Techinical Trends

PAYMENTS: Can Facebook be trusted to provide Whatsapp Payments to 200 million users in India? Facebook's hair is on fire again. A set of company emails from around 2015 have been acquired by a UK parliamentary committee, despite being sealed by a court in the United States. The emails were on a private computer of a person of interest (Ted Kramer, CEO of Six4Three) who was traveling in the UK. The sovereign issues are interesting in themselves, as global technology companies stretch across jurisdictions to be subject to the laws of each one of them. Case in point is the US arrest of the Huawei (massive Chinese phone manufacturer) CFO in Canada as part of a feud on intellectual property and selling goods to economically sanctioned countries like Iran. So, if you're running a tech company with global impact, maybe just telecommute lest you be snatched by a regulator. What we learned from the emails is that Facebook acts like a monopoly, using its control over APIs a...

As soon as WhatsApp announces a new update, users get excited and can’t wait to try it out. Things might be different this time. In an attempt by Facebook to monetize WhatsApp, the service will introduce targeted advertisements, which will be displayed in the Status tab. Clearly, WhatsApp users are quite pissed and reports have suggested that few users are already switching to ad-free based messaging platforms, such as Telegram and Viber. WhatsApp serial tipster WABetaInfo on Twitter ran a poll, asking followers if they would continue to use the service, after the new Status ads feature goes live. However, 60 percent of users did vote to stick to the platform as they believed these ads were not invasive WhatsApp’s Status tab is similar to Snapchat’s Stories, wherein users post videos and GIFs which disappear in 24 hours. WhatsApp-owned Facebook says that over 450 million of WhatsApp’s user base is currently using the Status tab feature. Early this year, one of the co-foun...

Pinterest announced its new measurement options: Oracle Data Cloud’s Moat to analyze viewability, and NinthDecimal to track foot traffic. Announced today, Pinterest’s Gunnard Johnson, the company’s Head of Measurement Sciences and Insights, commented in a blog post that the two new options has averaged 90% viewability for the in-app ads since teaming up with Oracle Data Cloud-based Moat for this metric and have been rolled out for standard Promoted Pins and testing begins with the platform’s Promoted Video ad formats. Johnson talks about improved sales and bringing value to customers with Oracle Data Cloud, He continues stating that viewability isn’t enough on its own, saying, Ads need to be relevant and actionable to drive results. Pinterest and NinthDecimal have already analyzed billions of ad impressions across verticals like retail, auto, entertainment, quick-serve restaurants, and consumer packaged goods. These results prove Pinterest’s impact: 93% of campaig...

Nike teams up with conversational AI project on a Facebook Messenger bot for the Air Jordan brand, targetting a younger audience. The testing of the new Messenger project began around February, when NBA All-Star Weekend has begun and Nike announced the bot is generating open rates of 87%, passing the typical 15% to 20% it sees from emails. Delivering content from the Air Jordan blog, Jordan.com and Jordan Newsweekly, the fare is divided into three categories: shop, Air Jordan and watch. According to the Global Senior Director for the Digital, Dan Harbison, the team is up to two-way conversations enabled by Messenger bots as a massive opportunity. He thinks that People will connect with people much more than they will with a large entity. Harbison added that while he could not offer specific numbers on how many people are using the bot, his team is really happy with the fact that engagement with the bot has remained strong despite it being made available to a wider audience. Th...

PayPal Holdings has reported a third-quarter profit that beat analysts' estimates as the company signed up more new customers and volume of payments processed rose. Net income rose to $436 million in the third quarter, from $380 million a year earlier. Revenue rose to $3.68 billion from $3.24 billion. For the fourth quarter, PayPal expects revenue between $4.20 billion and $4.28 billion, in line with analysts' estimates of $4.21 billion estimate. Shares of the company, which separated from e-commerce site eBay in 2015, were up 7% in trading after the bell on Thursday. In September it completed the purchase of Swedish payments firm iZettle, its largest ever acquisition. "As pleased as I am with our financials, the highlight of the quarter was our growth in net new actives and engagement," PayPal Chief Executive Dan Schulman said on a call with analysts. The company added a record 9.1 million new active accounts in the third quarter, compare...

New WhatsApp update WhatsApp is set to bring a major refresh to its delete messages for everyone feature which was one of the most users demanded features on the platform. With the new Recipient limit feature added, users won't be able to delete messages by changing system settings on their end. The new feature is said to be added to stop senders from deleting old messages sent weeks or months earlier.  The new feature With the new addition of Recipient limit, if the recipient device doesn't receive a revoke message before 13 hours, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds then the sent message won't be deleted. The new recipient limit, however, doesn't change anything for regular WhatsApp users. The latest update to WhatsApp's delete message for everyone isn't on the sender side but for the recipient . The recipient decides WhatsApp is expected to add an all-new recipient limit feature which means if the recipient hasn't received a revoke message from sen...