Digital Information World

YouTube’s Trending tab displays videos that a lot of users around the globe would find interesting, and several content creators want to know more about the internal working of this tab. How and why this tab surfaces some seemingly popular clips. It is likely that YouTube will never describe what makes a YouTube video hit the trending tab. However, Ammar Alyousfi, a data scientist did an analysis of YouTube trending videos, and provided a huge amount of data about every YouTube video that hit the Trending tab last year.

In order to compile his report, he ran an automated script that collected data from the tab each day throughout the year 2019.

According to the report, 11,177 unique clips hit the Trending tab in 2019, and a total of 72,994 videos were displayed in the tab. However, several videos trended for more than one day. Alyousfi examined data on all the 72,994 videos and included 3 occurrences of a video if that video trended for 3 days. The data shows that 6 videos trended for thirty days, three of which were related to BTS, a popular kpop band, who is behind the most watched YouTube video of 2019.

90% of YouTube videos hit the Trending tab when they had less than 2,752,317 views, Alyousfi found. According to the report, none of the longest-trending YouTube video came from channels that most frequently created trending videos. Linus Tech Tips was the top trending channel of last year, which had 365 videos appeared on the Trending tab. Binging with Babish ranked second in the list of top trending channels with nearly 360 trending videos.

So, what are the factors that helps a video to hit the Trending tab? According to the report, Trending uploads were spread pretty evenly across the seven days of a week. Tuesday was the highest posting day with nearly 11,986 trending clips. In comparison, Saturday lagged behind all other days of the week with nearly 7,345 Trending videos. Videos that were uploaded between noon and 2 PM (based on Washington Time) were most likely to become Trending videos, while those uploaded between 6 am and 11 am (GMT-4) were least likely to hit Trending.

You may also note that most of the viral content did not hit the Trending tab on the actual date they were uploaded. Alyousfi states that on average, videos hit the Trending tab after 5 or 6 days of publishing, and it took less than 13 days for 95 percent of the content to appear in the Trending section. He also highlighted various interesting stats among video titles such as 50% of Trending content had no all-caps words in their titles.

"While the allowed maximum (limit in YouTube description box) is 5,000 character, most trending videos have their descriptions length between 500 and 1500 characters."

Discussing the length of the titles, generally it was between 36 and 64 characters, and the most common words in these titles include trailer, vs, 2019, highlights, first, music, game, challenge, official, and video.

Almost all Trending clips used tags, according to Alyuosfi, the average number of tags used in a Trending video is 21. Only 3.5% of Trending videos on YouTube used no tags.

Bloomberg published a new report about the highest-paid CEOs and executives in 2019. According to the report, Elon Musk, CEO Tesla is the highest-paid CEO across the globe with over $595 million made during the last year. However, when it comes to the tech industry, Apple's Tim Cook is the highest-paid CEO in the industry.

Tim Cook made more than $133 million during the last year. This indicates that he is the second-highest-paid CEO around the world. When it comes to Apple’s competitors from the tech industry, the closest is Robert Swan, CEO at Intel. Robert Swan made $99 million during the year 2019.

Sundar Pichai, CEO at Alphabet/Google is the third-highest paid CEO in the tech industry and was paid more than $86 million during 2019. You may also note that the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella holds the ninth position in the chart provided by Bloomberg. Nadella made over $77 million during the year 2019.

Currently, Apple is the most valuable company around the world, so it makes sense that its CEO, Tim Cook should also do well. According to Bloomberg’s chart, more than $122 million of all the money Cook made last year comes from stock awards. In comparison, his yearly bonus accounts for ‘only’ $7.6 million.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla leads the charts for the year 2019, all the money he made during 2019 comes from option rewards. Discussing the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, more than $64 million of all the money made by Nadella comes from stock awards. While over $10.7 million of all the money made by Nadella in 2019 comes from a bonus for the performance of the company during the year 2018.

The tech industry is still dominating the charts, and the data published by Bloomberg also reveals that no less than 4 out of 10 CEOs in the top ten paid CEOs across the globe come from this sector. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, and Intel’s CEO Robert Swan together made over half a billion dollars in 2019. This indicates how well the tech industry is doing these days. According to Bloomberg, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has already confirmed that he will donate all the money he earned in 2019.

The 2020 ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning) accepted a paper from Facebook’s researchers. In the paper, researchers described a method to separate up to 5 voices speaking simultaneously on one microphone. Facebook’s team claims that their method is better than previous state-of-the-art speech-source separation benchmarks.

Isolating speech from conversations is an important step towards enhancing communication across various apps such as video tools and voice messaging. The problem of background noise suppression can also be resolved by speech-separation methods like those proposed by Facebook’s team.

In this method, the researchers at Facebook used a novel recurrent neural network to create their model. The model proposed by the researchers at Facebook leverages an encoder network, and the encoder network maps raw audio waveforms to a latent representation. Then, these representations are transformed into an estimated audio signal for every speaker by a voice separation network.

To work efficiently, this encoder model requires foreknowledge of the total number of speakers. However, the number of speakers can be automatically detected by a subsystem, and the subsystem can select the speech model accordingly.

In this model, Facebook’s researchers trained distinct models for isolating 2, 3, 4, and 5 speakers. They trained the models by feeding the input mixture to the model that was designed to accommodate up to five speakers at once, so the model would be able to detect the number of audio channels.

Also read: Adobe's New AI Tool Can Recommend Different Headlines and Images To The Varying Audience Of A Blog

Then, researchers repeated the same process with a model that was trained for the number of active speakers. Then, they checked to see if any of the output channels were active, stopping when all the audio channels were active or when the team found the model with the least number of target speakers.

According to researchers at Facebook, their model will be helpful in improving the audio quality for individuals with hearing aids. The system could make it easier for people with hearing aids to hear in a crowded place, or noisy environments like restaurants, and parties. The researchers now plan to prune as well as optimize this model until their model achieves sufficiently high-performance in the real world.

The paper released by Facebook follows a paper published by Google. Google’s publication proposes MixIT (mixture invariant training), an unsupervised approach to isolate and improve the audio of multiple speakers in audio recordings.

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Recently, it has been noticed by Matt Navarra that Facebook has given access to its users to share their Facebook posts on Twitter, right within its sharing sheet. This has caught the attention of many people.

When Matt tweeted about this feature, it turned out that many social media user were oblivious about this addition and were somewhat shocked about it happening due to past events.

Users also suggest Facebook to bring back the CrowdTangle and Twitter Integration. CrowdTangle is a social analytics tool that monitors and discovers the content posted by the audience of various social media apps like Facebook and Instagram. This platform used to contain Twitter in the past but as of September 2019, Twitter has been disabled on it. And now people are requesting to bring it back.

A Twitter user also pointed out that he sees a lot of options to share a Facebook post. Other than that, some users also thought that this might be a joke or prank being played on them and they had to make sure that it was not April’s fool day. Now either it was a sarcastic comment being passed or an actual concern of the user, that we cannot be sure about.

Some people have also called Twitter being given access by Facebook an “Irony”. Some users think all of this makes perfect sense while others are fairly confused about it.

Anyway, this feature can make the job of social media managers a bit easier who usually share content from Facebook to Twitter.

Here’s the full suite of new Facebook share options pic.twitter.com/YziQGVRc2n
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) July 11, 2020

There’s never been a better time to plan – if not action – a move towards freelance working. Over the past five years, jobseekers have increasingly demanded more opportunity to choose their own hours and coveted the flexibility of freelancing. But, adjusting your ways of working to fit a freelance environment requires you to consider far more than a city’s touristic appeal.

If you’re looking to pivot towards freelance working, you’ll need to consider factors such as expected average salary and rent in the city of your choice, internet speed, healthcare, co-working spaces, and, of course, what your options are when you’re off the clock.

That’s where this table of the World’s Best Freelance Cities can come in handy. It outlines the 30 best cities for freelancers and digital nomads (including USA, Ukraine,UK, UAE, Thailand, Spain, South Africa, Serbia, Russia, Philippines, Pakistan, Norway, New Zealand, Netherlands, Kenya, Isreal, Indonesia, India, Hong Kong, Greece, Germany, France, Egypt, Colombia, Chile, Canada, Brazil, Bangladesh, Australia and Argentina), taking into consideration 10 metrics split across three categories: work, life and play. The following is a roundup of the top 10 cities in the list – and why they made the grade.

Austin, Texas

This city in the United States is rated best for freelancers, with a total score of 65.18 out of 100. Some of the things that make this eclectic city so appealing for freelancers include ranking in third position for internet connections (reaching speeds of 137 Mbps) and offering the highest average salary at £3,688 per month. Austin is also known for its welcoming locals, great live music and its excellent commute time.

Chiang Mai

Thailand’s Chiang Mai is well known in nomad circles and for good reason. It has one of the highest employment rates out of all 30 cities assessed, with 67% of adults over 15 being in employment. It also gets great scores for healthcare and commute satisfaction, while also asking for a low monthly rent of just £302. Couple that with its low cost of living, and the tropical town becomes perfect for remote working without breaking the bank.

Berlin

Scoring well for leisure activities and the commute, Germany’s capital city takes third place in the list of top freelance cities. Offering a decent monthly salary of £2,187 as well as great healthcare, the culture-rich Berlin is ideal if you want to make a lengthy pitstop in Europe as you work your way around the world. Berlin also scores well for quality of life and is known for its nightlife, cafés and museums.

Barcelona

Staying in Europe, Spain’s Barcelona gets fourth place in the ranks, boasting high scores across healthcare, the commute and leisure activities. The city is almost synonymous with the nomad lifestyle, with a thriving community of digital nomads calling Barcelona their (temporary) home. Incredibly, the city maintains a perfect track record, never scoring lowest for any of the factors measured. Expect a monthly salary of £1,298, impressive internet speeds of 133 Mbps (on par with top ranking Austin), and enough co-working spaces to work at a different location every day.

