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With Canon’s new EOS Rebel T7, what’s old is new again http://ift.tt/2HL5VnT It’s what’s inside that counts, right? With Canon’s latest entry-level camera, the EOS Rebel T7, let’s hope so. The new DSLR stays all but identical to its predecessor — the EOS Rebel T6 — on the outside. That said, most of what’s on the inside is unchanged, as well. Announced on February 25 (alongside the EOS M50 mirrorless camera and 470EX-AI flash), the T7 takes a minor evolutionary approach with only a single, but notable update over the T6: the sensor. At the heart of the T7 is a 24-megapixel CMOS sensor, a substantial increase from the 18MP sensor inside the T6. Other than that, the other specs and features are pulled straight from the Rebel T6, including the older Digic 4+ processor and nine-point autofocus system. Continuous shooting speed tops out at three frames per second, for a maximum burst of just 11 frames for RAW photos or 150 for JPEGs. Although the sensor is new, ISO range is just 100 to 6,400, expandable to 12,800 — respectable, but certainly not up to par with Canon’s other DSLRs. Video performance is also unchanged, with the T7 capturing Full HD 1080p at both 24 and 30 frames per second or 720p at 60 fps. Canon estimates that when shooting in 1080p, you can expect about one and a half hours of recording with a 32GB memory card, with an estimated file size of 340MB per minute. On the rear of the camera, you’ll find the same controls and fixed, three-inch, 920,000-dot LCD monitor used for navigating the menu, composing shots when in live view, and reviewing photos and video already captured. Like the T6, the T7 features Canon’s multiple intelligent automatic modes, which make it easy to capture specific scenes using the appropriate settings. One interesting tidbit of news to note is that, although the sensor is the exact same size and resolution as that in the EOS M50 mirrorless camera, Canon states the sensors are not the same. Notably, the Rebel T7’s sensor lacks Dual Pixel Autofocus (DPAF), which is found on the M50 as well as many of of Canon’s other mirrorless cameras and DSLRs. DPAF allows for fast, smooth autofocus performance in live view, which is particularly useful for video. The EOS Rebel T7 is set to go on sale in April 2018. It will be available as a lens and body kit alongside the EF-S 18–55mm f/2.5–5.6 IS II for an estimated retail price of $550.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/2p4eJdC February 25, 2018 at 11:03PM
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Nokia 8 Sirocco Hands-on Review http://ift.tt/2FvLKtl Ever since HMD started producing smartphones with the Nokia brand name, its designs have more or less been utilitarian. A tough protective metal frame around a single aluminum unibody, with a fairly straightforward rear and front design. Well, the company thinks it’s ready to change things up with its first luxury smartphone, the Nokia 8 Sirocco. If you recall the Sirocco name, it’s from when Nokia used to differentiate some of its special edition feature phones, like the Nokia 8800 Sirocco. Well, the Nokia 8 Sirocco certainly is something special. Let’s take a closer look. Razor-thin edgesThe Nokia 8 Sirocco is wrapped in Gorilla Glass 5, with a stainless steel frame in between. Stainless steel is tougher than aluminum, which is used in most phones, and it also makes the phone look and feel a tad more luxurious. The first thing you’ll notice, however, is how compact the Sirocco feels. The minimized edges around the screen really do make the 5.5-inch form factor feel small. Better yet, the phone is thin at 7.5mm, but the edges curve into the stainless steel frame, with the thinnest point being just 2mm. It’s quite an experience holding the Nokia 8 Sirocco, because it feels futuristic, and the edges are razor thin. It’s just plain cool to hold and stare at. The sides of the phone do feel a little too sharp, but we’ll have to use the phone a little longer to decide if it’s detrimental to the smartphone experience. What we certainly didn’t like were the buttons — they’re flush against the right edge of the Sirocco, so not only is it difficult to quickly locate them, but they’re tough to press without making sure you exert a certain amount of pressure. The rear side of the phone is a little too glossy because of the glass, and it attracts plenty of fingerprints, but that’s a problem with most flagship smartphones these days. There’s a dual-camera system on the top, a fingerprint sensor below it, as well as the Nokia and Android One logos below. We’re hoping the certification labels aren’t going to sit at the very bottom, because it sort of clutters the look of the device. There’s a USB-Type C charging port on the bottom, and HMD thinks it’s also time to get rid of the headphone jack, sadly. Overall, we love the look of the phone. It feels compact and comfortable to grip in the hand, and we like how the curved edges don’t blend as much into the frame as the Galaxy S9, which sometimes interrupts usability. We’ll certainly have to use it for a longer period of time to see if the razor-sharp edges continue to bother us. High-end specsThe Nokia 8 Sirocco mostly has the flagship specifications you’d expect — except for the processor. It uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chip, which was the flagship processor of choice for many smartphones last year. 2018 is the year of the Snapdragon 845, so it’s a little odd that HMD’s flagship phone doesn’t have the latest processor on board. In terms of actual performance, though, you won’t see a problem with the 835 at all. Apps opened quickly, and moving through the operating system felt fast. There’s 6GB of RAM on board, which is more than enough, as well as 128GB of internal storage. There’s no MicroSD card slot, which may be disappointing for some, but again, 128GB is plenty for the average person. The P-OLED 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution on the 5.5-inch screen looks vibrant, colorful, and incredibly sharp — perfect for viewing movies and videos. The glass back allows for Qi wireless charging, and a 3,260mAh battery should keep the phone going strong for about a full day. The phone is also IP67 water-resistant, which means it should still survive submersion up to a meter underwater for 30 minutes. The camera system is also surprisingly fast to react. There’s a 12-megapixel camera accompanying a 13-megapixel telephoto lens on the rear — with Zeiss optics — which adds a 2x optical zoom feature, to shoot subjects that are further away, as well as a bokeh portrait mode. We saw virtually no shutter lag, though there was a little blur in the low-light environment we were shooting in. It’s the “bothie” feature that caught our eye. Debuting last year on the Nokia 8, it lets you take photos or videos with the 5-megapixel front camera and the rear camera at the same time, perfect for trying to capture reaction and action at the same time. It worked incredibly well with an easy-to-use interface, offering high-quality photos at the touch of a button. The new Pro Mode is a nice addition as well. Swipe up from the shutter icon and you can get access to manual controls for the camera. It’s well-laid out and easy to slide the toggles to get the settings you want. This feature will be available on all Nokia phones with Zeiss optics. Nokia 8 Sirocco Compared ToAndroid OneBut perhaps best of all, the Nokia 8 Sirocco runs Android One. That doesn’t just mean you get stock Android with no bloatware apps — you also get access to fast security and Android version updates. The software is slick, simple, and fast, and the promise of updates is always good to hear from any Android manufacturer. Price and availabilityThe Nokia 8 Sirocco will cost a whopping 750 euros (about $922). You can certainly get equal or better specifications for the price, such as with the Galaxy S9, but it may be worth the cost. We’re quite happy with the design, the camera is promising and has quite a few must-have features, and you’re guaranteed immediate updates. The Sirocco will be available in April 2018, but there’s no word of a U.S. release.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/2p4eJdC February 25, 2018 at 10:06PM
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Canon's Next Flash Is Trying to Be Idiot-Proof http://ift.tt/2sTNiuv Using a flash is what separates photographers from people who got a good camera deal on Black Friday. Flash photography can be hard. There’s light theory and mathematics at play. Use a flash incorrectly and the images you’re making are often uglier than if you’d never used a flash at all. Canon’s hoping its new 470EX-AI flash unit changes that. The 470EX-AI automatically scans for the subject and the ceiling in a room, measures the distance, and then bounces the flash off of the ceiling. This should, theoretically, give your images a softer and more appealing light than if you’d just pointed the flash at your subject—as most people who don’t understand flash photography are inclined to do. Advertisement In a recent briefing Canon made it very clear that 470EX-AI isn’t a flash intended for professionals. Its for people who know enough to know they need a flash, but maybe don’t know enough to properly use it. It does all the measuring using a laser located next to the flash’s bulb, which means it should work no matter how dim the room, but won’t work if you block the laser with something like a flash diffuser or your hand. This obviously isn’t the perfect super smart flash, but it is the first full size flash to try and automatically bounce the light, and that’s pretty cool. It’s also just slick enough that it should grow with a budding photographer. There’s a second, semi-auto mode that lets you choose the angle of the flash, it then maintains that angle no matter how you position the camera. So if you set it to bounce off a wall at 45-degrees and the tilt the camera or try and shoot in portrait it will automatically seek out that original angle. Advertisement And should you go full-on pro and start using multiple flashes it has an optical receiver mode so it can work with other flashes you might have in the room. The Canon Speedlight 470EX-AI is expected to be available in April 2018 and retail for $400. That’s almost twice the price of the dumber Speedlight 430EX III-RT and only $130 less than the more powerful Canon Speedlight 600EX II-RT. So you’re definitely paying a premium to not bother to learn how to bounce your flash. Canon has also announced two new cameras today. The first, the EOS Rebel T7 is nearly identical to the current Rebel T6. The only difference is the megapixel count. The T7 moves from 18 MP to 24 MP. The T7 will be available in April, and as with the T6 it is expected to retail for around $550. The second camera announced is another in Canon’s long languishing mirrorless line up. The EOS M50 is fairly budget friendly. When it is available in April it will retail for just $780 for the body alone, that’s almost $500 less than Canon’s top mirrorless camera the EOS M5, and unlike the M5 the cheaper M50 can shoot 4K video. The two cameras also have nearly identical megapixel counts. the M50 as 24.1MP while the M5 has 24.2. Advertisement The super light camera (it weighs just 13.7 ounces with a battery) uses a new digital processor, the Digic 8, to pull off it’s 4K videos and is the first non DSLR camera from Canon to manage 4K. That’s a bid by Canon to woo vloggers—who demand inexpensive, light cameras with a wide variety of lenses and top notch video capabilities. For the non-vloggers the M50 can also shoot 120fps video at 720p and shoot 10fps when shooting stills. And it offers a new RAW type, the CRAW. The CRAW replaces the SRAW and MRAW and is intended to be a RAW type for people hoping to save some storage space while still have some of the post-processing flexibility that that RAWs afford. Canon claims one image went from 29.5MB shot in RAW to 18.5MB shot in CRAW. Advertisement While the company is not saying how it accomplishes the smaller RAW type it’s safe to assume there’s some compression happening, and while you’ll still have a better image than you might with JPEG it won’t necessarily give you the same experience as a true RAW. Like you know how you can recover an under exposed image when you edit the RAW? You probably won’t be able to recover as much with a CRAW. But don’t worry, the M50 will still shoot regular RAWs too. Unfortunately Canon wouldn’t let me shoot any CRAWs with the camera, just JPEGs (my computer wouldn’t have been able to read them anyways). So we won’t know how good, or bad the new format is until the camera is publicly available in April. Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com February 25, 2018 at 10:06PM
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Google Assistant is adding Routines and location-based reminders http://ift.tt/2CGaf3J Alongside news of Google Assistant’s forthcoming multilingual support and the addition of more languages this year, Google also announced this morning its smart assistant would soon be gaining two new features: Routines and location-based reminders. Google has been promising Routines were in the works for some time. The feature, which lets Google Assistant users string together multiple commands, was first announced back in October 2017. With Routines, you can create personalized commands and responses – for example, saying “OK Google, I’m home,” could turn on the lights, adjust the thermostat, and play some music. It’s a feature that rival Alexa announced in September 2017, and launched the following month. Google is playing catch up here, but it’s doing it quickly. This isn’t the only way that Google Assistant can multitask, however. Before, you could say two commands in one sentence – like “turn on the TV and what’s the weather?”, and the smart assistant could perform both actions. However, Routines will support tying together more than two commands, and will associate them with a trigger phrase. According to Google, Routines will first launch in the U.S. in the weeks ahead, and will allow users to personalize six routines that help with morning commutes to and from work, and their evening at home. In addition to Routines, location-based reminders is another new feature set to roll out in the near future. This option is already available in Google Assistant on smartphones, but it will now be integrated into Google Home devices, as well. Of course, the Google Home smart speaker stays in one location itself – but it can be used to create the location-based reminders you want to be alerted about later on your phone. For example, you could tell your Google Home device to remind you to buy milk when you’re at the grocery store. Google didn’t give an exact launch date for either feature as it’s a staged rollout, but says they’ll start arriving next week. Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com February 23, 2018 at 09:52AM
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‘Annihilation’ is an unsettling science fiction fever dream http://ift.tt/2BKhVW2 Writer-director Alex Garland has said that his adaptation of Annihilation isn’t a straightforward retelling of the book — instead, he said, it’s “true to my subjective response to the novel.” That’s a fair warning: The movie’s details don’t really match the book, which was written by Jeff VanderMeer. What carries over, however, is a sense of dread and unease; readers of the novel and watchers of the film will both feel a pervasive wrongness that they can’t quite put their finger on. As the movie begins, a biologist played by Natalie Portman has returned from Area X, a mysterious patch of wilderness hidden behind a barrier called The Shimmer. The expedition’s other members have not returned, and the biologist seems uncertain about whether any of them might still be alive. The rest of the film (which opens in US theaters today, before going live on Netflix internationally) fills in the details of what transpired beyond The Shimmer, and of why Portman’s character felt compelled to join the expedition in the first place. In some ways, Garland’s plot is more straightforward than VanderMeer’s. The film’s scientists follow a more coherent plan, with more forward motion, than they do in the book, and the monsters that hunt them are more conventionally scary. But very little about the film feels conventional. The main plot seems far less important than the long conversations about self-destruction and change, the flashbacks to Portman’s marriage to a soldier played by Oscar Isaac, and the strange, prismatic quality of the light. I’ll admit that Garland has never been a particularly subtle writer. Characters in 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd (all films he wrote) tend to argue about the movie’s big ideas quite openly, just as they do in his directorial debut, Ex Machina. That’s true in Annihilation as well, though there’s less argument here and more brooding. What makes the movie feel exciting, even daring, is the visual form that Garland and his team have found for those ideas. The plants and animals of Area X have been transformed, different species and features mixing together, sometimes beautifully, sometimes disgustingly, often both — Annihilation has its fair share of monsters and corpses, and they’re some of the best-looking monsters and corpses I’ve ever seen. VIDEOWithout giving too much away, I can say that by the film’s end, we do get some explanations for the weird stuff we’ve been seeing. The explanations are fine, but the way we discover them —walking past a grove of crystalline trees, through a tangle of pale white branches and diving into a dark hole, where things get really weird — is far more memorable. Not everyone will enjoy Annihilation, and not just because it’s a strange movie. It also has some real flaws. For example, even in the book, a couple of the expedition members felt rather sketched in, but I still wish they’d been more memorable here, and that the scheming psychologist who leads the team had made the transition with more of her story intact. Isaac, meanwhile, gives his character a convincingly haunted quality — but for some reason, he’s trying to pull off an erratic Southern accent that becomes a huge distraction. And ultimately, I’m not sure that the revelations in the film’s very last scene felt justified. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that as I left my screening. Instead, for at least few minutes, the world around me felt genuinely unsettled. The light seemed a little off, and I worried about strange mutations lurking under the skin of my fellow subway passengers. Area X was closer than I’d realized. Featured Image: ParamountDigital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com February 23, 2018 at 09:42AM
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Poop Is a Really Popular Kids Toy This Year http://ift.tt/2sOm8Fd
Poop should not be a trend. Nevertheless turd toys were everywhere at Toy Fair this year. But it wasn’t all fecal fare. Boogers, farts, and pimples were all the subject of toys appropriate for kids too. As toymakers can’t seem to stop pushing the limits, we set to find the grossest toys we could. Below are the 7 grossest toys we found at Toy Fair, ranked in order of filthiness. 7. Jakks Pacific Skid Shot 30Okay, yes, the Skid Shot 30 has skid in the title, and probably makes you think of skid marks and that one summer of nastiness where you’re brother refused to wipe, but the $20 Skid Shot 30 is only tangentially related to the bum hole. Advertisement You load toilet paper into the Skid Shot 30, and it wets and wads it up creating huge spit balls that are sure to make people gag is they fly past their faces and slap against the wall. Rating: ? 6. Alex Brands Plunge ItWe’ve all been there. Watching our friends plunge a monster turd out of the toilet and thinking “I can do that better.” Advertisement Alex Brands’ $22 Plunge It! game lets you finally prove you’re better at sucking up poops than your friends. A toy turd rests in the middle of the board and players compete to claim it with their plunger. Rating: ?? 5. Mattel Flushing FrenzyPlunge It! was just one of many poo plunger games at Toy Fair this year. Mattel’s $20 Flushin’ Frenzy also involved furious application of plunging tools. This time players role a dice which tells them how many plunge attempts they get. The loser is the player who sends the turd flying into the air. Which is a rule that holds true in real life too. Rating: ?? 4. Spin Master Flush ForceEach Flush Force figure costs just $3, which feels like a steal compared to the price of some of the other toys on the list. But no other toy on this list requires you to fill tiny toilets to find out what kind of figurine you got. Advertisement There are multiple Flush Force figures available, and kids are encouraged to collect them. They’ll know they got an especially rare one if they fill the toilet and the water changes color. When we were kids that just meant we weren’t drinking enough water. Rating: ??? 3. Jakks Pacific Pull My FingerDespite the name, the goal of Pull My Finger is to not create farts. Instead, players spin a dial that tells them how many times they must pull the finger of Mr. Buster, a monkey with too many carbs in its diet. Advertisement The monkey’s butt slowly inflates with each tug, and then randomly deflates, emitting a noisy toot. The player who causes the fart is eliminated. Rating: ??? 2. Spin Master Dr. Pimple PopperThe world is a terrible place, so of course someone had to make a board game where you pop pimples. Dr. Pimple Popper is sort of like Operation in that you have to do some careful extractions. But this time you’re scooping up white heads and blackheads. Advertisement A spinning dial tells you where on Pete’s face to focus and if you uses too much force in your attempt at dermatology Pete’s mega-zit will explode. Rating: ???? 1. Hasbro Don’t Step In ItThe filthiest toy on our list earns it spot for the sheer number of poops involved. In Hasbro’s $20 Don’t Step In It you create a ton of poop using modeling clay and a mold, then you place them on a mat. Advertisement Players spin a dial and take turns walking blindfolded and barefoot down the mat, hoping not to step in it. Rating: ????? Digital Trends via Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com February 23, 2018 at 09:42AM
