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Amazon has unveiled a new augmented reality (AR) feature in its app for iOS that allow online shoppers to view products in a 3D rendering to show how the product will look like in real world experience.

The Amazon AR View is built on Apple’s ARKit technology, and as such, it will only work on the iPhone 6S or higher, on devices running Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 11.

The AR View is simply activated by clicking on the camera icon in the Amazon app and then select “AR View” from the menu that appears. You can choose a product from across the different categories like Light Fixtures & Fittings, kitchen ware or furniture.



In the AR View screen, you can also move and rotate the items to see them in a full 360-degree view.

The AR capabilities have the potential to influence consumers behavior, as it allows them to imagine items not just in a finished room, but right in their own room.

Albeit, shoppers may eventually have the option to select AR View from an individual product page as Amazon complete development of its catalogue of digital imagery needed to make this happen.

The new feature is perhaps bringing AR experience to mainstream online shoppers at a large scale, which hitherto the use cases have been more of a gimmick or publicity stunts. The addition of AR View is about now rolling out to the Amazon app on iOS devices.

Amazon’s 3D AR let shoppers feel Product in Real World view



While Microsoft availed Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users a whole year to upgrade to Windows 10 for free, there was one exception nonetheless: those users on "assistive technology", such as screen readers, have an indefinite extension.

There's still a way for consumers to upgrade to Windows 10 for free — but Microsoft will shut it down on December 31.

And the December 31 deadline for users to upgrade to Windows 10 for free, means that consumers will have to pay the full price for a Windows license afterwards, which costs about $75 for a "system builder" license for Windows 10 Home, and more for Professional versions.

The company's rather generous offer in making its upgrade path to users of assistive technologies, isn't quite one-sided, as any user of assistive technology on Windows is eligible for the free upgrade.

All that's required is to visit the assistive support page, and fill up that you use assistive technologies, and then download the upgrade tool to Windows 10 for free.

And the enhancements to assistive technologies that are built into the Windows 10, will ensure that those in need of assistance will benefit from the upgrade. Albeit, the assistive loophole represents a gray area, especially for those who normally wouldn't need an assistive technology.

Microsoft shutting down Windows 10 upgrade path for consumers

Apple has released iOS 11.1, the latest software update for its iPhones and iPads, bringing the much-needed security update to patch the KRACK Wi-Fi exploit, a weakness in Wi-Fi-connected devices which could expose users to nearby hackers.

The newly discovered Wi-Fi weak spot, KRACK puts just about every device at risk, but the prompt response by Apple in this latest update to fix the flaw is quite reassuring.

The update is coming on the heels of Friday's launch of the iPhone X, and to add to the fun, it includes more than 70 new emojis: star-struck and exploding-head smiley faces, a woman with a headscarf, a sandwich, a coconut, a T. rex, a zebra, a zombie and an elf.



The iPhone X marks a major redesign for the iPhone in years, and for the first time ditches the home button in favor of Face ID with a flashy OLED display.

While the Apple Watch Series 3 has been available since mid-September, but a couple of major features did not accompany the device at launch. Apple launched WatchOS 4.1 for the Apple Watch, bringing music streaming and a new Radio app to the smartwatch.

The new WatchOS 4.1 also brings GymKit to the Series 3, allowing the device to connect to compatible exercise equipment to share data.

Additionally, the Wi-Fi toggle option to the Control Center in watchOS 4.1 allow users to manually disable Wi-Fi when they want to use LTE data instead of available Wi-Fi networks.

Apple iOS 11.1 brings a fix for KRACK Wi-Fi Exploit and new Emojis



Microsoft Office 365, the company's group of subscription services that provide productivity software, now has about 120 million active monthly subscribers, mostly enterprise users generating more revenue for Microsoft than what's usually the case with its one-time licenses.

Last week, Microsoft revealed its milestone at driving customers to its subscription services for software,with the workplace-provided Office 365 subscription plan hitting 120 million active users.

The figure actually represents about 10% of all Office users; which several months ago, Microsoft had claimed the global Office user base has crossed 1 billion.

Microsoft's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, revealed that during the June financial period, revenue for the corporate side of Office 365 had for the first time surpassed what's generated by traditional licensing of the productivity suite.

Albeit, the company generally revealed the revenue breakdown of the two models - subscription or one-time licensing, with the latter often referred to as "perpetual" licensing.

Microsoft is perhaps making more money from Office subscriptions than from one-time license purchases on the heels of only one-tenth of the user base, which implication is quite obvious: the customers are paying more for Office 365 than they were previously for perpetual licenses.

While the never-ending payments the subscription model require - costs more than an outright purchase; for smaller organizations, they're probably saving money with Office 365, as the size of the organization determines whether savings will dwindle.

Such organizations, lacking economies of scale for internal computing operations, will likely save money and have a more efficient cost structure moving from on-premises services to Office 365.

Microsoft's emphasis on SaaS model pays off with Office 365 milestone



Apple's product lineup have one notable distinction - how tightly integrated the different devices are - and all the user contents are accessible across every other Apple device; which continuity allow users to easily migrate contents when switching device.

For instance, if you're not done reading an article on Safari in the office Mac, on your commute home, you can pick up from where you left on your iPad or iPhone with only a tap.

This integration between iOS devices and macOS devices can also be experienced in the Messaging apps, with iMessage conversations on an iPhone or iPad are mirrored on a Mac as long as the user is logged into the same iCloud account on both devices.

The same is also true for text messages if the option is enabled, the feature make many Apple's device users to imply they can't live without one, but now a little new bug is making may think otherwise.

While the ability to move over conversations between devices is perhaps the best thing about iPhone and Mac, Apple’s latest update to macOS High Sierra has broken this key functionality for a number of users.

As it appears, many users have not been receiving notifications when new messages arrive on their iPhone/iPad/Apple Watch even with their Mac computers powered on; which making matters even worse, the notifications on Mac are hugely delayed, that affected users don’t know when they receive messages even when working on their Mac.

According to AppleInsider, even the latest available betas still don’t fix this annoying problem, but the only thing that seem to get messaging working again on an iPhone, albeit temporarily, is to either disable Messages on the Mac or simply shut down the computer.

New Bug in Apple's iMessage infuriate iPhone users



Google announced a range of new updates coming to Firebase, its platform that allow developers to leverage the backend services to build/manage their mobile and web apps, with many of the service’s becoming core features.

While the company acquired Fabric from Twitter, along with Crashlytics, the crash-reporting tool; other enhancements coming to Firebase include: improved Cloud Messaging API, Predictions support from Google’s AI, and a revamped console for managing projects across the app cycle.

Albeit, the Crashlytics support will be rolling out in the next few weeks into the Firebase console, even as Firebase has become more of a platform over, that developers will be able to build their app crash reports into workflows.

And the revamped Firebase console is now a straightforward proposition, especially now that the service includes a far wider range of features.

The Firebase team explains it as follows:

We’ve clustered Firebase products into four main areas, based on the app development lifecycle: Develop, Stability, Analytics, and Grow, All of the products that you’re used to seeing in the Firebase console are still there; we’ve simply reorganized things to more accurately reflect the way your team works.


Google will be expanding the Firebase Cloud Messaging service to include sending notifications to its users.

It is launching a new API for this service to make it easier to send cross-platform notifications that could, for example, only include basic text for iOS users and an additional click_action for Android users.

Also, the new A/B testing framework is launching to make it easier to run variant tests and try different push notification messages. If you're a eveloper and want to get an early peek at what this will look like, you can opt in to get early access here.

Google brings Crashlytics Integration and A/B testing to Firebase



Apache PredictionIO is an open-sourced version of a project originally developed by a subsidiary of Salesforce, which is built on Spark and Hadoop framework, and serves predictions from data using customizable templates for common tasks.

The PredictionIO’s event server receive data from apps to train a model, then query the engine for predictions based on the given model.

While PredictionIO's template system is perhaps its most notable advantage, as it reduces the heavy lifting needed to set up the system to serve specific kinds of predictions.

And some templates also integrate other machine learning products, but PredictionIO can automatically evaluate a prediction engine to determine the best hyperparameters to use.

Albeit, the developer needs to set metrics on how to do this, but there’s generally less work involved than in tuning hyperparameters manually.

Apache also offers supported SDKs for working in Java, Python, PHP and Ruby. MLlib, HBase, Spray, and Elasticsearch all come bundled with PredictionIO, while data can be stored in a variety of back ends, including: Elasticsearch, JDBC, HBase, HDFS and their local file systems are all supported out of the box.

PredictionIO can accept predictions singly or as a batch, with batched predictions automatically parallelized across a Spark cluster, as the algorithms (default algorithms) used in batch predictions are all serialized.

How Apache PredictionIO makes it easier to serve Predictions from Machine Learning



Facebook has made changes to its ads policy days before the company, with rivals Google and Twitter, are scheduled to testify to the U.S. Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The lawmakers on November 1, are expected to grill these tech giants concerning Russian interference in the last U.S. elections using their various platforms to spread misinformation.

With the changes in policy, Facebook intends to make political advertisements easier to spot, in an effort to promote transparency.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, the changes will make it easier to see what different groups are trying to communicate around elections and will make it harder for anyone to break the rules.

While the political ads will need to be verified and identified as political, with a "paid for by" disclosure included and users can tap on an ad to view more information. Facebook will use machine learning to help identify and verify those advertisers who did not disclose themselves as political advertisers.

Also, Facebook will be adding "thousands" of people to its teams that review ads, albeit this won't stop all bad actors, but it's one of many important steps forward.

Additionally, Facebook will allow users to view all ads circulating from a Page, even if that user is not part of the targeted audience for each ad.

Initial tests have started in Canada and users will be able to view current ads that are running from a Page. But as it expands into the US during the election, Facebook will create an archive to view all election-related ads that have run in the past.

Facebook will also provide information on how much money is spent for each political advertisers, with the number of impressions garnered and demographic information about the audience reached.

The new changes will be rolling out next month and will affect all Pages, not just political advertisers.

How Facebook's new rules will ensure Transparency for Political ads



If you've ever sent a message to the wrong person or group, which in most cases may be somewhat embarrassing, WhatsApp has finally got the problem covered with the new "delete for everyone" option.

While the app’s former delete function barely removes a message from the senders side, it is fairly useless as it only removes a message for the person who sent it.

The new update affords users the option to “delete for everyone,” which rids the message(s) from the chat windows for all, with a notification explaining to the recipient(s) that the message has been removed.

The company statement reads as follows:

Messages you successfully delete for everyone will be replaced with “This message was deleted” in your recipients’ chats (*). Similarly, if you see “This message was deleted” in a chat, it means that the sender deleted their message for everyone.

You can only delete messages for everyone for up to seven minutes after sending. Once seven minutes have passed, there is no way to delete messages for everyone.


The feature is particularly useful if you sent a message to the wrong person or if the message you sent contains a mistake.

It is about now rolling out to WhatsApp's over one billion users, and requires the latest version of the messaging app, as all conversation participants must have the latest version of WhatsApp installed on their device.

WhatsApp introduces “Delete for Everyone” message recall



The power of social media in today’s competitive business environment cannot be underestimated. With so many social media platforms at your disposal today, you cannot afford to ignore their immense potential to help you market your business more effectively. Businesses across all sectors are scrambling for a piece of the pie—online car dealerships, eCommerce sites, gaming sites etc. In fact, even online trading sites such as CMC Markets are using social media to grow their ever increasing customer base.

A great majority of young people have at the very least one social media account. According to a recent study, about 33% of young people prefer to use social media to communicate with businesses. About 35% of baby boomers also use social media. This is a huge market that you should do everything in your power to take advantage of.

Social media campaigns cannot be successful if they’re run blindly and without clear goals right from the start.

With social media, the secret to success is in engagement and creativity. You need to keep your audience engaged with interesting and creative content so that you can inspire them and effectively market your brand to them. If you have been struggling to leverage the ever growing number of social media users to boost your business, you can learn a thing or two from businesses that have run very successful social media campaigns in 2017.

Using public events to your advantage

You stand to attract much more attention from social media users by centering your social media campaign on upcoming public events. This is a tried and tested strategy that has had very high success rates. You should start your campaign in good time so that it attracts as much attention as possible by the time of the event. The more people mention your brand and share your content, the more popular your brand becomes, and this is a dream come true for any business.

Creativity is key

With social media, your creativity is what sets you apart from your competition. You need to have a campaign that is interesting and unique to your brand. Your choice of social media platform is also a very significant determinant of how successful your campaign will be. If you are targeting millennials, Instagram is your best bet. You can share your content across all your social media platforms to ensure it reaches as many people as possible. The hashtags you use for your campaign also matter.

Meaningful and helpful content

While your content needs to be entertaining to keep your audience interested, it also has to be informative and add value to the viewers. You can easily combine these two aspects and have a campaign that is both informative and entertaining. Take advantage of visual content to ensure that even the illiterate can understand your campaign and take part in it. Most importantly, keep your audience engaged throughout the campaign.

Reward your audience

Use your social media pages to get information from your audience and share the same to boost your engagement levels. You can tweak this a bit by making it a competition and rewarding your audience with free products or services every once in a while. You will be surprised at how much more engaged your audience will be.

Partnering with authority brands

You can partner with an authority brand in your industry or in a totally unrelated industry and come up with a killer campaign that will benefit both brands involved. You will be able to combine your ideas and promote each others brands to each others audiences. This will significantly increase your reach and consequently boost your conversion rates.

Conclusion

As is evident from the above, taking advantage of social media to boost your business is not as difficult as many people think it is. The key to a successful social media campaign is to set clear goals and keep it simple. The campaign must be focused on what your audience might be interested in, and not just what you think will work. Working with other companies to promote each others brands is also a very effective strategy that is gaining popularity because of its high success rates. With the fast changing trends in SEO and social media marketing, keeping up with the trends is a must if you are to stay ahead of the competition. Otherwise, you risk sinking into oblivion.

A Reflection On The Most Successful Social Media Campaigns

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