Weekly Roundup: Friday, 16 June, 2017
Here are some links I thought were worth sharing this week:
MEDIA
The Times Sharply Increases Articles Open for Comments, Using Google’s Technology
Then: "To protect our conversations from bad actors, The New York Times’s community desk reviews almost all reader submissions by hand. With 12,000 comments moderated per day, this work is labor intensive, and has forced us to close comments on stories sooner than we would like simply because we didn’t have the resources to sort through them all. Many of our best stories are never opened for comments at all."
Now: "Moderator was created in partnership with Jigsaw, a technology incubator that’s part of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. It uses machine learning technology to prioritize comments for moderation, and sometimes, approves them automatically. Its judgments are based on more than 16 million moderated Times comments, going back to 2007."
Apple makes major podcast updates
The iOS podcasting app is getting updated in iOS 11. "New extensions to Apple’s podcast feed specification will allow podcasts to define individual seasons and explain whether an episode is a teaser, a full episode, or bonus content."
DATA PRIVACY
Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms
This is a really interesting take on Facebook's Safety Check feature, related to this week's London tower block fire.
"should Facebook be reacting to a tragedy by sending push alerts — including to users who are miles away from the building in question?"
"Is that helpful? Or does it risk generating more stress than it is apparently supposed to relieve…"
"Facebook is actively encouraging users to worry by using emotive language (“your friends”) to nudge a public declaration of individual safety."
Facebook’s Safety Check will integrate fundraisers, among other upgrades
Facebook is adding fundraising to Safety Check, this looks like going directly up against sites like GoFundMe. "people will now have the option to start fundraisers from within Safety Check, in order to immediately translate concern for victims of a crisis or natural disaster into specific actions". Bearing in mind that this is a revenue generating business for Facebook, it gives it a lot of potential power to prompt an emotional response and then convert that into fundraising!
COMPANIES
Amazon
Amazon Deal for Whole Foods Starts a Supermarket War
Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods is the obvious Tech/Business story of the week. Amazon's acquisition of a high-end grocery chain with 450 stores in the US will be analysed endlessly over the coming week and beyond. This is the beginning of the merger of the bricks and mortar retailers with the tech and logistics platform, creating local distribution hubs for delivery and pickup coupled with a mobile/voice/other first retail experience.
Softbank
SoftBank Acquires Boston Dynamics From Alphabet
Google are offloading their scary robot division (also known as Boston Dynamics) to Japan's Softbank. "The acquisition comes as SoftBank's Masayoshi Son closed his $93 billion Vision Fund last month. With the largest tech fund ever, Son will focus on making big bets in artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and robotics, among other emerging technologies. SoftBank already owns UK-based chip designer ARM, which it acquired for $32 billion last year, and a small stake in graphics chipmaker Nvidia, which has become a dominant force in AI computing."