Melbourne

Melbourne, Australia rounds off the top 5, scoring top marks for leisure activities and impressively well for quality of life. All this is despite the city having a surprisingly low internet speed compared to the others in the top five, only reaching speed of 43 Mbps. And yet, the arty city with the inimitable coffee culture boasts strong commute satisfaction and healthcare figures, as well as a healthy average salary of £2,322 per month.

What other cities make the top ten?

If the top cities above don’t tickle your fancy – or maybe you’ve worked there already – the rest of the cities that made the top ten might be more to your tune:

Toulouse, France narrowly misses the top five, getting sixth place in the ranks despite offering only 11 co-working spaces, and a low employment rate. Its shining graces include commute satisfaction, healthcare, quality of life and an internet speed of 140 Mbps.

Canada’s Montréal scores well for the commute, quality of life, leisure activities and internet speed, offering 126 Mbps for its nomadic workers. Perhaps some of the features that see it lingering at seventh place in this list are its relatively low number of co-working spaces and high cost of living.

Also read: These 50+ Job Posting Platforms Will Help You Hire Faster And Smarter (infographic)

Dubai takes eighth place in this list and is the only entry from the Middle East. As one of the UAE’s major cities, Dubai has the highest employment rate across all countries tested, with 80% of the workforce currently in employment. The country also scores well for the commute, but falters for cost of living, monthly rent and number of co-working spaces.

South America’s Colombia (Medellín to be exact) scores extremely well for commute satisfaction, cost of living and monthly rent, earning it the final place in the top ten. Its high notes are tempered by a low score for monthly salary that sees it fourth from the bottom for that metric.

Whether you’re a seasoned digital nomad looking for your next destination or a newbie just starting out on your freelance journey, there’s a city out there to suit.

Data-backed list: The 10 best cities in the world for freelancers

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Google has been developing revamped media controls for its Chrome browser, and these controls were introduced to the Stable version earlier this year. With the Global Media Controls, you can manage multimedia directly from the toolbar instead of having to navigate from the current tab to the tab which is playing the media. It appears that Google is improving these controls.

As Edge is based on the Chromium engine, almost all the updates that come to Chrome, are also sooner or later introduced in the new Microsoft browser. We have seen in the past that several updates were introduced to the Microsoft browser such as support for a photo in the picture playback mode or unified multimedia playback controls. Later, these updates and improvements also reached Edge. Tools that gain enhanced usability if you enable floating media controls.

Options to activate or deactivate the PiP (picture-in-picture) also known as multi-windows mode are also available in the floating media controls. You can now access these updates via the Canary version of Chrome. The tech giant, Google has added this tool in Chrome 86 version. Now, when you will enable the feature, you will be able to drag the media control window from the toolbar to any point on the screen of your device. The PiP mode offers a similar functioning.

The function is disabled by default, and users need to enable it manually. If you want to enable this feature, type ‘chrome://flags’ in the search bar and paste this in the search bar ‘Enable overlay control for Global Media Controls’, or you can also enable the same feature by directly typing/pasting ‘chrome://flags/#global-media-controls-overlay-controls’ in the search bar of the browser. Now, you only need to set the Default box to ‘Enabled’. Now, restart Chrome browser and you can use the feature, while surfing any website that hosts media files.

After enabling the function, if you play multimedia content on sites like YouTube, Facebook or Instagram, you will be able to access the multimedia playback controls in the toolbar, as well as you will be able to take these multimedia playback controls to any point on the screen of your device. These playback controls also allow you to activate or deactivate the PiP mode with a new shortcut. It is expected that the feature will be introduced to the Stable version of Google Chrome.

WOW! Google Chrome Users Can Now Use "Global Media Controls" As PiP Overlay

Showing a specific emotion in an advertisement is one of the best ways to relay the feeling that a particular product could potentially end up giving you, and a big part of the reason why that is the case has to do with the fact that human beings are pretty empathetic by nature and with all of that having been said and out of the way it is important to note that this is the sort of thing that can have some pretty serious results if you were to look into them and all that they can accomplish.

Usually happiness could be relied on as a really useful emotion to show in an ad. After all, everyone wants to be happy right? Well, it turns out that according to a recent study conducted by VidMob, during the pandemic happiness is actually drawing 64% fewer conversions than before and because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up negatively impacting ad campaigns a lot of agencies have started to look into ways in which they can change things up.

Surprise is one emotion that is seeing a lot more traction, seeing an incredible 360% increase in its success rate. Men seem to be having a rough time of it in ads, with ads featuring men seeing 41% decrease in their performance. Ads featuring women seem to be soaring in their popularity though, with ads that feature women seeing a 325% increase in their rate of conversion which is a massive number and probably means that women are more than likely going to end up getting a lot more jobs in advertising in the near future. Calmness is also a quality that has become more popular than ads recently as have outdoor settings, and all of these factors could indicate a shift in how advertising is created at least in the coming months.

For the fourth year running, Hopper HQ released its Instagram Rich List 2020. The list includes 100 social media influencers from different walks of life, along with their earnings from Instagram and the number of followers they have.

The list named Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock as the most bankable Instagrammer with over 187,300,000 followers. The former wrestler turned celebrity also enjoys a net worth of $1,015,000 per post.

With the exceptional growth in his list of Instagram followers, The Rock dethroned celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian, and Ariana Grande to reach the #1 rank from the sixth position he held in 2019.

Kylie Jenner – last year’s topper and the youngest self-made the billionaire of all time this year according to Forbes is on the second position for 2020. The American celebrity has an internet following of 181,500,000 and the price tag of $986,000 per post.

She is followed by the European footballer Christiano Ronaldo has a higher command of 224,800,000 followers. However, his posts are valued at $889,000, thus lowering his overall ranking on the list.

Rounding up the fourth and fifth position is the newly minted billionaire Kim Kardashian and singer Ariana Grande with a value of over $850,000 per post each.

Cricketer Virat Kohli and actress Priyanka Chopra are the only two Indian celebrities that managed to make the Instagram Rich List 2020.

Justin Bieber also moved up the ladders to reach the eight position from the tenth he earned last year. In 2020, the Canadian singer had an Instagram following of 139,300,000 and a value of $747,000 per post. The young pop sensation was reported to have 115 million followers in the list of 2019.

Brazilian footballer Neymar Da Silva also made it to the top 10 list. He and Christiano Ronaldo are the only two celebrities, part of the top 10 that are not from the USA. Interestingly, both of them are related to the sports niche.

Here, let’s take a look at the top 10 of the wealthiest Instagram account holders.

1. Dwayne Johnson

2. Kylie Jenner

3. Christiano Ronaldo

4. Kim Kardashian

5. Ariana Grande

6. Selena Gomez

7. Beyoncé Knowles

8. Justin Bieber

9. Taylor Swift

10. Neymar Da Silva Santos Junior

Hop over to the Hopper HQ's website for the complete list of Instagram's Rich.

We all know that people are spending more time online during the coronavirus pandemic. People are using social media platforms to communicate with their friends, family, and colleagues. It has also been discovered that online streamers are spending more time online during the pandemic.

According to the latest report published by GlobalWebIndex, consumers using online streaming platforms, such as Disney+, Amazon Video, Hulu, and Netflix, are over 40% more likely to be concerned about the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic in their country as compared to average internet users.

Globalwebindex asked 9,276 internet users what they have been doing at home during the lockdowns. These 9K+ internet users are aged between 16 and 64 and they use online streaming platforms such as Disney+, Amazon Video, Hulu, and Netflix.

55% of online video streamers said that they have been watching videos, while 51% of average internet users spent time watching more videos. The survey also discovered that 50% of online video streamers spend longer on social media platforms, while only 42% of average users spent extra time on social media platforms.

47% and 44% of online video streamers and average users spent more time on messaging services to stay connected with their loved ones. Some people are watching more broadcast TV as 47% of online streams and 42% of average users said that they have been watching more broadcast TV during the pandemic.

42% of online streamers listened to more streaming services and 40% of them spent longer on video or PC games. In comparison, 37% and 34% of average users listened to more streaming services and spent more time on games, respectively.

This data also suggests that people may have discovered new interests during the pandemic. Globalwebindex asked the respondents about the interests they discovered during the pandemic. 25% of Netflix users stated that they discovered they like documentaries more than they thought. In comparison, 28%, 24%, and 28% of people who use Hulu, Prime Video, and Disney+, respectively, said that they have discovered they like this genre.

In terms of comedy videos, 21% of Netflix users, 26% of Hulu users, 20% of Amazon Prime Video users, and 22% of Disney+ users said that they liked this genre. According to 22% of users of Netflix, 24% of users of Hulu, 20% of users of Prime Video, and 18% of users of Disney+, they enjoyed watching true crime videos more than they thought.

Some people also discovered that they like watching lifestyle videos as 20% of Netflix users, 21% of Hulu users, 19% of Prime Video users, and 23% of Disney+ users said that they enjoyed watching lifestyle videos such as DIY, or cooking videos. 18% (Netflix users), 21% (Hulu users), 21% (Prime Video users), and 23% (Disney+ users) showed an interest in science fiction videos and movies.

19% of both Netflix and Prime Video users enjoyed watching action/ adventure movies while 21% of both Hulu and Disney+ users said that they enjoyed this genre. The report shows that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the streaming habits of people and people are discovering new interests during the pandemic.

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In this progressive world where AI generated models have become an important tool to compose new images from the provided samples, a safe and effective manipulation of the actual image has been a hurdle.

Acknowledging this, developers have brought forward an encoder, namely, Swapping encoder to make the photo manipulation a lot easier.

The researchers of this emerging encoding model specified that the they have designed the swapping autoencoder to manipulate the images more effectively and adequately. It is a machine learning model that has been devised only for the manipulation of the desired image into a master piece.

According to the researchers from University of California, Berkeley and Adobe, their AI-model can do wonders on your chosen image in a variety of ways, including modification and texture swapping more efficiently as compared to other models. It proves to be the perfect partner of your desirous qualitative image with high-resolution and all in the easiest way possible.

Following this, they explained that the method, which this model of auto encoder uses, has premium advantages compared to the previous products. Their AI can produce a real image of high quality and resolution with on-time delivery. It untangles the structure of the image into a more generative one and offers its user with realistic output.

These researchers said that along with a convenient manipulation, it also creates deepfakes in which an already existing image is replaced, as a whole with the new image.

Moreover, in a study related to its deep fake feature, it has reported that presently 31% of the population hasn’t got the insight of the swapped image that has been altered using this encoding tool. However, further studies showed that approximately 73.9% of the timely proposed detectors were able to inspect the replacement in the images successfully.

It is a living proof that swapping encoder for image manipulation and swapping is safe and secured to use in contrast to the already registered AI-powered tools for image manipulation.

To conclude, this swapping encoder model is new and provides the safest and advanced way of image manipulation. However, the strategy that the developers of this device have followed is not new, and this editing facet has been used a plethora of times in various previous AI models, such as MIT IBM and NVIDIA GuaGAN, to name some. Despite of this, the swapping encoder model has gained an extreme likeness because of its amazing results.

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According to Roy Amara’s oft-cited law, people tend to overestimate the impact of new technology in the short run, however, underestimate its impacts in the long run. This law appears to be specifically applicable to usage of voice as well as digital search.

Siri was introduced over ten years ago, and steady growth in the usage of voice and virtual assistants has been recorded since then. The market has not transformed since Siri was introduced. While several people were expecting that Smart speakers will prove to be the revolutionary product, they are still in their initial growth phase.

Now, a recent survey from Perficient Digital indicates that voice may have plateaued. The agency has been performing surveys and asking more than 1,000 US adults about their usage of voice, virtual assistants, and voice search, for the last four years. The survey performed last year discovered that voice was second to the smartphone browser as the ‘first choice’ entry point for mobile search.

This year the agency asked respondents five different questions and the use of voice search ranked fourth. However, the latest survey by the agency did not replicate this ‘first choice’ segment of the last year’s survey. Respondents were asked about how they are most likely to ask queries on their smartphones.

Most people (around 75 percent) said that they prefer to manually enter text into a search application, internet browser, or search bar on the smartphone. Thus, usage seems to be flat. According to the survey, usage of voice seems to be down for users at all education levels, although voice usage is positively correlated with education. Those people with more education tend to use voice more as compared to individuals with less education.

When the respondents were asked how often they use smart speakers to search for data, 56% said that they never use them or use them less than twice a week. 44% of respondents use smart speakers at least twice a week, and 20% and 44% said that they use them 6 to 9 times every week.

User frustration with virtual assistants not being able to understand commands or questions explain this flat-to-declining use. Enhanced accuracy and improved comprehension may be able to generate extra usage frequency. Voice seems to be just an alternative input mechanism for text, however, it also represents a different user experience.

Behind the scenes, this technology is becoming more sophisticated. The survey also points out that voice is central for the majority of non-traditional connected gadgets. It has also been recorded that 77% of all internet-connected devices are other than a computer, tablet, or mobile.

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Back in March, Pinterest announced that the platform is introducing a ‘custom search experience’ to make sure that users get authentic information when they turn to its platform for information about the coronavirus pandemic, while recently its engendering team also boasted about their Algorithm efficiency in terms of providing better and balanced content in Home Feed of users. However, Pinterest’s moderation efforts seem to have its limits. It has been reported that the platform is hosting sexual images of young girls and white supremacist propaganda, and conspiracy theories despite its big claims.

The content discover network was praised for its proactive moderation efforts in the past, however, an OneZero investigation revealed that the platform’s moderation does not catch some abusive and false content. Numerous cases were revealed during the investigation where Pinterest’s moderation did not catch NSFW images of young girls, conspiracy theories related to 5G and QAnon, and racist material. This issue revolves around ‘loopholes’ that get past its standard search approach.

The abuse filters typically kick in on the platform itself. Users cannot search the homepage if they have not signed in to their Pinterest accounts, however, they can get around that visiting another account’s page. If a person uses the right Google searches, they can find a slew of content that filters of Pinterest would otherwise detect.

Moreover, the autocomplete as well as the suggestion system of the platform may also steer you toward racist misleading content. A Pinterest’s spokesman acknowledged to OneZero that content violating the policies of the platform would ‘sometimes appear’ in search results, even after it asked to have the material entirely removed from the platform.

OneZero’s findings underscore the risk of Pinterest’s moderation approach which hides abusive and false content instead of entirely removing it from the platform. A Pinterest spokesman stated that the company wants Pinterest to be a place for inspiration and that indicates that the company needs to be deliberate about creating a safe and positive space for people. He said that the company encourages people to report the content that should not be on the platform.

The company states that Pinterest relies on reports from users to improve its standards and proactive tools to find and remove abuse and false content.

The company’s representative also added that the company does not want Pinterest to be a ‘go-to-place’ for politics and tries to curb adversarial behavior. Pinterest also seeks advice from outside experts to improve its policies as well as enforcement.

The platform’s moderation approach contrast sharply with social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Facebook and Twitter typically remove offensive material instead of hiding searches.

Photo: Getty

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According to Thurrott, Microsoft has joined hands with Google to bring more progressive web applications to Android smartphones via the Google Play Store. Judah Gabriel Himango of Microsoft confirmed the move in a post over on Medium. PWAs use emerging browser APIs (Application Programming Interface) and tools, along with progressive enhancement strategy, to bring application-like user experience to cross-platform web apps.

Google’s Bubblewrap and Microsoft’s PWABuilder are currently operating together to help web developers get their PWAs into the Google Play Store. Microsoft’s PWABuilder is an open-source developer tool that helps developers to create high-quality progressive web applications and publish them in application stores. While Google’s Bubblewrap is a command-line utility and library to create and sign Play Store packages from PWAs.

According to Microsoft, the expanded features will not need significantly extra effort to implement. Likely, it will take a while before you will see applications making use of the latest features. The new change could lead to more and improved applications reaching your smartphone. In a case like this, it is not interesting to see that Google and Microsoft are collaborating to bring more progressive web applications to Android devices through the Google Play Store.

The two tech giants announced two new features for progressive web application developers after months of working together. The new features are web shortcuts support, and advanced Android features and customization. Now, Microsoft’s PWABuilder supports the complete range of trusted web activity options that helps progressive web applications to work better on Android devices.

By using Microsoft’s PWABuilder, progressive web application developers can customize the appearance of the Android navigation bar as well as the status bar. Developers can also change the name of the launcher, use an existing signing key, configure package ID & versioning, utilize deeper push notification support, fallback behavior, and customize Android splash screen, by using Microsoft’s PWABuilder.

Also read: Microsoft is ready to advance its Android strategy for the development of a more apt hardware system of its own

Judah Gabriel Himango of Microsoft stated that both the companies are working together to make the web a more capable application platform. He also revealed that Microsoft is working with Google on Project Fugu to incubate new web platform features, with progressive web applications front and center, toward the goal of standardization.

This gives app developers extra reasons to use Microsoft’s toolkit. Moreover, Google will get more app developers who create Android-friendly web applications instead of pointing users to generic applications inside a web browser.

Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images

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The current pandemic has changed the way a lot of big companies do business, and a big part of the reason why that is the case has to do with the fact that there is a renewed focus on health both physical as well as mental. While the previous focus was mostly on physical health, mental health is now also being targeted for a pretty good reason. Now if you search for mental health related topics, you will be shown a panel that would give you a test that can determine whether or not you might have a mental illness.

It is important to note that this is not an actual diagnosis, but it will definitely give you some information that you can use. The most important thing to note here is that some of the information you get will indicate that the disease you have is common as well as treatable, which is something people need to hear due to the reason that it will impact their outlook on life and help them feel like there is more hope for them than might have been the case otherwise.

The primary benefit of these panels is that they will give information and help people get a direction when they are facing a particular mental illness. These are things that matter, and the fact that a big tech company is focusing on this is definitely a heartening development. Users aren’t the only ones that would end up benefiting from something like this either. The truth of the situation is that a lot of content creators on the platform have talked about things like their mental health, and they would now be able to get some help which they might not have been able to get otherwise. This is a great step all around and YouTube should definitely work on more things like this in the future.

At @YouTube, we’re always looking for ways to help our community prioritize wellbeing. Today we’re launching new health information panels to help users who are searching for info about depression and anxiety. pic.twitter.com/tINnkOXrWO
— Susan Wojcicki (@SusanWojcicki) July 13, 2020

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People spend the majority of their mobile time while connected to the internet. eMarketer estimates that on average, US adults will spend over four hours with mobile internet, and 88% of the time will be spent on applications. The application percentage continues to grow year-over-year. However, eMarketer’s data may undercount time in embedded smartphone browsers like those browsers embedded with Twitter or Facebook, etc.

eMarketer’s data suggests that the average daily time spent in the United States on applications will be three hours and 47 minutes in 2022. In comparison, the average daily time spent in the US on browsers will be 23 minutes in 2022. This year, 83% of the total time spent on tablets will be within applications which represents a massive increase from a few years ago. While 90% of the total time spent on smartphones will be in applications.

Likely, the higher browser percentage for tablets is due to their increased role in online shopping which remains a primarily web-based activity of individuals. However, the distinction between application and browsers time seems to blur over time.

Kargo and Verto Analytics conducted a study back in the year 2019 and discovered that at least 9% of the total time spent Facebook took place within embedded browsers. Advanced websites can also offer an app-like experience to users. It is evident that smartphone users prefer in-app experiences, however, as the web continues to improve, many of those experiences may be JavaScript-based.

The coronavirus pandemic has also effected the mix between smartphone web and applications. Overall, most of the time was spent on a few key applications such as social media apps, video apps, and messaging applications. The data from SimilarWeb suggests that the smartphone web traffic was 11.4% higher in April of this year as compared to April of the year 2019.

Among the top 100 websites, 55.6% of this mobile traffic went to PCs, electronic & technology publishers, which include search and social media. The highest percentage gains were on law and government websites. Traffic grew 44.9% on law sites, and 54.9% on government websites, year-over-year. Cdc.gov was the government website with the highest year-over-year increase. Traffic on cdc.gov increased by 1870% in March of this year, and 990% in April of this year.

Iterable’s study discovered that web push notifications increased by 37.5% between Feb and March of this year. Iterable is a company that provides messaging and other customer engagement services for marketers and found that application notifications decreased by 5.2% during February and March of this year. In comparison, customer open rates for app notifications increased by 28.5%.

TikTok is one of the most influential apps existing on mobile devices. However, the app’s future is unclear due to ongoing investigations into its processes. Many giants like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and even Byte are also testing out new TikTok like features to gather the migrating audience.

Snapchat, another social media giant appears to join the others in the race to replicate TikTok features and gather an audience for their platforms. It seems to be working on a new, vertical swipe UX for its Discover content according to an image shared by Matt Navarra and posted by the user @artb2668.

Snapchat has also included in-app instructions for users so they can use the new feature easily. The screenshot instructions can be seen providing information about how swiping in various directions can trigger different commands. For example, swiping left or right will exit the Discover content.

According to TechCrunch, a very small percentage of the users currently have access to this feature as Snapchat confirmed the UX test. However, it is only for Discover content and not for Stories sent to users by their friends. Users involved in the test still need to tap on each Story to advance through them, which is unlike TikTok as it does not have separate Story frames.

All of these replication attempts highlight the significance and the impact of TikTok on social media. Every major functionality is bound to get copied at some point. For example, Facebook’s News Feed and Snapchat’s Stories were replicated by other developers, hence TikTok’s unique features are also going to go through this phase. This also underlines the fact that there is a potential for innovation stemming beyond the major platforms.

Facebook’s awareness of this trend is proven by its NPE team always launching and shutting down new applications all the time, trying to tap into the next big trend before other developers come across it. However, this testing does not seem to have yielded any significant results. Although, this can help Facebook maintain its top position in the social media apps by already having features that can potentially gain traction.

TikTok is also looking for ways to pick off users who are uncertain about the app’s future given the situation its currently in. Facebook also quickly rolled out Instagram’s Reels feature in the region when TikTok got banned by India last month. US President Donald Trump also commented that America could also look into blocking the app, as a punishment for China for COVID-19. This has increased the downloads for alternate tools, and it is logical for many developers to add TikTok-style tools to gather more migrating users.

Snapchat’s duplication of TikTok features also makes sense with TikTok facing more questions and its top creators trying to diversify their presence to secure their future in the industry. However, there is no official announcement on what Snapchat might do after completing the experiment.

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The digital payments landscape has undergone a structural shift during the last ten years. The digital payments ecosystem continues to grow as a solution of choice for millions of users every year. The coronavirus pandemic has also accelerated the digital payment adoption.

First, we will discuss the origins of digital payments. 25 years ago, a 21-year-old entrepreneur Dan Kohn in Nashua, New Hampshire sold a CD over the internet through credit card payment. This was the first digital payment transaction in history. In 1994, a CD was sold for $12.48 on NetMarket. This was the first online purchase, and then in 1997, Coca-Cola installed two vending machines in Helsinki that accept payments by text messages.

PayPal launched an electronic money transfer service back in the year 1999, and the user base grew approximately 10% daily. Elon Musk, CEO Tesla, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel were among the co-founders of this service. Then, Alibaba launched Alipay in China back in the year 2003.

In 2007, the first payment system for mobile was created by M-PESA which has more than 37 million active users across Africa. In 2009, Bitcoin enables secure and untraceable payments when Satoshi Nakamoto developed a decentralized payment system in the world.

WeChat rolled out WeChat Pay back in the year 2013, and it had over 800 million monthly active users back in the year 2018. In 2014, Apple Pay was launched, and it is expected that more than $2 trillion of smartphone payment transactions will be authenticated via biometric technology.

The sheer volume of the digital payment ecosystem has now surpassed the $4.1 trillion mark. Singapore is the region with the highest number of digital payments per person, with an average of 831 digital payments annually. Singapore’s e-commerce market is supported by high-speed and reliable internet and a young & tech-savvy population. It is expected that Sweden will become a cashless nation as early as 2023.

As digital transactions continue to rise, several other technological innovations may also be instrumental in shaping the evolution of this industry. The Payments feature in various messaging apps such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat can leverage the reach of billions of people across the globe. Moreover, Bank of America and Visa are investing in peer-to-peer partnerships, and more than 1 million cryptocurrency-transactions take place each day.

Mobile biometric security tools may also spur traction across cashless payments, and facial recognition may soon replace QR codes across transit, airports, and retail in China. According to experts, blockchain wallet users may reach 200 million by the year 2030. The $4.1 trillion digital payments industry is experiencing a notable transition that is catalyzed by a wave of worldwide advancements as well as disruption.

Take a look at this infographic for more insights:

Infographic courtesy of VC.

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One of Twitter's latest achievements is that it has exceeded over a billion installs in Google Play Store alone. There are almost 25 other apps that have also joined the billion-install club till now. Many of them are owned by Google including, Google Maps, Google Search, etc. Other apps are mostly owned by Facebook, Microsoft, and Samsung. The first-ever app to reach this milestone was Google Play Services in January of 2014. In 2019, the apps that hit this number were OneDrive, Microsoft Word, and Excel on Android.

The number of Installs of an app is only counted once on each device. This means that even if we uninstall an app and later install it again, it would only count as 1 install because the device was the same. So that means that over a billion devices have Twitter installed on them, which seems absurd but at the same time, it is understandable because the average person changes their phones every 3 years.

One of the biggest reasons why Twitter had a sudden gain of Installs was it being one of the biggest news source platforms about the recent protests taking place for George Floyd and the whole BLM movement as well as for the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter has set a new record by gaining a million downloads in one day. Even after a day or two, its number of downloads had stayed near a million. On June 3rd it was noticed by another app that Twitter had almost 140,000 installs just from the United States which is the second-highest most installed number in the US. During the first quarter of 2020, there have been almost 33 million active users on Twitter in the US alone.

Twitter has been a part of the third-party developer ecosystem, which are the direct and indirect relationships between companies and the third-parties. This is one of the reasons why Twitter gained its Installs at a much slower pace. In 2018 However, Twitter claimed that the changes made to their APIs which were supplying third-party apps pointless. API or Application Programming Interface is an interface that defines interactions between two applications. Due to this many users started using the official application which was not desired that much before. The official Twitter application had much better third-party customers on the Play Store.

Twitter has started updating its apps and has introduced PWA for its users, a few years back. PWA or Progressive Web Application is a web page that behaves like it as a mobile application. This frees the user from going to the app store and purchasing and downloading the application. Many new users have been attracted to Twitter because of PWA being introduced.

If you were to ask anyone whether they like to deal with passwords, the answer would be a big fat no. Not only passwords are hard to remember but changing often can be another big task that most of us tend to avoid. However, passwords are still necessary for your digital identity and they serve to be the only way to keep your accounts secure - at least when an attacker attempts to break-in.

These days, with so much being said about passwords already, internet users have become wise enough to set passwords that are hard to crack. Some who have a good memory and are efficient go one step further of setting up different passwords for different sites.

But under all circumstances, the question still remains that should you change your passwords with time? If yes, then how often?

If we go by the suggestions of cybersecurity experts then the answer revolves around “a few months”. For instance, Jo O'Reilly, deputy editor at ProPrivacy once revealed in a conversation with Business Insider that passwords should be changed every three months. By doing so even if the password is compromised, you basically shorten the time of cybercriminal to remain inside your account. While his recommendation does make sense to some extent, still there are other experts who disagree.

A cybersecurity consultant at Intrust IT, Dave Hatter, on the other hand, argued that unless there hasn’t been a proper password breach, you should not change your passwords. Now with two-factor authentication in place, this does stand even more true.

Gabe Turner, Director of Content at Security.org also had a more interesting answer as he explained that users who change their passwords frequently take shortcuts and then choose passwords that are weak and easy to access for hackers.

Furthermore, there are also Digital Identity Guidelines as released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology on the password game which we think you should definitely follow for perfect passwords.

Make sure the password that you are about to set is strong and unique.
Always use two-factor authentication so that even if your account is compromised, you are still safe.
Using two-factor authentication with machine-generated passwords can make your account absolutely uncrackable.
Use a password manager so that you don’t have to memorize a password. (Bonus Point: Password managers can also help you identify weak or old passwords so that your account is protected with a strong password at all times)
In case, if you think your account is hacked, change the password immediately.

Microsoft has created some truly great Android application, however, the company is also notorious for tactics to get its products in the hands of users, whether users want to use its products or not. Now, the company has quietly added a Bing search option on the long-press context menu of Android, even if a user has never installed any Microsoft application for Android other than the Microsoft Outlook app.

Despite the company is losing the search war to Google, it seems that Microsoft keeps pushing its Bing search engine. The company added the ability to perform Bing search in Outlook on Android to promote its search engine, Bing. Although the company has separate applications such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook, and many more, it is actually selling a suite, or rather an ecosystem.

Microsoft’s products connect to each other in some way, however, users probably do not expect one Microsoft application to install the features of another application unless they installed the latter explicitly. This is the reason why people were surprised to see the mysterious appearance of the Bing search option in Android’s long-press menu when they never installed the Bing app on their devices.

The company is not making any security hack and the Bing app is not actually installed on your device behind your back. Instead, Microsoft utilizes an Android feature that enables application developers to insert their custom actions into the popup long-press menu to offer extra services provided by their application.

The new option works in a simple way. If a person is using the Microsoft Outlook app on their Android device, they will need to open an email that was sent to them, and then they will have to select the text that they need more information about by performing a long-press on that text. Now, you will see the Bing search option at the top of the Android’s long-press menu.

XDA Developer did a brief analysis of the Microsoft Outlook application to confirm whether the behavior originates from the Outlook app or not. But it seems that users also need to have the Edge browser installed on their Android smartphones to trigger this behavior. However, some users also stated that this was not the case. There is an intent-filter in Outlook’s Manifest file that enables the app to display the Bing search option in Android’s long-press menu. This behavior might be a bug or an oversight that the company can easily fix.

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