Snapchat is a Smartphone application that allows users to send photos or short videos to another user. But with Snapchat messages, they disappear after viewing–usually in just a few seconds–so they can’t be forwarded or saved.
how do you build brand awareness on a temporary medium?
Do you think a short Snapchat video of your CEO playing Halo in the conference room would be interesting to a younger audience? A VP sleeping in an office meeting? The HR Director’s bad tie or haircut? Scenes such as these are the coin-of-the-realm in brand marking these days–the way for you and your brand to be “not that guy.” And Snapchat’s temporary nature is the perfect place for such less-than-serious messaging.
You may find it difficult to engage your senior leadership–or other company leaders–in being Snapchat fodder. Or you may decide that producing short clips or funny photos just isn’t worth the marketing investment. Both are fine conclusions.
“YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, and Snapchat represent some of the largest and most influential platforms in the United States, and they provide almost no functional transparency into their systems. And as a result, they avoid nearly all of the scrutiny and criticism that comes with it.”
Cruz expressed great confusion about why he got relatively few new Twitter followers in the days before Elon Musk said he was going to buy it, but then got many more after the acquisition was announced.
The actual explanation is that Musk has lots of conservative fans, they flocked back to the platform when they heard he was buying it, and from there Twitter’s recommendation algorithms kicked into gear.
As usual, though, Europe is much further ahead of us. The Digital Services Act, which regulators reached an agreement on in April, includes provisions that would require big platforms to share data with qualified researchers. The law is expected to go into effect by next year. And so even if Congress dithers after today, transparency is coming to platforms one way or another. Here’s hoping it can begin to answer some very important questions.
The News Feed made Facebook an actual social network. In turn, the News Feed became synonymous with social media.
Twitter’s feed was chronological, so you could tweet out a ton of links to content and get consistent clicks from your followers. Facebook’s algorithm was incredibly friendly to “link posts” that sent users to news or blog articles.
Stories let Snapchat users post a series of snaps that would last for 24 hours, and it was an immediate hit.
Stories were so absurd on LinkedIn that the company is shutting it down by the end of this month).
TikTok’s success has often been attributed to its algorithm, which is very good at predicting the type of video you’ll like. But TikTok is also so successful because it plays on the same part of our brain that makes gambling so addictive. random reinforcement
As our research showed earlier this year, people will continue to consume content in an array of different formats—from blog posts to YouTube to podcasts to good old-fashioned memes.
The parent company of Snapchat has bought Vertebrae, a company that lets brands create and manage 3D versions of their goods.
Early tests of AR shopping experiences, such as a recent collaboration with Gucci to let people virtually try on a pair of limited-edition sneakers, have shown Snap that people are more likely to buy something after they interact with it in 3D.
Snap declined to say how much it paid for Vertebrae, but the deal was likely small relative to its $500 million acquisition of WaveOptics, which makes the AR displays in its Spectacles smart glasses. Vertebrae raised about $10 million in venture funding to date. It lists Toyota, Adidas, CB2, and other well-known brands as clients on its website. It also worked with Facebook — Snap’s biggest competitor — on AR shopping tech in 2019.
And looking beyond smartphones, AR shopping is more compelling in a future world when more people are potentially wearing smart glasses with displays in them, such as Snap’s latest Spectacles.
startup JigSpace, which was among the first apps to support ARKit and LiDAR for iPhone augmented reality apps
“Creating and sharing knowledge in 3D should be simple, useful, and delightful. We’re on a mission to unlock the utility of augmented reality at massive scale and bring interactive 3D experiences into everyday life,” said Zac Duff, co-founder and CEO at JigSpace
Compared to the camera effects from Snapchat and Facebook, mobile AR apps built on ARKit from Apple and ARCore from Google haven’t had quite the impact we expected them to when Apple originally announced ARKit.
Tech platforms used to focus on ways to create wildly different products to attract audiences. Today, they all have similar features, and instead differentiate themselves with their philosophies, values and use cases.
Ephemerality has been one of the most radical and sticky features in messaging in years — it has now been around for close to a decade. And it has arguably been the defining feature for one of the runaway, viral hits of the genre, Snapchat — so much so that clones of the feature have popped up in a number of other apps, from those focused first and foremost on privacy like Signal and Telegram, through to those that are aimed at more casual consumer audiences, like WhatsApp today.
Police monitored RSVP lists on Facebook events, shared information about Slack channels protesters were using, and cited protesters’ posts in encrypted messaging apps like Telegram.
How police used social media to track protesters
warning sent to police departments on June 6, the FBI says it’s been tracking “individuals using Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram” who post about organizing protests.
The EDUCAUSE XR (Extended Reality) Community Group Listserv <XR@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Greetings to you all! Presently, I am undertaking a masters course in “Instruction Design and Technology” which has two components: Coursework and Research. For my research, I would like to pursue it in the field of Augmented Reality (AR) and Mobile Learning. I am thinking of an idea that could lead to collaboration among students and directly translate into enhanced learning for students while using an AR application. However, I am having a problem with coming up with an application because I don’t have any computing background. This, in turn, is affecting my ability to come up with a good research topic.
I teach gross anatomy and histology to many students of health sciences at Mbarara University, and this is where I feel I could make a contribution to learning anatomy using AR since almost all students own smartphones. I, therefore, kindly request you to let me know which of the freely-available AR app authoring tools could help me in this regard. In addition, I request for your suggestions regarding which research area(s) I should pursue in order to come up with a good research topic.
Hoping to hear from you soon.
Grace Muwanga Department of Anatomy Mbarara University Uganda (East Africa)
One limitation with Spark and Snap is that file sizes need to be small.
If you’re interested in creating AR experiences that work directly in a web browser and are up for writing some markup code, look at A-Frame AR https://aframe.io/blog/webxr-ar-module/.
For finding and hosting 3D models you can look at Sketchfab and Google Poly. I think both have many examples of anatomy.
I’ve been using Roar. They have a 99$ a year license.
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I have recently been experimenting with an AR development tool called Zappar, which I like because the end users do not have to download an app to view the AR content. Codes can be scanned either with the Zappar app or at web.zappar.com.
From a development standpoint, Zappar has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface called ZapWorks Designer that will help you build basic AR experiences quickly, but for a more complicated, more interactive use case such as learning anatomy, you will probably need ZapWorks Studio, which will have much more of a learning curve. The Hobby (non-commercial) license is free if you are interested in trying it out.
You can check out an AR anatomy mini-lesson with models of the human brain, liver, and heart using ZapWorks here: https://www.zappar.com/campaigns/secrets-human-body/. Even if you choose to go with a different development tool, this example might help nail down ideas for your own project.
Hope this helps,
Brighten
Brighten Jelke Academic Assistant for Virtual Technology Lake Forest College bjelke@lakeforest.edu Office: DO 233 | Phone: 847-735-5168
he Intercept reported that Zoom video calls are not end-to-end encrypted, despite the company’s claims that they are.
Motherboard reports that Zoom is leaking the email addresses of “at least a few thousand” people because personal addresses are treated as if they belong to the same company
Apple was forced to step in to secure millions of Macs after a security researcher found Zoom failed to disclose that it installed a secret web server on users’ Macs, which Zoom failed to remove when the client was uninstalled
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‘Zoom is malware’: why experts worry about the video conferencing platform
A report from Motherboard found Zoom sends data from users of its iOS app to Facebook for advertising purposes, even if the user does not have a Facebook account.
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I used to thoroughly love @zoom_us as a platform for collaborating. I still use it. But it’s not something that I would recommend to others anymore. Here’s a thread as to why: