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myluciferiscody · 4 years

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Dancing With Your Ghost p.1 (Request)

anon: Can u write a fic (or series if u want) where reader goes camping with some frens & she's the only 1 who can c the ded counselors. She makes friendly w/ Xavier & they get rlly close. They begin dating & no 1 knows y she's so happy. She has a whole other life when she's with the counselors & likes it more than her normal living 1. After some thinking, she pops the question & asks Xavier 2 find a way 2 kill her and keep her there with him, he asks y & she says it's cuz she's in love w/ him :o

I was going to wait until I finished “i loved you first” before posting, but the ideas kept coming and they won’t stop coming, so here it is!

pairing: Xavier Plympton x Reader

word count: 2,706

warnings: non (yet)

part 2

You scrambled out of the van, staring up at the faded sign of Camp Redwood. Your friends were laughing as they gathered their belongings, but you were too busy observing the abandoned murder sight from over thirty-years ago. You had read countless books and television documentaries of what transpired here. It was odd seeing it in all of its run-down glory.

"y/n! Catch!"

You turned just as your friend Winter tossed your bag of belongings. You caught it with one hand, shouldering it, while still looking around. As interested as you were in both massacres that occurred here, it wasn't your idea to choose it as a camping site. Your friends were real crime buffs, and this was their next stop, but taking it to the next level by staying overnight seemed a little much to you.

Winter trailed next to you, followed by Riley and Dorothy, who trailed behind with their phones at the ready. You stepped over the piles of leaves, tripping over random holes in the ground as Winter teased you.

"This place is awesome!" Riley said, taking a picture of a cabin with boarded-up windows and graffiti. "Why didn't we come here sooner?"

"I wanted to go to Briarcliff," Winter said, "After all the bodies they found there a few years ago, no fucking way!"

The four of you walked around, taking pictures, and enjoying the California sunshine on your skin. You and Winter had moved here for school almost four years ago now, meeting Riley and Dorothy in one of your classes. You were not looking forward to moving back to Michigan after graduation.

You had found a decent place by the lake, the one rumored to be bottomless. Riley wanted to sleep in one of the cabins, but most were boarded up entirely and inaccessible. It seemed like you'd be setting up the tents you brought instead.

Winter urged you to take off your clothes to swim. The swimsuit you were wearing was from the Summer before, but it still felt nice. You laid in the sun while the others tested the waters, yelling that it was cold, and their nipples were hard.

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw movement in the woods surrounding the lake. It was very brief, but you knew you saw a dark purple shirt and shorts. You sat up, squinting against the sunlight. There was nothing there.

"y/n! Come and swim with us!" Dorothy splashed water your way, barely reaching the towel you laid out on.

You glanced back toward the woods, seeing a bird hopping along the ground for some food. You stood up, preparing to jump in with the girls. It was ridiculous, it was only the four of you here.

***

Some hours later, the coolers had been drug out onto the sand, and drinks were being passed around. Your belly was full from dinner, and you laughed as Dorothy and Riley were talking about how hot Captain America is.

"I'm gonna use the bathroom," you set down your drink, standing up. Winter laid sprawled out beside you, singing a Lana Del Rey song under her breath.

You grabbed the small bag of toiletries you had brought, planning on finding a bush to use. You felt slightly embarrassed, never imagining that you'd be relieving yourself surrounded by nature. The sun was starting to set, and very few lights worked around the camp. You fumbled with your phone, about to turn on the flashlight when-

"What's that in your hand?" You screamed, dropping your bag and phone, turning around to see a young woman with the blondest hair you had ever seen. She smirked at you, and you realized she had a striking resemblance to Winter.

"Who are you?" you wheezed, bending down and grabbing your stuff, keeping your eyes on her.

"I'm Montana!" she outstretched her hand towards you, "I'm a frequent visitor,"

You hesitantly shook her hand, seeing that she was kept nicely. "N-Nice to meet you, I'm y/n,"

"What are you holding?" she asked again, gesturing towards your phone.

"It's my phone, haven't you seen one?" you laughed lamely, showing her your smartphone.

