Evernote will cease all work on Evernote Food on September 30. Users will be able to still use the apps, but no further updates will be provided by the company, including syncing back to the Evernote service.
In a blog post, Evernote’s senior director of content and communications Ronda Scott explained that the shifting of resources was because the core Evernote app and its Web Clipper service are already duplicating the efforts of Food.
Evernote Food launched in 2011 and is available on both iOS and Android devices. The idea was for people to capture individual meal entries, take photos and notes, and then share them to Twitter and Facebook. If you had a great meal, you could snap a photo to remember what it looked like or jot down the recipe.
Users that have recipes and other items stored within Evernote Food will find it on the core app, assuming that it’s been synced prior to September 30. Afterwards, those notes may be gone.
In 2012, LinkedIn acquired SlideShare to add its online community of documents to its collective knowledge. Today, the professional social networking company is taking things to another level to further integrate SlideShare into the fold: rebranding it and making it easier to share knowledge amongst its 70 million users.
Meet LinkedIn SlideShare, the rebranded document sharing service. But that’s not really the big news — it’s the release of Clipping, a new feature that lets users save the best slides from anyone’s presentation to reference later in what LinkedIn calls “Clipboards.” There are no limits to how many slides you can clip or how many Clipboards can be created.
Think about Clipping like a bookmark tool. If you come across a great presentation and find a slide you’d want to keep, you could save the entire presentation. But will you remember exactly which slide you’re interested in? Clipping takes it and imports it into an area where you can curate a collection of similarly themed slides.
If you prefer, you can prevent others from Clipping your presentation by adjusting the setting for that particular file. However, LinkedIn frowns upon this, telling VentureBeat that it would like to help spread that content to “an entirely new audience.” Presentation statistics have also been enhanced to now display which slide has been clipped the most.
Clipping a slide is pretty simple within LinkedIn Slideshare. When viewing the presentation, in the lower-left hand corner, there will be a link that reads “Clip Slide”. When done, you can specify which of your Clipboards you’d like to save the slide to. Additionally, you have the option of sharing that clip across social media.
If you made a mistake or want to undo your clip, it can all be reverted with just a click of the mouse.
Offering more granular sharing is unsurprising as now users can build their own library of topical knowledge. And there’s quite a lot of content to tap into — LinkedIn has revealed it now as 18 million presentations stored within SlideShare, an 80 percent increase since 2013. Every month, 400,000 presentations are added.
LinkedIn says it will not be charging for Clipping and it’s accessible to anyone with a SlideShare account. Clipping is only available through the Web, but LinkedIn says the team is “looking to expand to mobile in the near future.”
Twitter is making some updates to how users are being made aware of new direct messages. The company announced today that over the next few days it will start allowing users to receive desktop notifications for direct messages when they’re using Twitter.com.
“Notifications appear on the top right side of the screen, when a Direct Message is sent,” a Twitter spokeswoman told VentureBeat in an email. “Clicking the notification brings you into the modal where you read and reply to Direct Messages.”
How many will be affected by this change is unknown as Twitter hasn’t provided figures on the number of people specifically on Twitter.com. Eighty percent of Twitter’s 316 million monthly active users are accessing the service on mobile, however, there’s no indication about what percentage is exclusive to mobile.
Perhaps beneficial to those in places where smartphone adoption isn’t rampant, the addition of desktop notifications for messaging will be helpful.
Twitter today is also announcing some changes to the direct message component of its Android app. From the company spokeswoman’s email:
When you share a public tweet in a private direct message, you’ll notice the screen where you pick who to sent the message to looks different. We’ve made the avatars more prominent, and place your most recent conversations up top. Below your most recent conversations, we suggest more conversations to dive into.
Today’s feature release comes a couple of weeks after Twitter officially removed the 140-character limit on direct messages. Clearly one-to-one instant messaging is becoming a higher priority at Twitter as the company looks to grow further.
Flipboard is expanding its promoted stories program to now include videos. Starting today, brands can submit their television-quality commercials and bring them to the digital magazine app. These video ads will feature Cinema Loops, which are three-to-eight second segments of the file and are meant to entice viewers to click-through in order to watch the entire video.
The new video ads will autoplay but silently. Gaming company Machine Zone is the first brand partner with its “Game of War” campaign.
In January, Flipboard debuted promoted stories which takes curated stories and features them in interest channels to get more exposure. With mobile video marketing heating up, the company wants to give brands a new way to increase attention and uplift for their advertisements.
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This isn’t the first time Flipboard has had video ads. In September 2014, the company teamed with Gucci, Sony Pictures, Woodford Reserve, and others to test out its full-page video ads. But unlike that time, the new Cinema Loop video ads will autoplay sans sound and only include a clip — creating an appearance you’re watching an animated GIF image and not the full video.
These promoted video ads are a way for Flipboard to tap into the television ad budgets that brands have. The company hopes its ability to repurpose existing creative will be enticing to brands to bite.
“Data shows that brand lift generated by users actively selecting to watch a video is higher than in typical autoplay scenarios,” says Dave Huynh, Flipboard’s head of advertising product. “Cinema Loop is designed to spark interest and encourage the viewer to watch the whole video.”
Huynh told VentureBeat in an interview that mobile video is a good way to tell a story, but Flipboard was conscious in how it was presented to users while engaging.
Participating brands will submit their creative files to Flipboard and tell the intervals that they want to make be the preview clip. Flipboard will handle the processing and everything else. Brands won’t be limited to just one preview clip. As a matter of fact, Huynh says that more is actually better.
These video ads also include an area that includes a title and a quick description of what’s going on. Unlike with stories where the description is a snippet from the article, Cinema Loops are really brief descriptions. A call-to-action can be included on the description, but not on the full-length video itself.
Huynh says standard video engagement metrics are offered, including measuring the tap-through rate to the call-to-action, which Cinema Loop was more popular, and more. Ads will be charged either on impression or engagement, depending on the brand’s preference.
Users will see this new ad placement on Flipboard’s mobile app, but the company says that it’s going to gradually extend it to the rest of the platform over the next few weeks.
Politicians the world over can breathe a huge sigh of relief today, as news emerges that Twitter has pulled the rug from under Politwoops.
A product of “digital transparency” organization Open State Foundation (OSF), Politwoops emerged as a key tool for journalists and opponents looking to track the deleted tweets of politicians. While many of the tweets it saved for posterity were dull, it also helped shine a light on regrettable utterances and opinions from political leaders.
OSF confirmed yesterday that Twitter had killed the API Politwoops relied on to aggregate deleted tweets in all 30 countries it operated in, though this should come as little surprise — Twitter first scythed the API in the U.S. back in May.
While many see deleted tweets as a key process in holding politicians accountable for their statements, it seems Twitter disagrees. Citing a statement it says it received from Twitter, a OSF press release notes that Twitter cut-off the API once-and-for-all in every Politwoops territory, after a “thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors.”
Above: Politwoops
Twitter argues, according to OSF, that politicians are no-different to any other user — people have the right to delete ‘retweets’ or personal comments from the social network.
“Imagine how nerve-racking – terrifying, even – tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?,” the Twitter statement reads. “No one user is more deserving of that ability than another. Indeed, deleting a tweet is an expression of the user’s voice.”
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That’s all very well and good, but many would argue that this lets politicians erase anything bad they’ve said from a public record, a privilege generally not afforded in other mediums. Indeed, Twitter has often sought to align itself with the media fraternity, be it newspapers, TV companies, or other broadcasters. But generally, anyone passing comment through these channels have little recourse to “back track”.
“What elected politicians publicly say is a matter of public record,” says Arjan El Fassed, director of Open State Foundation. “Even when tweets are deleted, it’s part of parliamentary history. These tweets were once posted and later deleted. What politicians say in public should be available to anyone. This is not about typos but it is a unique insight on how messages from elected politicians can change without notice.”
In other words, this latest move isn’t just about protecting politicians’ rights to delete a controversial comment, it also holds politicians to account if their messages or “public position” changes over time.
While this doesn’t necessarily prevent all deleted tweets from being preserved (we’re counting on you, screenshots), it does make it much harder to automate. This means that many potentially controversial nuggets will slip away into the foggy ruins of time. However, OSF says it will “continue to explore and engage with others to keep public messages by elected politicians visible.”
Politwoops came to fruition following a hackathon in the Netherlands way back in 2010, and subsequently launched in more than 30 countries, automatically tracking the Twitter accounts of elected politicians. Last year, it also launched Diplotwoops, covering diplomats and embassies, and this has now been closed off too.
VentureBeat has reached out to Twitter for comment, and will update here if we hear back.
The stock is now fluctuating a bit in after-hours trading. But earlier today the stock was trading under $26.
This is just the latest rough patch that the San Francisco-based social networking company has encountered in the past few months. The stock has dipped on severaloccasions since chief executive Dick Costolo stepped down and cofounder Jack Dorsey (currently the chief executive of IPO-bound Square) took on the company’s lead role in the interim.
Making matters worse, Twitter’s heads of growth and product have left recently.
But Facebook continues to outperform Twitter in terms of revenue and user base. It’s not easy to be in the shadow of Facebook, which has almost 1.5 billion users around the world.
Microsoft beganrolling out the Xbox One August 2015 update today. The latest version adds a slew of new social features to the console and also improves game streaming from Xbox One to Windows 10 PCs.
In short, if you have the right network conditions (read: a wired connection or a very fast wireless connection) and a lot of bandwidth to spare, you can now stream games from your Xbox One to your Windows 10 PC at 1080p and 60fps (frames per second). To take advantage of this, go to Settings in the Xbox app on Windows 10, choose Game Streaming, and set the video encoding level to “Very High.”
This also has some tweaks to how you can interact with your friends. You can now right-click on one of your friends and select Send Message or Invite to Party. You can also compare achievements with any friend who has played the same game (on a Game Hub page, select Achievements, and then choose Compare in the top right).