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Gothamist, LAist, and DCist Will Return, Thanks to a Boost From Public Radio http://ift.tt/2BLqrUF After billionaire Joe Ricketts announced the shuttering of local news organizations Gothamist and DNAInfo last fall, readers across the country mourned the loss of the beloved sites, and worried about the vulnerability of journalism in the digital age. Now, a consortium of public radio stations, including WNYC in New York, WAMU in Washington DC, and KPCC in Southern California, has banded together to bring some of those sites back from the dead. The three stations are acquiring the assets of Gothamist and some of its associated sites, including LAist, DCist, and DNAInfo. The deal was spearheaded by Gothamist founders Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung, and is being funded by two anonymous donors who have contributed an undisclosed sum to acquire the brands. As part of the deal, the archives of those sites will remain online, and Gothamist, led by Dobkin and Chung, will begin publishing new stories this spring. Dobkin characterizes the acquisition as "the best possible outcome" following Gothamist's unceremonious closure, which infuriated much of the media industry. Ricketts' controversial decision to shut down the sites came months after DNAInfo acquired Gothamist, and just one week after the combined newsroom successfully unionized. As an added blow, Ricketts initially blocked access to the archives of both sites, replacing them with a letter announcing that he had turned off the lights. "I think you can imagine how we felt," Dobkin says of the shutdown. "It was unexpected. We tried to do our best to improve the situation and bring something positive out of it, and we did." Following a public outcry, those archives were restored, and will now be maintained by the public radio stations. In a statement regarding the sale Thursday, Ricketts said, "The most important thing for me was to make sure the assets went to a news organization that would honor our commitment to neighborhood storytelling."
Jim Schachter, WNYC If there's any bastion of neighborhood storytelling left in America, public radio stations would be it. While local newspapers and other media companies have largely failed to adjust to the difficult freemium economics of digital journalism, New York Public Radio, the non-profit owner of WNYC, has only grown, expanding to some $93 million in annual revenue in 2017 and more than 20 million listeners across its radio stations and podcasts. That's why, when the news about Gothamist broke in the fall, WNYC executives thought they might be able to keep it alive. They soon began talks with Dobkin and Chung—who were already busy looking for possible donors—as well as fellow public radio stations across the country. "The nonprofit WNYC business model has proved to be a growing and thriving thing while a lot of things have been going so deeply south," says Jim Schachter, head of the news division at WNYC. "The hope is we can build something bigger and better by bringing these two things together." The details of the integration are still being ironed out. Initially, WNYC plans to run Gothamist as a parallel site, seeded with stories by Chung, members of the WNYC staff, and eventually, a mix of new hires and former Gothamist writers interested in getting the band back together. "We're going to be trying to rebuild the newsroom," Chung says. Because the size of the donation is still private, it's unclear just how large the budget for hiring is. Out west, where the Los Angeles Times currently faces its own existential crisis under changing ownership, KPCC's team hopes LAist can preserve "a strong news ecosystem in Los Angeles," says Alex Schaffert, assistant vice president of digital strategy and innovation. "Our goal is to generate new content for the site, build on the archive of stories that we were fortunate to acquire, and integrate LAist into KPCC’s portfolio of services." And in Washington, DC, WAMU plans to hire a three-person staff and begin publishing new content to DCist by spring. "Regional journalism is an essential aspect of our mission as a public media station, and acquiring DCist means serving a bigger audience, across more platforms," says Andi McDaniel, chief content officer of WAMU. According to Dobkin, the group is currently scouting other local radio stations and news organizations that could acquire the assets for Gothamist's additional city sites, including Chicago and San Francisco. These sites will continue to face the same pressures that afflict all digital media brands in 2018. They haven't gone away. Schachter of WNYC says the team plans to proceed slowly and cautiously. "The history of media integration is one that requires you to enter into it with great humility," he says. A nearly century-old radio station like WNYC swooping in to save a group of sites that helped write the rules of online journalism does contain a hint of irony. But when you consider these radio stations have managed to weather technological changes from the transistor to the television, the idea that they might be able to help younger newsrooms navigate the choppy waters of the digital revolution—while benefitting from their digital native audiences—doesn't sound so crazy after all. Local News LivesDigital Trends via Feed: All Latest http://ift.tt/2uc60ci February 23, 2018 at 09:36AM
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Google Assistant will support over 30 languages by year-end, become multilingual http://ift.tt/2olE2dO Google Assistant, the search giant’s answer to Alexa that lives on Android smartphones, tablets, and Google Home speakers, will expand to more languages over the course of the year, to cover 95 percent of all eligible Android smartphones, Google announced this morning. It will also soon become multilingual – meaning users who speak more than one language will be able to talk to Assistant in all the languages they speak, as well. The latter feature will be especially helpful for those who speak their native language in their home, but may speak a different language with local friends or at work, for example. Though Google Assistant is capable of understanding different languages, there wasn’t a way to easily switch between them before – you’d have to configure your language selection in the app’s settings. This feature will make talking to the assistant more natural. Multilingual support will first be available in English, French and German when it rolls out later this year, but more languages will be added in time, the company says. Google Assistant’s global footprint is also growing, the company says. This year, the smart assistant will jump from being available in 8 languages to more than 30. Over the next few months, the Assistant will learn to speak Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai on Android phones and iPhones. By year-end, it’s expected to reach 95 percent of Android smartphones worldwide capable of running Google Assistant. This will also give Google Assistant an advantage over rivals like Siri and Alexa, which have more limited language support. Amazon may have expanded Echo speakers to more markets around the world, but it hasn’t localized the device for those locations, in most cases. Meanwhile, one of Siri’s biggest strengths had been the fact that it could speak over 20 languages. The added language support was one of several updates for Google Assistant announced this morning, including also an Assistant Mobile OEM program, to help mobile manufacturers more deeply integrate with Assistant, and the launch of Routines and location-based reminders, rolling out next week. Digital Trends via TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com February 23, 2018 at 09:21AM
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How Trump Conquered Facebook Without Russian Ads http://ift.tt/2EYp4Ux It’s not every day that a former work colleague gets retweeted by the president of the United States. Last Friday, Rob Goldman, a vice president inside Facebook’s Ads team, rather ill-advisedly published a series of tweets that seemed to confirm the Trump administration’s allegations regarding the recent indictments of 13 Russian nationals by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. To wit, the tweets said that the online advertising campaign led by the shadowy Internet Research Agency was meant to divide the American people, not influence the 2016 election. Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Before turning to writing, he dropped out of a doctoral program in physics to work on Goldman Sachs’ credit trading desk, then joined the Silicon Valley startup world, where he founded his own startup (acquired by Twitter in 2011) and finally joined Facebook’s early monetization team, where he headed the company's targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year, and his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. He splits his time between a sailboat on the San Francisco Bay and a yurt in Washington’s San Juan Islands. You’re probably skeptical of Rob’s claim, and I don’t blame you. The world looks very different to people outside the belly of Facebook’s monetization beast. But when you’re on the inside, like Rob is and like I was, and you have access to the revenue dashboards detailing every ring of the cash register, your worldview tends to follow what advertising data can and cannot tell you. From this worldview, it's still not clear how much influence the IRA had with its Facebook ads (which, as others have pointed out, is just one small part of the huge propaganda campaign that Mueller is currently investigating). But no matter how you look at them, Russia’s Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign’s mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: The ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences). Both of which sound incredibly dull, until you realize that the fate of our 242-year-old experiment in democracy once depended on them, and surely will again. Like many things at Facebook, the ads auction is a version of something Google built first. As on Google, Facebook has a piece of ad real estate that it’s auctioning off, and potential advertisers submit a piece of ad creative, a targeting spec for their ideal user, and a bid for what they’re willing to pay to obtain a desired response (such as a click, a like, or a comment). Rather than simply reward that ad position to the highest bidder, though, Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is. If Facebook’s model thinks your ad is 10 times more likely to engage a user than another company’s ad, then your effective bid at auction is considered 10 times higher than a company willing to pay the same dollar amount. A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook’s estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor. That’s why, if you’ve noticed a News Feed ad that’s pulling out all the stops (via provocative stock photography or other gimcrackery) to get you to click on it, it’s partly because the advertiser is aiming to pump up their engagement levels and increase their exposure, all without paying any more money. During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money. In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone’s screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating. (Speaking of Manhattan vs. Detroit prices, there are some (very nonmetaphorical) differences in media costs across the country that also impacted Trump’s ability to reach voters. Broadly, advertising costs in rural, out-of-the-way areas are considerably less than in hotly contested, dense urban areas. As each campaign tried to mobilize its base, largely rural Trump voters were probably cheaper to reach than Clinton’s urban voters. Consider Germantown, Pa. (a Philly suburb Clinton won by a landslide) vs. Belmont County, Ohio (a rural county Trump comfortably won). Actual media costs are closely guarded secrets, but Facebook’s own advertiser tools can give us some ballpark estimates. For zip code 43950 (covering the county seat of St. Clairsville, Ohio), Facebook estimates an advertiser can show an ad to about 83 people per dollar. For zip code 19144 in the Philly suburbs, that number sinks to 50 people an ad for every dollar of ad spend. Averaged over lots of time and space, the impacts on media budgets can be sizable. Anyway …)
The above auction analysis is even more true for News Feed, which is only based on engagement, with every user mired in a self-reinforcing loop of engagement, followed by optimized content, followed by more revealing engagement, then more content, ad infinitum. The candidate who can trigger that feedback loop ultimately wins. The Like button is our new ballot box, and democracy has been transformed into an algorithmic popularity contest. But how to trigger the loop? For that, we need the machinery of targeting. (Full disclosure: I was the original product manager for Custom Audiences, and along with a team of other product managers and engineers, I launched the first versions of Facebook precision targeting in the summer of 2012, in those heady and desperate days of the IPO and sudden investor expectation.) Despite folklore about “selling your data,” most Facebook advertisers couldn’t care less about your Likes, your drunk college photos, or your gossipy chats with a boyfriend. What advertisers want to do is find the person who left a product unpurchased in an online shopping cart, just used a loyalty card to buy diapers at Safeway, or registered as a Republican voter in Stark County, Ohio (a swing county in a swing state). Custom Audiences lets them do that. It’s the tunnel beneath the data wall that allows the outside world into Facebook’s well-protected garden, and it’s like that by design. Browsed for shoes and then saw them on Facebook? You’re in a Custom Audience. Registered for an email newsletter or used your email as login somewhere? You’re in a Custom Audience. Ordered something to a postal address known to merchants and marketers? You’re definitely in a Custom Audience. Here’s how it works in practice: A campaign manager takes a list of emails or other personal data for people they think will be susceptible to a certain type of messaging (e.g. people in Florida who donated money to Trump For America). They upload that spreadsheet to Facebook via the Ads Manager tool, and Facebook scours its user data, looks for users who match the uploaded spreadsheet, and turns the matches into an “Audience,” which is really just a set of Facebook users. Facebook can also populate an audience by reading a user’s cookies—those digital fragments gathered through a user’s wanderings around the web. Half the bizarre conspiracy theories around Facebook targeting boil down to you leaving a data trail somewhere inside our consumer economy that was then uploaded via Custom Audiences. In the language of database people, there’s now a “join” between the Facebook user ID (that’s you) and this outside third-party who knows what you bought, browsed, or who you voted for (probably). That join is permanent, irrevocable, and will follow you to every screen where you’ve used Facebook. The above is pretty rudimentary data plumbing. But only when you’ve built a Custom Audience can you build Lookalike Audiences— the most unknown, poorly understood, and yet powerful weapon in the Facebook ads arsenal. With a mere mouse click from our hypothetical campaign manager, Facebook now searches the friends of everyone in the Custom Audience, trying to find everyone who (wait for it) “looks like” you. Using a witches’ brew of mutual engagement—probably including some mix of shared page Likes, interacting with similar News Feed or Ads content, a score used to measure your social proximity to friends—the Custom Audience is expanded to a bigger set of like-minded people. Lookalikes. (Another way to picture it: Your social network resembles a nutrient-rich petri dish, just sitting out in the open. Custom Audiences helps mercenary marketers find that dish, and lets them plant the bacterium of a Facebook post inside it. From there, your own interaction with the meme, which is echoed in News Feed, spreads it to your immediate vicinity. Lookalike Audiences finishes the job by pushing it to the edges of your social petri dish, to everyone whose tastes and behaviors resemble yours. The net result is a network overrun by an infectious meme, dutifully placed there by an advertiser, and spread by the ads and News Feed machinery.) We’ve all contributed to this political balkanization by self-sorting (or being sorted by Facebook) into online tribes that get morphed into filter bubbles, which are then studiously colonized by commercial memes planted and spread there by a combination of Custom and Lookalike Audiences. One of the ways the Trump campaign leveraged Lookalike Audiences was through its voter suppression campaigns among likely Clinton voters. They seeded the Audiences assembly line with content about Clinton that was engaging but dispiriting. This is one of the ways that Trump won the election, by the very tools that were originally built to help companies like Bed Bath & Beyond sell you towels. Unsurprisingly, the Russians also apparently made use of Custom Audiences in their ads campaign. The unwary clicker on a Russian ad who then visited their propaganda site suddenly could find yet more planted content in their Feed, which could generate downstream engagement in Feed, and thus the great Facebook wheel turned. The scale of their spend was puny, however, a measly $100,000, which pales in comparison to the millions Trump spent on online advertising. The above isn’t mere informed speculation, the Trump campaign admitted to its wide use of both Custom and Lookalike audiences. There seems to be little public coverage of whether the Clinton campaign used Facebook Ads extensively, but there’s no reason to think her campaign did not exploit the same tools. “I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical,” Brad Parscale, the leader of the Trump data effort, told reporters in late 2016. “It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.” He’s absolutely right. None of this is even novel: It’s merely best practice for any smart Facebook advertiser. Custom Audiences was launched almost six (!) years ago, marketed publicly at the time, and only now is becoming a mainstream talking point. The ads auction has been studied by marketers and academics for even longer. The only surprise is how surprising it can still seem to many. If we’re going to reorient our society around Internet echo chambers, with Facebook and Twitter serving as our new Athenian agora, then we as citizens should understand how that forum gets paid for. Rarely will the owners of that now-privatized space deign to explain how they’re keeping the lights on. Plotting Russians make for a good story, and external enemies frequently serve an internal purpose, but the trail of blame often leads much closer to home. It’s right there, topped by a big, blue bar on our smartphone screens, and could very well be how you arrived at what you’re reading right now. Facebook's Advertising Machine
Photograph by WIRED/Getty Images Digital Trends via Feed: All Latest http://ift.tt/2uc60ci February 23, 2018 at 09:18AM
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Big Brown goes green: UPS to build its own electric delivery fleet http://ift.tt/2CEXW7O In a few short years, you might not hear the low rumble of a UPS truck as it approaches your driveway to drop off a parcel. The American delivery company has joined forces with a startup named Workhorse to design, build, and test a delivery van powered exclusively by electricity. “With our scale and real-world duty cycles, these new electric trucks will be quantum leap forward for the purpose-built UPS delivery fleet. The all-electric trucks will deliver by day and re-charge overnight,” explained Carlton Rose, the president of UPS’s global fleet maintenance and engineering department. He added the van will offer about 100 miles of range in real-world driving conditions. That doesn’t sound like much, not when companies like Tesla and Porsche promise long-range models that can drive over 300 miles, but it’s more than enough for a vehicle that spends a majority of its time in urban areas. UPS expects switching to battery power will come with numerous advantages. The truck (which looks Sprinter-sized) is expected to provide 400 percent better fuel economy than the diesel-powered model it will replace, so the company will save a considerable amount of money on fuel. An electric motor requires less maintenance than an internal combustion engine, too. UPS will never again have to buy routine maintenance items like glow plugs and oil filters. Workhorse and UPS will start by launching a pilot program made of 50 trucks. We don’t know what they’ll look yet but don’t expect a design breakthrough; this is a UPS truck, not an Italian sports sedan. Drivers will test them in real-world conditions on urban routes scattered across the country in cities like Dallas, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The feedback gathered during the program will help engineers improve the technology. The two partners will begin ramping up production next year. Neither of them wants to speak about volume yet, but UPS points out it currently operates approximately 35,000 gasoline- or diesel-powered vans comparable in size to the electric model it’s developing. Executives hope to make battery-powered models the standard selection when appropriate. Electric cars get a lot of attention these days, but the electric van segment is becoming equally crowded. Volkswagen announced plans to introduce a battery-powered delivery van inspired by the I.D. Buzz concept in the coming years, and Mercedes-Benz developed the latest Sprinter with electrification in mind. Don’t be surprised to see other major van manufacturers (like Ford and Ram) leap into the segment in the coming years.
Digital Trends via Digital Trends http://ift.tt/2p4eJdC February 23, 2018 at 09:02AM |
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