% of in-app purchase dollars.

Kooti advised future developers that the App Store is a gamble: “People don’t pay attention to the fact that very few apps make any money at all. It&039;s very risky to go after the App Store market, but the apps that do well do very, very well.”

Besides in-app purchases, people spent money on individual songs from iTunes — 23% of the money — about a billion dollars — and buying apps outright — 7% of of the money, roughly $320 million. The study did not account for music purchases outside of iTunes. The people in the study purchased 430 million songs, and in the same period, they made 255 million in-app purchases, which had a much higher value per transaction, according to the study.

Apple raked in $20 billion from the app store in 2015, and that number likely rose in 2016. The company disclosed that it made $3 billion in December 2016 alone.

The study had one major limitation of note. It only targeted users of Yahoo&#033; Mail, which Kooti said became irrelevant for two reasons: the sample size, 26 million people, was large enough to smooth out demographic differences, and the researchers were comparing percentages of populations that behaved certain ways rather than comparing raw numbers.

Quelle: <a href="Here’s Who Drops The Most Cash On Candy Crush And Clash Of Clans“>BuzzFeed

The First Rule of These Facebook Groups: Don't Talk Trump

Kat Ayres moderates “Heughan&#039;s Heughligans,” a Facebook group devoted to the Outlander book series and its Starz adaptation. It&039;s a big job. The group&039;s 22,000 members write around 1,000 new posts a day — about everything from the show&039;s stars, Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe, to ancient Scottish tea sets — and Ayres and her nine co-moderators have to ensure they adhere to community guidelines that, in part, prohibit the discussion of politics.

“If there’s politics, it&039;s shut down,” Ayres told BuzzFeed News. “It leads to ugliness and bad feelings and drama.”

Leading up to the presidential election, that big job got even bigger. Heughan&039;s Heughligans had banned political discussion since the group started in 2013, but in 2016 political posts became more frequent and, as Ayres put it, “more intense.” She found herself spending hours a day poring over every post, trying to remove political content from the group; it felt like every other comment referred disparagingly to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Finally, after Trump was elected and the political talk didn&039;t abate, Ayres and the other mods decided to take a drastic step: They enabled “Post Approval,” which requires everything posted to Heughan&039;s Heughligans to be blessed by a mod first.

“It was around Thanksgiving,” Ayres said. “We wanted to spend more time with our families.”

That&039;s right: It takes the the Heughan&039;s Heughligans mods less time to read and approve 1,000 posts a day than it does to retroactively spot-scrub the page and deal with the conflicts that emerge from letting people discuss politics before the posts can be taken down.

Yet such is the life of a certain kind of moderator in the age of the Trump administration. Across the internet of nonpolitical interest groups, from college football and Catholic community message boards to parenting, professional sports, and New Age Facebook groups, determined — if beleaguered — admins are trying their best to keep their spaces free from politics, which in 2017 really means the looming presence of one extremely polarizing person. They&039;re doing so on behalf of an untold number of users who have quickly found fandom and personal interest communities to be some of the last politics-free spaces on the English-language internet.

“A lot of the messages we get say, &039;Thank you for having this rule,&039;” Ayres said. “&039;Because this is the one place I know I’m not going to have to deal with politics.&039;”

A post on the “N.Y. Islanders Baby&#033; Uncensored* Isles Talk for Adults” Facebook group.

Explicit or tacit bans on political talk in specialty message boards and other groups are nearly as old as the internet. And indeed, Heughan&039;s Heughligans and other no-politics groups would (and do) readily ban posts about Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton.

But over the past year, a half dozen moderators of various political persuasions told BuzzFeed News, something has changed. Begin with a presidential campaign that in the words of one mod was “the most heated and volatile one that most of our subscribers can remember.” Add a president who uses one social network, Twitter, as his own personal news channel, to the point of saturation. Throw in hyperpartisan filter bubbles that create parallel versions of current events (and nasty fights in the comments sections) on the biggest social network, Facebook. Finish it off with a mainstream media that has become all Trump, all the time, and you&039;ve got the recipe for a social internet that seems to be downright Trump-themed, no matter your politics.

In such an environment, the moderators of niche-interest communities say their spaces are more important than ever.

“We look at it as an oasis to get away from all the madness.”

“We look at it as an oasis to get away from all the madness,” said Gregory Christopher, who moderates a Facebook group called “N.Y. Islanders Baby&033; Uncensored Isles Talk for Adults,” which, well, censors political talk. “CNN is just 24 hours a day Trump.”

Christopher, in fact, has had to go further than just banning political speech. His group, which is made up of Islanders fans from across the political spectrum, doesn&039;t allow Trump&039;s image (or the image of any national politician).

“Someone posted a meme of an Isles fan in a Trump mask holding a sign saying “Make the Isles Great Again,” Christopher said. “It immediately set off a firestorm and we asked the poster to take down the post.”

Christopher and Ayres, as well as other moderators, said they don&039;t police political speech simply for the benefit of their users; it&039;s also for the overall health of the communities. As anyone who has spent time on Twitter or Reddit in the last few years will tell you, political arguments can quickly turn toxic.

“It is such an incendiary topic that you’re going to drive people away,” said John Borton, editor of The Wolverine, a magazine and message board devoted to University of Michigan football that significantly limits political opinion online. “It doesn’t matter which side it happens to fall on. You’re going to see people walking away saying, &039;I don’t need this. I can go to a hundred different websites.&039;”

These politics-safe spaces do welcome most off-topic conversation. It&039;s common for users of the The Wolverine to ask for legal advice, prayers for an ailing relative, or grilling tips. Indeed, the ability of these communities to draw in off-topic discussion is part of what makes them communities. But politics — particularly in the age of Trump — is a third rail.

“I don’t mind reading that you lost your yellow Lab, but those aren’t the kind of things that engender the fury that will make people not want to be here,” Borton said.

At times, no-politics rules can lead to unintended and alienating consequences. Olga Tomchin, an immigrants&039; rights lawyer and a former child refugee, submitted a post to a Facebook anxiety support group asking how to deal with stress related to the recent executive order banning travel from some Muslim-majority countries. A moderator of the group asked Tomchin to change the language in her post to make the cause of her anxiety less specific, and less political. Tomchin refused and left the group.

Another tricky situation for no-politics communities arises when someone who is an important figure to the group does something political. Last month, Outlander star Caitriona Balfe tweeted that she would be taking part in the Women&039;s March in Edinburgh. Despite the tweet&039;s relevance to the show&039;s fans, Ayres and her fellow mods decided not to allow any posts referencing it.

Yet for most niche-interest sites, Ayres said, despite pushback from a few posters, this form of censorship is necessary to preserve the increasingly rare places on the internet where people who love Donald Trump and people who hate Donald Trump can come together and talk about something completely unrelated to Donald Trump.

“It&039;s kind of like a vacation on Facebook to come to our group,” Ayres said, “and not have to deal with politics, drama, and constant fighting.”

Quelle: <a href="The First Rule of These Facebook Groups: Don&039;t Talk Trump“>BuzzFeed

Senators Are Asking Questions About The Security Of Trump's Personal Phone

Pool / Getty Images

Is President Trump still using an insecure smartphone? If he&#039;s been given a secure device for his personal use, is he actually using it? And what security measures are in place to protect his personal phone from intruders?

These are some of the questions recently put to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis by two Democratic Senators who serve on the Homeland Security Committee. In a letter dated February 9th, Sens. Claire McCaskill and Tom Carper expressed concern that Trump&039;s personal phone — which he may use to send tweets, they note, and may be vulnerable to hacking — poses a serious national security risk.

“Public reports originally indicated that President Trump began using a &039;secure, encrypted device approved by the U.S. Secret Service&039; prior to taking office,” the Senators wrote. “Subsequent reports, however, suggest that President Trump may still be using his personal smartphone, an &039;old, unsecured Android phone.&039; While it is important for the President to have the ability to communicate electronically, it is equally important that he does so in a manner that is secure and that ensures the preservation of presidential records.”

Sens. McCaskill and Carper describe these news reports as “troubling,” since hackers can target unsecured devices and activate a phone&039;s audio recording, camera, and location tracking. Even when people take precautions to secure their devices, hackers continue to exploit security weaknesses or create new pathways to personal data, the Senators said.

“These vulnerabilities are among the reasons why national security agencies discourage the use of personal devices,” the letter reads. “The national security risks of compromising a smartphone used by a senior government official, such as the President of the United States, are considerable.”

Sens. McCaskill and Carper asked Secretary Mattis to confirm whether the president has a “secured, encrypted smartphone for his personal use.” They also asked to review the Defense Department&039;s written policies for securing President Trump&039;s personal device.

Alongside the security risks, the Senators are also concerned that presidential records — including Trump&039;s tweets — may not be properly recorded if they are created on his personal device. “The National Archives and Records
Administration considers President Trump&039;s tweets to be records that must be adequately documented, preserved, and maintained for historic purposes, as required by the Presidential Records Act,” the letter explains.

One of questions posed to Secretary Mattis was whether the Defense Department collaborated with the National Archives and Records Administration to ensure that the security measures on Trump&039;s phone don&039;t interfere with the preservation of presidential records.

The Senators asked Secretary Mattis to respond by March 9th.

Last month, McCaskill and Carper wrote a letter to White House Counsel Donald McGahn seeking to find out if Trump&039;s staff complied with federal law regarding the use of private email accounts to conduct official business. They asked that he respond by February 10th. A spokesperson for Sen. McCaskill told BuzzFeed News that they have not received a response.

Quelle: <a href="Senators Are Asking Questions About The Security Of Trump&039;s Personal Phone“>BuzzFeed

Here's How Much Traffic A Trump Tweet Drives

When President Trump deployed his “big, beautiful Twitter account” to direct his followers to the swearing-in of Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general last Thursday, some 66,000 people clicked the link he created to get them there.

Trump, whose @realDonaldTrump Twitter account currently boasts 24.5 million followers, often uses a URL management tool called Bitly to shorten the links he tweets. And because he uses the public version of that tool, the anonymized traffic analytics for those shortened links is freely available.

That data — which would be inaccessible to the public were Trump to use standard URLs — reveals that @realDonaldTrump is a traffic cannon. Though the president&#039;s Twitter influence manifests itself largely in conversation-driving tweets like last Thursday night&039;s “SEE YOU IN COURT” missive, it&039;s also quite effective at directing his followers to stories and reports he wants them to read.

Last Wednesday, for instance, Trump shared a link to a story citing an Emerson College poll that found voters trust the Trump administration more than the media. Placing a plus sign after the Bitly link he created, “bit.ly/2k4b0imEmersonPoll,” summons a page displaying all the click data on the link — including the number of clicks through to the story and where they came from.

In the case of the Emerson poll story, published by The Hill, more than 678,000 people clicked Trump&039;s link to it — 558,000 of them on Twitter. 72% of those clicks occurred in the US, 6% were generated in the United Kingdom and another 6% in Canada. Of the remaining 120,000 clicks, around 32,000 originated from Facebook, and the rest from platforms other than Twitter.

Trump&039;s activity on Bitly blows away other links created with the service. In the first hour after he tweeted the Emerson poll link, 78,411 people clicked it, according to Bitly, far and away the most clicks on any Bitly link within that timeframe. The next-most-clicked Bitly link in that timeframe was another Trump-generated link, and the following eight in the top 10 a grand total of approximately 31,000 clicks.

Bitly

The caveat here is that Bitly measures all clicks on the shortened links it creates: If someone copied Trump&039;s link and shared it somewhere else, those clicks are included in this data as well. That said, Bitly&039;s analytics can put a rough, but reasonable, number on the kind of web traffic Trump drives. And, predictably, that number is massive — especially when compared to that of other celebrity Twitter accounts.

A recent Bitly link tweeted by Kim Kardashian, for instance, generated just 2,998 clickthroughs from Twitter despite the fact that Kardashian has an audience of 50 million followers — double the size of Trump&039;s.

Bitly

Trump, meanwhile, has averaged 84,000 clicks per tweet on the last 10 Bitly links he&039;s shared.

Hillary Clinton also uses Bitly. A tweeted link to her concession speech generated 78,000 clicks from Twitter, less than Trump&039;s average click number.

Bitly

Quelle: <a href="Here&039;s How Much Traffic A Trump Tweet Drives“>BuzzFeed

Thousands Of Protesting Uber And Ola Drivers Have Knocked New Delhi's Transport System Out Of Whack

Twitter: @sweta_goswami

Thousands of drivers working for Uber and Ola in the Indian capital of New Delhi have been on strike for more than 72 hours, throwing the city&#039;s transport system into chaos.

This is what they’re demanding from the ride-hailing companies: reduced working hours, better monetary incentives, higher base fare, and accident insurance among other things.

Surge-pricing — sometimes as high as three times the usual fare — kicked in over the weekend as thousands of cabs from both services went offline. Auto rickshaws and traditional radio cabs — legacy forms of transport that have been hit hard by Uber and Ola — made a killing, even as the Delhi government rushed to provide extra buses to stranded commuters.

Hundreds of drivers have been protesting at Jantar Mantar, a popular protest site in Central Delhi over the weekend. At least two people who were on hunger strike have been hospitalised, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Drivers want Uber and Ola to bump up the base fare from Rs. 6 a kilometer to Rs. 21 a kilometer — in line with what traditional radio cabs charge in the city. They also want both services to cut back on the commission that they take on each ride — typically between 20% and 30%, and provide accident insurance to drivers.

In response to the protests, Uber filed a court order against the two largest unions representing drivers in New Delhi in the Delhi High Court, which was granted on Monday. An Uber spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “We welcome this court order, which prohibits unions, their leaders and anybody else from obstructing the activities of Uber driver partners as they go about their business. We hope it will enable drivers to get back behind the wheel, something many have been telling us they wish to do. We&039;re sorry that our service has been disrupted and for any inconvenience this has caused.”

“Our demands are not unreasonable,” said Manoj Kumar Verma, spokesperson at the Sarvodaya Drivers Association, one of the two drivers&039; unions that Uber filed a court order against, and which claims to represent over 150,000 drivers in New Delhi. “We used to make between Rs. 80,000 and Rs. 100,000 a month earlier. Now we are lucky to make Rs. 30,000.”

Over half a dozen Uber and Ola drivers that BuzzFeed News spoke to said that the key reason for the sharp dip in earnings was that both Uber and Ola have stopped doling out monetary incentives in the last two months. An incentive is a flat fee that both companies give out to drivers in exchange for meeting daily targets such as completing a minimum number of rides or driving a minimum distance.

“When we first signed up, [Uber and Ola] promised us that we would make lots of money,” an Ola driver told BuzzFeed News on the condition of anonymity. “That’s not true anymore. Ola and Uber have not even acknowledged our demands yet. They don’t care if we live or die.”

Twitter: @PranavDixit

Uber declined to answer BuzzFeed News’ questions about incentives, but provided the following statement: “We’re sorry that our service has been disrupted and for any inconvenience this has caused. Serving riders, drivers and cities is core to our mission and we are working hard to ensure that drivers are able to get back behind the wheel and riders can get from A to B conveniently, reliably and safely.”

The company is showing the following message in its app to riders.

Pranav Dixit / Via BuzzFeed News

Ola told BuzzFeed News that the company would not comment on the protests. It has been sending out the following text message to customers in New Delhi:

Pranav Dixit / Via BuzzFeed News

New Delhi&039;s transport minister Satyender Jain told Reuters that he is planning to meet the striking drivers on Tuesday to resolve the issue. “I am going to hear all the sides and then we will set new rules soon,” he said.

This is not the first time that Uber and Ola drivers have gone on strike in India. Last year, Ola and Uber drivers in Hyderabad called for a five-day strike to protest against low earnings. And In January, drivers in Bengaluru, Uber&039;s largest market in India, went offline for a day to protest against dwindling earnings and long working hours.

Meanwhile, the New Delhi protests threaten to spread — once again — to Bengaluru, and Chennai. According to the Economic Times, more than 50,000 drivers in Bengaluru and 5,000 drivers in Chennai are planning to strike on February 15.

Quelle: <a href="Thousands Of Protesting Uber And Ola Drivers Have Knocked New Delhi&039;s Transport System Out Of Whack“>BuzzFeed