The Xbox One’s recently played section now shows an animated display showing you how many friends have played each game along with the four most recent players. The display switches to show a second tile with your last played date, Gamerscore and Achievements percentage complete. Clicking on the game takes you to the Game Hub, where you can see a list of all of your friends who have played the game, sorted by most recently played.
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The update also now lets you toggle notifications for when you are invited to a party or a multiplayer game. To enable or disable this type of notification, head to Settings, hit General, and select Party & Games Invitations.
Last but not least, My Games has been updated to support a grid view with a jump list, where your games are now displayed in a grid sorted alphabetically. Clicking on a letter lets you collapse the list to more quickly find a game. You can also now manually add games to your collection that have a link in the Start Menu (selecting My Games and then Add a game).
Coming back to the Windows 10 part of the update, Xbox app issues around sign-in, localization, and game streaming have been addressed. The update should happen automatically via the Windows Store when it’s available (check your Xbox app version number under Settings and then General — you want 8.8.15003.00000 or higher).
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Twitter said on Tuesday it plans to accelerate its push for content partnerships in Asia Pacific and the Middle East.
It has appointed a Singapore-based executive, Rishi Jaitley, to boost teams in major markets such as Australia, India, and Japan as well as to expand into Greater China and Southeast Asia, the company said in a statement. Jaitley was previously Twitter’s market director for India and Southeast Asia.
Twitter has been aggressively expanding its capabilities to carry pictures, video and interactive content.
(Reporting by Aradhana Aravindan; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
The app was originally conceived as a part of Google+, but Google has been gradually breaking up that social network in the past few months, beginning with the stand-alone Google Photos app. Now that Hangouts has broken out of Gmail, it has its own unique web presence.
Whether for its original stuffed-crust concept (now duplicated by many), the pizza lunch buffet, or (most recently) the hot dog crust, Pizza Hut is known for its disruptive tendencies in the world of pizza.
For Pizza Hut’s most recent gastronomic creation, a two-foot long pizza called “The Big Flavor Dipper,” the company turned to Tim Staples and Shareability’s Nick Reed to create an exclusively Web-based, socially shared marketing campaign. The campaign, dubbed “The Dangers of Selfie Sticks PSA,” has been an unmitigated success, with over 4 million views on YouTube in the past three months alone.
Baron Concors, chief digital officer at Pizza Hut, was looking to make an impact with non-traditional buzz about the new product. “The Big Flavor Dipper was big, and we wanted to make an impact befitting the product. So we chose to lean into an enormous digital video activation in partnership with Pepsi to ensure the content was seen and the brand’s cultural connection was solid,” shared Concors.
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Said Staples, “What we saw was the hot trend that selfie sticks were getting longer and longer. That lined up beautifully with this monster-sized pizza.” Shareability has found success with numerous clients, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Sony, Pepsi and ESPN, by digging a little deeper into what is culturally hot in social media. Staples added, “What we do is combine brands with topics which are culturally relevant.”
Pizza Hut created a viral hit with their comedic PSA. According to Concors, this innovative and creative campaign was the second-most shared ad in the world during the month of May, and YouTube referrals to PizzaHut.com increased by a whopping 4000 percent.
This was an even bigger surprise for Pizza Hut in light of the gamble they took in only lightly branding the YouTube spot. Said Concors, “We took an entertainment-first approach by branding the video so lightly – it was a gamble for us to pull back on our natural inclination as marketers to brand every moment of this thing. We crafted a killer piece of culturally relevant content first, then integrated the brands subtly. The product wasn’t the hero; the brand message wasn’t the payoff or punchline. We were naturally integrated into the story in the blink of an eye, and our light touch paid off.”
According to Staples, this is the new way to promote online, particularly with Millennials, “In respect to big brand videos, less is more.” He added, “No one wants to be sold to. When you give them something of value, something funny and entertain them, now they want to be part of the conversation and are willing to take a step beyond to go and click on a website or learn about a promotional offer because you made the first step in their direction, instead of asking them to take the first step in yours.”
Beyond YouTube, Pizza Hut is very active online and their strategy is specific to each social channel. For example, they use Facebook to drive transactions with tailored messaging, while Twitter is primarily used for always-on content and one-to-one conversations. Concors said Pizza Hut has begun doing interesting work on Instagram because the platform facilitates telling a visually compelling and authentic story. Snapchat is on Pizza Hut’s radar for further exploration.
Beyond the power of online advertising to drive traffic, the 120-second merger of the giant selfie stick with the monster pizza caused a profound realization for Concors: “We learned that creating engaging, relatable content is a winning formula for relevance. It’s not about the real-time culture-jacking tweets anymore; to break through the clutter, we need a creative idea anchored in cultural insight – and scale.”
Baron Concors and Tim Staples will both join AdAge’s Maureen Morrison on stage at GrowthBeat. It’s not too late to grab a ticket!
View the YouTube video of “The Dangers of Selfie Sticks PSA” below:
