Mediaboss Marketing

Xbox One is getting an update starting today, echoing some of the major changes coming to Windows in its forthcoming Creators Update. The big new additions include streaming via Microsofts own Twitch competitor Beam, as well as a brand new Xbox user experience made up of a new design for Guide, improvements to Home and more.

The new features are designed around encouraging gamers to stream more often, providing easier access to those aspects of the UI. The overhaul can be seen as a push for Beam in this way, which it acquired last year. Beam is a Twitch competitor designed around offering more ways for audiences to interact with streamers, and Microsoft clearly sees it as a way to bringthe popularity of game streaming back within its own domain. It highlights that the new Beam integration means you dont have to download or activate any additional software or accounts Beam is fully native in Xbox.

Other big new features include the new Home design, which is designed for improved performance, and which puts content related to the games youre currently playing front and center. This is part of the ongoing evolution of the platform back to being primarily a gaming device, though at the Xbox Ones outset it was positioned more as a media hub for all types of content.

The Guide is also reconfigured, providing quick access to media controls and your most used content in a menu you can access via the Xbox button on your controller. Theres also improved multitasking, including in-game Achievement tracking via an overlaid UI element. Cortana will also be available on top of whatever else youre doing, so you dont need to jump entirely out of the action to control music, set reminders and do more via voice controls.

Beam broadcast and the new Beam viewing app, which is rolling out to all users, are again a big focal point here. Other additions like new accessibility features, screen time limits for parents of younger kids and Blu-ray bitstream passthrough for native audio decoding on home theatre setups are also nice additions. however.

The nice thing about consoles and their long shelf life is the extremely iterative approach their makers take to their core software. The centrality of Beam to this new Xbox experience seems like it could be more of a distraction for a large number of users, but otherwise these changes feel like a clear win.

The rest is here:
Xbox One gets Beam streaming, a new guide and more starting today - TechCrunch

Sahil Bhagat, founder and CEO, Vebbler

Re-launches mobile- and camera-first mobile app

Kolkata, March 29:

As times change, so do business models; more so in the tech world.

When Sahil Bhagat founded home-grown social network Vebbler in 2013, the idea was to have a personal forum allowing people to interact with each other through groups, while maintaining privacy.

But Bhagat, also Vebblers CEO, realised social-network users were more inclined to photo-sharing than just on interactions, with photos clicked using mobilephones dominating the segment.

The desi social network was re-launched in the later half of 2016 with focus on mobile and camera first and photo-sharing.

Social networking relies more on sharing images now-a-days. And people end up creating multiple groups on chat forums to get those select pictures. Vebbler makes it easier by creating Clubs where users of a group can send photos. These photos can then be uploaded across multiple social networking sites, he told BusinessLine.

This apart, the mobile app has a host of photo filters and other effects that can be used to enhance the images, and various visual reactions responding to photos using selfies, emojis, captions and quirky GIFs.

Vebbler currently has 5,00,000 users across 118 countries. The top countries include India, the US, Iran and Argentina.

Bhagat knows he is targeting a young audience preferably between ages 18 and 24 who want results fast, and are willing to experiment with the new. Accordingly, the Bengaluru-headquartered company is working on new features to ensure customer retention.

It is also in talks with social-media influencers for promoted profiles.

Various programmes are also being carried out across campuses (mostly educational institutions) to popularise the platform.

In the initial days, customer acquisition and retention is important. Once we have done that, scaling up will be looked into.

Monetisation of the platform and integrating m-commerce are not under Bhagats immediate goals. Maybe around 2018-19, we could look at monetisation options or open up the platform for advertisements. As of now, we are working towards content.

Interestingly, Vebbler is still not into the funding game.

Initially, it was a boot-strapped company. Later it secured very early funding to the tune of $500,000 from a host of investors in India and abroad.

As of now, there are no immediate fund-raising plans, Bhagat adds.

(This article was published on March 29, 2017)

Please enter your email. Thank You.

Newsletter has been successfully subscribed.

See the rest here:
Desi social network Vebbler focusses on photo-sharing in its second avatar - Hindu Business Line

An interesting trend has recently emerged among Facebook users. One might refer to it as the Facebook fatigue. An increasing amount of users are opting to take a hiatus from the otherwise addictive social media website, while many choose to be online ghosts, logging in every day, observing the activities and updates of their relatives and friends without letting their own presence felt.Furthermore, few users have even created more than two profiles in order to filter their friends and hide from those whom they dont wish to see online.

The aforementioned example is funny and ironic at so many levels because not too long ago, people would escape from their daily lives, for brief as well as extended moments, to find refuge in the unfamiliar, yet comforting arms of the social network. And unlike life, one online profile was enough. Perhaps it was the unfamiliarity that made it more exciting. But as is with everything, there comes a moment when an event or a series of events shatters the bubbled glass of perception we surround ourselves in. And suddenly, there is an ultra-high-definition of clarity all around.

Facebook was once the definition of coolness! Back then, asking, Arent you on Facebook? was as de rigueur as poking someone with, OMG, You dont watch Game of Thrones nowadays. It used to be a virtual hangout where people would flock to, in an attempt to shun the realities of life and the exacting demands of the world at large. They made their own online pristine precincts, impregnably guarded by privacy and security settings, where things were just as they wanted, with people and content of their choice.

Then, as if in an act of harakiri, they themselves opened the back doors by liking, commenting or sharing something that wasnt exactly in their own comfort zone. As FB (as Facebook is colloquially called), acquired more than a billion users, the world at large that bully in school, that ghastly colleague from office, an ex or an ex-boss, the nagging aunt, or those forgettable nameless acquaintances whose faces one can neither place nor would like to see quietly snuck into their lives, online. And to an unimaginable extent, offline too! Striding along came this new bunchs choices, tastes and opinions. Soon, as if taking a cue, the Modis, the Kejriwals and also the press made its inroads. And with them, they brought in the deluge of all that is wrong with the planet we inhabit.

Other than being cool, Facebook became many things. Currently, it serves the daily news (factual or not depends upon which political ideology one sides with), it shows you pictures and videos of entertainment, it gives phenomenal advice on food, travel, music and dance. It even provides the ideal platform to satiate your inner narcissism! Click that selfie, show off those culinary skills or DSLR captured escapades to your friends and extended family. You dont want to see their faces, but what on earth would you not give to shove that Eiffel Tower from your latest Parisian sojourn down their throats! Facebook enables you to exist in a parallel universe, even if for a while, where everything is just perfect, much like that filter enriched photoshopped picture.

Today, it can hardly be considered a refuge, certainly not when the people, issues, and ideas that you avoided all your life are part of your daily morning brief! No matter what the privacy settings are, they just show up. After all, Facebook would lose business if you continue avoiding contact with them. The newsfeed itself has evolved over the years. The feed which was once filled with witty, motivational or plain funny messages is now muddled with politics, hate and sheer negativity, each of them complementing the other. Artificial intelligence (AI) induced suggestions have been almost clandestinely injected into the system, so subtly, that at first, they are simply unnoticeable. If you wish to get a load of what cookies, trackers and crawlers can do, just google something as ordinary as a pencil or a water pump and check your Facebook page after two minutes. The right side of the page and the news feed will be filled with suggestions of five different brands of pencils and sponsored content from Tullu Pumps from Ludhiana! They just magically emerge from the vast sea of the worldwide web, except that it is not magic, but creepy AI slowly extending its pervasive tentacles into our private lives.

So, where does FB go from here? If users are so fatigued that they avoid the website or frequently go on a hiatus, and more fake profiles are unearthed, what does this mean for Facebook, the company? Should this spell the end? No, it wont. On the contrary, it will continue to expand its empire. It might indeed have been the end as early as 2012, if not for the slew of shrewd and calculative acquisitions the company made, starting from Instagram, Whatsapp and then the Oculus VR, all for a very large amount of money.

The acquisition wasnt as much about the intellectual property and data mines these hot startups offered as much as it was about the acquisition of competition itself! Facebook is not a social media company pitted against MySpace, Friendster or Orkut (remember it?) anymore, but a technology firm competing with Google, Microsoft and Amazon with projects that vary from its cash churning online advertising business to augmented reality, cloud computing, internet-beaming, AI home assistants and so on. The website would soon be suggesting job interviews to its users, taking on established players like LinkedIn and Monster.com. Mark Zuckerberg, who is currently the fifth richest person in the world according to Forbes Magazine, could well be on the top of the list in the future. As for the users, fatigued or not, they have no option but to return to the grid at some point in time. As much as you may abhor it, shunning the social network altogether gives one a feeling of being left out. It is like a party you decided not to got to, but cant stop thinking about while you try to sleep.

The current state of Facebook is not very different from the usual landfills where everyone simply dumps their garbage and vultures and trolls hover above looking for prey to feed on. From Narendra Modi to a common Indian, today, everyone has this innate urge to dump his opinions on the social platform. Just like this writer! It is, after all, the enabling of a vibrant democracy, as some would argue. As participants and often the beneficiaries of the social network, we must understand the deal we made with modernity, wherein, we willingly traded off our privacy in exchange for the abundance of information, troves of data and the sea of knowledge, before it came back to haunt us in the form of views and opinions that are essentially not our own. The problem lies there.

To be fair, Im not against free speech, nor am I deriding the will of anyone to express their opinion. In a liberal world, we are taught to respect each others opinion. But humans often feel differently and have contradictory desires.

As an individual, I do not wish to be a part of the socio-political jamboree. I have no interest in the elections or wars or the refugee situation and just want to watch cat videos and sift through the latest shade of lip gloss, can I not do it in peace and privacy of my social media account? I am simply piqued at the mere absence of my free will to be able to censor what I dont wish to see on my own Facebook page. Is it that difficult to achieve? I dont think so.

Facebook was about the best pictures, thoughts, and online behaviour; your wittiest, funniest and most compassionate self. That was the whole idea of being online in the first place, to create an alternative reality about yourself. Then, somewhere in between, niceties gave way to provocation, till this became the norm. Facebook is not dying anytime soon. It is far from that stage. So where does that leave us, the users? Addicted or not, given the fact that we will continue to return to the website, do we have a choice in controlling what we see on our Facebook page, thus making it cool for us all over again? A popular Japanese saying aptly sums up the conundrum. If you want a better picture, go get yourself a better face!

However, the newsfeed is a mirror and its content, mere reflection of our own activities, opinions, likes and dislikes. What we and our online avatars need are a relook and reboot. _

More:
Why I Miss The 'Old' Facebook - Youth Ki Awaaz

Unlike the government, which some criticize as an inefficient behemoth and others praise as an inefficient behemoth by design, Facebook's new Town Hall feature is streamlined and devoid of controversy: it simply tells you the two most crucial bits of information for civic participation: who your elected officials are, and when you need to vote.

Launched on Monday, the Town Hall site is integrated into Facebook's main desktop site. Upon visiting for the first time, you'll be greeted with a prompt to enter your physical address if you don't already have it saved to your profile. Facebook assures that it will not display the address publically.

Once it knows where you live, Town Hall offers a list of your local, state, and federal elected officials. Next to each one is a contact button that launches a pop-up with a mailing address, a phone number, and an email link. Of course, nearly all elected officials are already on Facebook, so the pop-up also has a button to start a Messenger conversation with the politician. There's also a "follow" link next to each person's name in the list.

Next to the list of officials is a settings pane with Town Hall's only configurable option: to toggle reminders about upcoming elections on or off. So even if Town Hall doesn't encourage you to proactively get in touch with any of your elected officials, at least you'll be alerted when democracy needs you.

There is one small but glaring caveat about Town Hall, however. Facebook may have launched it to improve civic participation, but it is self-promotional, too: it searches for officials based on their Facebook pages, and there's no one-click way to find out if your representative isn't on Facebook.

As with all things in the social media world, Town Hall is a work in progress. In a post on Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Town Hall was starting to roll out across the US, and that his company is "increasingly focused" on helping its users engage in politics.

Excerpt from:
Facebook's Town Hall Finds Your Elected Officials - PCMag India

Rep. Luis Gutirrez (D-Ill.) says Fourth Amendment cities is a more accurate name for the sanctuary cities being targeted by the Trump administration.

Heres how I see it yeah, they call them sanctuary cities, he told host Chris Cuomo Wednesday on CNNs New Day." "What I would say, Chris, is theyre Fourth Amendment cities.

Gutierrez used Chicago as an example of how cities can protect the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by the government unless it obtains a warrant.

The DEA, the FBI, the ATF they get warrants right? he said. "They go and pick people up.

What [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] which is another federal law enforcement agency does is it wants to have people detained and wants the City of Chicago to go after people without any probable cause being submitted before the court and without a warrant, Gutierrez added.

If you supply a warrant to the City of Chicago, we will absolutely honor that warrant. But youve got to get a warrant.

Attorney General Jeff SessionsJeff SessionsFiorina calls for special prosecutor for Russia probe The Hill's 12:30 Report Dem rep: Sanctuary cities are actually Fourth Amendment cities MORE said Monday that state and local governments seeking Justice Department grants must certify they are not sanctuary cities before receiving the money.

Such policies cannot continue, Sessions said during a surprise stop at the White Houses daily press briefing. "They make our nation less safe by putting dangerous criminals back on the streets.

The announcement was the latest step by the Trump administration to crack down on sanctuary cities, which do not assist federal authorities in enforcing immigration laws. Those cities say enforcing immigration laws would hurt law enforcement because undocumented immigrants would not come forward with information or to report crimes.

But the attorney general said compliance with federal immigration laws is now a prerequisite for state and local governments to receive grants from the Justice Department's Office of Justice Program.

The office provides billions of dollars in grants and other funding to help criminal justice programs across the country.

Read the original:
Dem rep: Sanctuary cities are actually 'Fourth Amendment cities ... - The Hill