"May I?" she asked.You hesitated before placing it in her hand. You watched as she toyed with it, her mouth falling open as you heard a random YouTube video playing. "This isn't a phone!" she exclaimed as she simultaneously smacked the screen a few times.

You were very confused as she handed it back to you. You forgot you were fighting the urge to pee yourself. Montana noticed the look on your face and grinned, before looking directly behind you. "Xavier!"

"What's going on over here?" you whirled around, starting to panic, thinking you were being ambushed. You saw a man wearing a plum shirt and shorts, a perfectly sculpted tuft of dirty blond hair on top of his head. You were entranced by his striking blue eyes that brightened at the sight of you.

"I'm talking to my new friend, y/n!" Montana grinned, "She's very nice, check out her phone!"

Xavier stepped closer to you, craning his neck as you showed him with a trembling hand. Montana was telling him about the random video that was playing, and he looked interested.

"Are you guys camping here too?" you asked finally, interrupting them when Montana wondered if you'd be able to find Aerobics tapes on them.

"You could say that," Xavier smirked at you. "Is this your first time here?"

"Yeah, I came with my friends," you nodded. Montana was grinning oddly at the two of you.

"You wanna hang out? You could tell me more about this device," Xavier handed your phone back that was running low on battery life.

You looked at the eager looks on their faces. Off in the distance, you could still hear your girls talking and laughing, probably getting drunk as you speak. A few minutes wouldn't hurt.

"I'd love that." you smiled.

***

The sun had set as you sat with Xavier and Montana under one of the only working lights in the camp. The subject changed from your phone to the current president, all the way to what exercises were popular. As odd as you found their questions, Xavier explained in a rather flat tone that they were people of nature and had quite the Amish existence.

Montana left after a while, talking about some guy named Trevor, leaving you alone with Xavier. He seemed very comfortable around you, which made you feel slightly better. He kept a safe distance, asking you about your life and the friends you came with. Xavier listened intently, a look of confusion appearing every once in a while when you mentioned social media.

He has to have some idea of what things are like now, you thought to yourself.

The more you spoke with him, the more he felt familiar to you. You couldn't quite put your finger on why or how. You never met someone like him; his beauty was one of the ages. He told you about his life before they moved out here, saying he was a gym instructor and was trying to break out into the acting scene that never worked out.

"It's getting cold," you commented, still wearing your tank top and shorts from earlier. Your now dead phone and bag sat at your feet.

"I'm sorry for keeping you this long," Xavier said, rubbing the back of his neck. His earring sparkled in the moonlight. "You can-"

"Y/N!" voices called your name, some louder than others. You had jumped, standing up from your spot on the wooden stairs when Xavier froze in his place.

"I'm over here!" you called, seeing flashlights heading in your direction. You saw Winter first, as she spotted you and skipped over, her cheeks flushed after the alcohol she consumed.

"There you are!" she gasped, bringing you in for a hug - a clumsy one at that. "WE WERE SO WORRIED!"

"Yeah, y/n, you've been gone for like an hour," Riley said.

"I'm sorry you guys, I was just talking to Xavier and Montana," you explained.

The three girls gave you a questioning look, despite being intoxicated. Winter stared at you, "Who?"

You frowned, pointing behind you with your thumb, "I met a camper, his name is Xavier-" you had turned around, only to stop in your tracks where the seat he once sat in was now empty. "Wait!"

"y/n, y/n, y/n, are you high?" Winter snorted at you. "There's nobody else here!"

You turned around now, looking for a sign that you weren't making this up. There were no footprints, no butt marks on the seats beside your own, nothing. You stuttered, attempting to explain who was sitting with you while your friends gave you concerned stares.

"I think you've had a long day!" Dorothy cooed, gently grabbing your arm. "Let's go back to camp! We have a long day tomorrow!"

You grabbed your stuff, your mind reeling as you followed them back to camp. You glanced behind you one last time, not seeing either of your new friends anywhere.

You woke up bright and early the next day, quietly creeping around as you changed into your new clothes. You made some breakfast, the little fire providing some much-needed warmth. You had shared a tent with Winter, who hogged most of the blankets. You gazed around, trying to spot Xavier and Montana, but they were nowhere to be found.

You unplugged your phone from the battery pack you brought, thinking if you got a picture with at least one of them, they'd believe you. You made sure the fire was kept low before setting off.

The sound of small animals and birds was the only thing you could hear now that the girls were asleep. Xavier and Montana never explicitly said where they were standing. They couldn't be that far away from you.

You stopped walking, looking off in the distance, and seeing the incredible hills and valleys surrounding the camp. You took a few pictures, smiling at the beauty of it all when you heard what sounded like a branch creaking above you.

You looked up, seeing nothing.

You took a few steps away, hiding under the shade as you continued to admire your surroundings. It wasn't long before you heard it again, looking up with a scowl when-

"CAWWWWW!"

You screamed when a towering figure jumped down, threatening to squash you. You dodged it just in time, nearly tripping over a root when you heard hysterical laughter.

A young black man was holding his sides, his overalls red and clean as a whistle as he buckled over. You stared at him with wide eyes, your heart beating a mile a minute.

"Aw shit, aw shit, that was better than I could have imagined!" he cackled, before two figures appeared from behind him, laughing along. It was them.

"Ray, you could have killed her!" Xavier said through his quiet laughter.

"She's fine! Aren't you, darling!?" Ray laughed again before going into a coughing fit.

"I-I think my heart stopped for a moment," you said, starting to laugh a little yourself.

"I know what that's like." Montana sighed dreamily.

Xavier gave her a comical look, before turning his attention to you. "Don't mind her, she's one of the most morbid people I know."

You smiled a bit, shaking Ray's hand when he offered it to you.

"You're friends, I take it," you said, before realizing how stupid it sounded.

"For a long time," Ray tossed an arm around Xavier's shoulder, who shrugged it off. "Tough love..." he mumbled.

"Come on, Ray, let's leave them," Montana said, now putting her arm around Ray, leading him away. Ray waved at you before making kissy faces at Xavier, who glared at him.

"I'm sorry about him, he can be a little much," Xavier smiled awkwardly.

"Where did you go last night?" you questioned. Xavier's face immediately fell, looking towards the scene you were previously admiring.

"I get a little nervous around people, anxiety, you know?" Xavier replied.

"Oh," you frowned, deciding not to push him any further. "I'm sorry if my friends scared you off, they can be loud when they're drunk,"

Xavier laughed at that, taking a seat in the dirt. You were surprised at this, as his appearance always seemed to be impeccable. You followed him, crossing your legs as you strained your neck to glance down at the sparkling water below.

"It's fine, I used to be like that too," he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, "I stopped a long time ago, it didn't interest me anymore,"

Just like the night before, you started talking about many things. You once again showed Xavier your phone, attempting to bring up Instagram in what little connection you had on this side of camp. His eyes lit up when you joked about how influencers were treated like celebrities most of the time.

"You should make an account, you'd have a cult following," you laughed, making him smile.

"Maybe one day, I don't even have a Snapbook,"

"Facebook," you corrected, hiding your giggle.

"Oh, sorry," Xavier wrinkled his nose. "What's the other one?"

"Snapchat," you masked your laugh again.

"It's not polite to laugh!" Xavier teased you, squinting his eyes as you finally lost it, knowing you would remember this moment forever to tease him later.

"I'm sorry, but that was the cutest thing I ever heard anyone say," you admitted, not realizing the implications of your words.

"Oh, you think I'm cute, huh?" Xavier teased you again, "That makes two of us."

You playfully shoved him, before asking him to take a photo with you. Xavier seemed hesitant at first before you took his very first selfie. Xavier asked when the film was supposed to pop out, tapping around your phone case.

"No, no, phones don't do that," you took it from him, showing him the picture from the gallery. Xavier's jaw dropped again, and you told him to go ahead and swipe. He saw the pictures you had taken earlier, as long as a few photos of your car ride with the girls on the way here before he gave it back.

"That's unbelievable, when I was growing up they said we'd have flying cars, not phones with touch screens and cameras!"

You laughed, believing him to be joking, but Xavier really wasn't. He didn't say anything, only laughing with you to avoid the real reason why he was at Camp Redwood.

Xavier encouraged you to walk around with him, and you took turns taking photos of each other, individually and together. He got the hang of it pretty quickly, not making any burst shots after the first fix or six times.

As much as you didn't want the day to end, you had already spent nearly four hours with him. Winter had texted you, saying they had just woken up and wanted to go on a hike.

Xavier seemed to realize it was time to let you go. He led you back towards the lake, asking when you were leaving.

"We're supposed to head back tomorrow afternoon," you explained, "Our spring break is over in a few days," you sighed, thinking of all of the homework that would be piled on your desk in the coming weeks.

"You go to school here, right?" he asked, trying to remember their conversation from last night.

"Yeah, I graduate in June," you sighed, "Then it's back home to Michigan with Winter." you frowned a little, realizing Xavier would be one of the friends you'd be leaving behind now.

Xavier didn't say anything, only stopping near the same cabin you met him yesterday. He smiled at you, "Uhh, if you're free later, Ray said something about a full-moon tonight if you wanna see it." he said lamely, and you could see the amusement in his eyes.

"I'd love that!" you smiled, "I can meet you here?"

"Awesome!" Xavier smiled. You both stood there, staring at each other before Xavier finally said, "I'll see you later." you nodded, watching as he headed back the way you came. You stared until his back disappeared from view before you met your friends at the lake.

taglist: (feel free to ignore)

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#xavier plympton x reader #jim mason x reader #michael langdon x reader #duncan shepherd x reader #Cody Fern #ahs1984 #ahs imagine #request #ray powell #montana duke #xavier plympton imagine

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ecoamerica · 1 month

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youtube

Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared

The American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 broadcast recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by active climate leaders. Watch to find out which finalist received the $50,000 grand prize! Hosted by Vanessa Hauc and featuring Bill McKibben and Katharine Hayhoe!

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idreamofthemeparks · 3 years

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My idea for an ATLA theme park

Disclaimer: I just finished watching ATLA for the first time the other day, and I haven’t interacted with its fandom at all. If these ideas were already thought of by someone else, it wasn’t intentional. I haven’t watched Korra yet, so I apologize if I get anything terribly wrong.

The park overall

-The setting is 20 or 30 years after the events of ATLA, when the war’s fallout has been (mostly) taken care of and things are generally peaceful in the world.

-The park is in a hub-and-spoke layout, with four themed lands (one for each of the four nations) making up the spokes.

-Each kingdom has an entry gate; these gates are all giant indoor rooms, which open into their respective kingdoms after their brief introduction shows. These introduction shows consist of a master of that kingdom’s respective element (original characters, in the form of animatronics) giving you a brief rundown of that kingdom’s history, and getting you excited for the attractions within. These are mandatory for entering the park at rope drop, but after that, they’re optional for kingdom access. Bonus-- the masters are walk-around characters, and they’ll teach you some bending moves if you meet them in their kingdoms.

-The center of the park is themed like a giant, permanent festival, celebrating unity through all four elements. There’s cultural exhibitions (dances, street food, murals) from all four nations. A couple of times during the day, there’s a “Bending Showcase” show, where master benders from all four nations show off their skills.

-Since this is the current year, there would be a tie-in technology or smartphone app. This would enable guests to interact with the world by “learning bending”; you’d have a smart watch of some kind, or just an app, which allowed you to “bend” to interact with parts of the world, learn from walk-around characters, duel others, etc. Some parts of the world would use this differently than others; in the Water Kingdom you’d primarily use it for controlling water features, but in the Fire Kingdom you’d use it for fighting. You can choose one element to bend per day, and you have the option to reset your choice upon each visit. (And you can mix and match-- what happens if you’re a firebender in the Water Kingdom?)

The Earth Kingdom

-Each of the four kingdom areas is aimed towards a slightly different mood. The Earth Kingdom has a little something for everyone-- you can relax and shop, have an adventure, or go on a thrill ride.

-This kingdom is set almost entirely in Ba Sing Se. You can visit more famous locations from the show (like Iroh’s tea shop, or the expensive table-service Earth King’s Palace restaurant) or you can walk through the streets and find your own adventure.

-Here, you can use the bending system to move rocks and sweep aside the earth to discover all kinds of cool secrets. What’s behind that huge boulder? Is there something in that sand pit? Find out!

-The rides in Ba Sing Se itself aren’t too thrilling, but everyone can enjoy them. The monorail gives scenic views of the whole city. The Tales of Ba Sing Se dark ride is full of fun scenes that we didn’t get to see in the ATLA show.

-Outside of Ba Sing Se is an Omashu area. There, you can ride the Omashu Postal Service coaster, or play in the highly-interactive Bumi’s Challenges play area.

The Water Kingdom

-The mood of this area is a lot more relaxed, and it caters more to adults.

-The setting is the Northern Water Tribe. If the whole park isn’t indoors, then at least this kingdom is; the dome ceiling is made up of screens. It’s pleasantly chilly, all of the structures look like they’re made of ice, and there’s a lot of little fountains and water features.

-This kingdom has no thrill rides, but it has two boat rides. The first is a retelling of the Northern Water Tribe’s history; like a big ride-through storybook, it would show the tribe’s story from its founding to its role in the defeat of the Fire Nation. The premise of the other ride is that you’re the judges of a waterbending festival; you’d watch several scenes of animatronic benders performing amazing feats, and you’d press a button in your boat towards the end of the ride, voting to determine who wins and which ending scene you get.

-The main restaurant and its corresponding bar are made entirely of ice. A “hole in the ice” in the restaurant is filled with a sparkling blue “spirit water” soda, and for the cost of a glass, you can drink as much as you want.

-At night, the sky lights up with the Northern Lights. Every night is a full moon, and just before the park closes, Princess Yue comes out of the moon to wish you a good night.

The Fire Kingdom

-This area is more fast-paced, and it’s geared toward teenagers and the thrill-seeking crowd.

-Rather than one large area, this kingdom is segmented and has a few different places to visit. It’s made up of the Sun Warriors’ ancient city, the outskirts of Royal Caldera City, and a new location: Obsidian Ridge.

-Obsidian Ridge is a town that’s on the very outskirts of the Nation’s volcanic archipelago. It’s a beautiful little town that’s filled with traditional Japanese Fire Nation architecture, but it has a dark underbelly: people here aren’t too happy about Ozai being overthrown, and they still want to carry out his plan to conquer the world. They bide their time, training and trying to recruit people.

-Obsidian Ridge is where the bending system is primarily used for fighting; you can duel other benders (other guests and characters alike) throughout the whole world, but this is where you go if you’ve got an itchy trigger finger. The townfolk and its militia will try to convince you to fight with them, and they tend to challenge people to duels when they disagree. There’s even an Agni Kai stage, where duels happen on an even bigger scale. You can duel the local Ozai or Azula impersonator! (Or you can lay low and just go to the live-fire restaurant.)

-The outskirts of Royal Caldera City are just fancy enough that you can go to nice restaurants and buy expensive art, but not so much that you’ll see the palace from up close. Firelord Zuko’s royal caravan parades through the town square once or twice a day. If you stand in the right places at the edge of town, you can hear Ozai and Azula, complaining in their prison cells.

-Instead of the palace, there’s an ornately-themed and very tall drop tower with a dark ride portion at the top; it’s called Sozin’s Revenge. The story is that you’re going up into the royal astronomy tower to look at Sozin’s Comet and chart its course. When you get to the top, you find that the comet is much closer than anyone thought, and Sozin’s angry spirit uses the comet’s power to come back-- and fling you straight down at 72 mph.

-The Sun Warriors’ city has a cool pyramid and some shops, but it mostly exists to host the Dragon Dance coaster. This flagship attraction has two (red and blue) intertwining tracks. The tracks stretch out over the whole area, so you can see the whole kingdom from up high. No this isn’t a Dueling Dragons clone, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

The Air Kingdom

-This area is fun and playful, and it’s geared primarily towards younger kids.

-This is primarily made up of the Eastern Air Temple; the Northern Air Temple takes up a smaller but significant portion.

-The Northern Air Temple is a huge, intricately themed play area. (Think of Fortress Explorations at Tokyo Disneysea.) Its art and structures have mostly been restored to their former glory, but some of the machinist’s modifications are still there. Maybe you can solve a puzzle on a wall to open a secret door, or turn some gears to make a mechanical air bison move along the ceiling.

-The machinist’s workshop is open, and not only is there a museum of his best inventions (and a mechanical diorama that tells the story of how they fought off the Fire Nation), but plenty of his cool devices can be played with.

-You can fly (zip-line) between the two temples.

-The Eastern Air Temple has the rides and restaurants, which are primarily located in an open courtyard. There aren’t many shops, because the air nomads weren’t very materialistic. You can get an arrow tattoo done in face-paint, though!

-There’s a Dumbo-style ride where you can choose and ride a flying bison. The flagship attraction is a dark ride called Aang’s Animal Adventure, where you fly across the world with Aang to discover all different kinds of fauna. This could be a gentler version of the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride system; you could soar through the air and dive under the sea, and it could end with you coming face-to-face with a lion turtle.

-The bending system would primarily be used in the Northern Air Temple to activate certain features, and it could also be used for interaction with flying bison. There could be a few bison located throughout the kingdom (in both animatronic and screen form), and you could make friends with them if you could airbend for them. (If you buy a bison plush, there’s a ceremony where it “chooses you”. Like Ollivander’s but cuter.) You could probably also “airbend” to get a boost on the zip-line or the bison ride.

Special events

-For one month every year, there would be a festival celebrating the end of the Hundred Year War. There would be re-enactments in every kingdom, and a big parade would go through all four kingdoms every day. You can imagine how the people of Obsidian Ridge would feel about this.

-Every kingdom has its own New Year celebration, set apart by a couple of months. The regular New Year would be celebrated in the central hub.

-The Earth Kingdom would have its own Avatar Day, complete with Aang, Korra, Roku and Kiyoshi impersonators.

-All throughout December, fake snow would fall throughout the park. Each morning, there’d be a ceremony where a group of waterbenders gathered to “summon” the snow.

Bonus

Since I like extinct theme park attractions, here’s how the park would deteriorate/ be replaced, when management inevitably decided it wasn’t pulling enough profit:

-The Water Kingdom would get an ill-thought-out water park.

-Obsidian Ridge would be re-themed to Ember Island. This would probably coincide with the point when the combat/ bending system broke down or lost its novelty. This area would probably also get a water park.

-Speaking of the bending system, people would complain that they could only bend in one kingdom at a time. The park would eventually offer an Avatar upgrade (for a high upcharge) so that you could bend all four elements. This would take away the incentive for a lot of people to visit for more than one day, and ironically, that would further contribute to the park’s downfall.

-Eventually, once the park was more or less dead, it’d be demolished-- that is, except for the Water Kingdom. That would meet the same fate that everything else in Central Florida eventually will. It’d become a Frozen attraction.

#avatar the last airbender #atla #theme park concept #avatar aang #fire nation #air nation #water nation #earth nation

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green-co · 4 years

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Comment voir les plus belles destinations du monde depuis votre canapé

While we're all staying home to prevent the spread of COVID-19, arm-chair travel has never been more appealing or important. Sure, Netflix watch parties and Zoom happy hours can take your mind off of things for a few hours, but at some point in your self-quarantine adventure, you've likely encountered boredom and—if you're anything like us—travel-related despair. So, if you're mourning a canceled vacation or just trying to get yourself pumped for a future trip, check out the live streams and 360-degree virtual tours that will transport you around the world. From Rio de Janeiro's iconic Copacabana Beach to Manitoba's dancing Northern Lights, these feeds offer a glimpse of the far-flung locales we're missing the most. And to spark more wanderlust, browse through these 27 Totally Insane Travel Photos You Won't Believe Are Real.

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New York isn't quite New York without its throngs of visitors and steady stream of yellow cabs, but not even a global pandemic can grind Times Square to a halt. While EarthCam's live stream reveals that pedestrians are few and far between, you'll see that the big screens play on with blinking Broadway advertisements and daily headlines from the Good Morning America studio.

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Put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones and pretend you're floating in the Dead Sea or making a pilgrimage to the Western Wall with Virtually Israel's tour of Jerusalem. The YouTube channel has dozens of tours—outside of Jerusalem, too— from balloon rides over Tel Aviv to panoramic views of the Tower of David. Once you've exhausted those videos, you can also check out Sygic Travel VR's 360-degree tours, which include narration for all you history buffs.

10 Great Wall of China

Right now, exercise consists of 10-minute YouTube workouts and short walks to the grocery store. But we still dream of the day we'll be able to lace up our sneakers and hike even a few miles of the vast Great Wall of China. Get as close as you can to the ancient fortification with The China Guide's 360-degree virtual tour which takes you from Jinshanling to Simatai and includes various bridges, passes, and beacon towers.

11 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

If irresistible online sales have you stocking up on post-quarantine swimwear, why not take a virtual break on Rio de Janeiro's iconic Copacabana Beach? This live stream captures an enviable slice of the two-mile shore, and while there's no people-watching to be had, you'll still catch calm waves and a few bikers who glide down the beach's geometric promenade.

12 Hong Kong

Soak in Hong Kong's stunning cityscape with this live feed from Skyline. The camera—which is perched atop the Harbour Grand Hong Kong—pans over Victoria Harbor, capturing the city's soaring penthouses and sleek skyscrapers, which are set against Victoria Peak to the west and Mount Parker to the east.

13 Eiffel Tower, Paris

Setting up a romantic date at home? Dig your HDMI cord out of storage and hook your laptop up to your TV so you can enjoy this live view of Paris' most iconic monument—the Eiffel Tower. Skyline also has the option to play a time-lapse of the previous day in which you can catch the sunrise, sunset, and nightly light show.

14 Yosemite National Park, California

Yosemite Conservancy's live cam captures the top section of Upper Yosemite Falls—one of the world's tallest cascades. The 2,425-foot drop experiences peak flow come summer, but it's still a pretty sight to be seen now. If the feed had you jonesing for more national park vistas, check out Virtual Yosemite, too. The interactive VR tour offers 360-degree vistas (and environmental audio tracks) of more than 100 park locations including El Capitan, Mirror Lake, and Glacier Point.

15 Washington, D.C.

For a true bird's-eye view of the nation's capital, give EarthCam's 24/7 live stream a go. The company partnered with the National Parks Service to embed a camera in Washington Monument's pyramidion—AKA the tippity top of the obelisk's capstone. The million-dollar vantage point overlooks the World War II Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, and Lincoln Memorial (reflecting pool and all).

16 Manitoba, Canada

Enjoy the magic of the aurora borealis without journeying above the Arctic Circle via Explore's Northern Lights live cam. The camera is positioned just below the aurora oval—a circular ring around the Arctic and Antarctic—in Churchill, Manitoba. Though the light show can be observed year-round, it's most pronounced in colder months, so catch it while you still can.

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sciencespies · 3 years

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Here's what you need to know about bitcoin's skyrocketing value

https://sciencespies.com/tech/heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-bitcoins-skyrocketing-value/

Here's what you need to know about bitcoin's skyrocketing value

Bitcoin continues to trade close to its all-time high reached this month. Its price is at the time of writing around US$34,000 – up about 77 percent over the past month and 305 percent over the past year.

First launched in 2009 as a digital currency, Bitcoin was for a while used as digital money on the fringes of the economy.

It has since become mainstream. Today, it’s used almost exclusively as a kind of ‘digital gold‘. That is to say, a scarce digital asset.

In response to the risk of economic collapse due to COVID, governments around the world have flooded global markets with money created by central banks, in order to boost spending and help save the economy.

But increasing the supply of money erodes its value and leads people to look for inflation-resistant assets to hold. In this climate, Bitcoin has become a hedge against looming inflation and poor returns on other types of assets.

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, has a current circulating supply of 18,590,300 bitcoins and a maximum supply of 21,000,000.

This limit is hard-coded into the Bitcoin protocol and can’t be changed. It creates artificial scarcity, which ensures the digital money increases in value over time.

Whereas government-issued currencies such as the Australian dollar can have their supply increased at will by central banks, Bitcoin has a fixed supply that can’t be inflated by political decisions.

Bitcoin is predominantly traded on online cryptocurrency exchanges, but can also be sent, received and stored in “digital wallets” on specific hardware or smartphone applications.

But perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of the Bitcoin network is that it draws on the work of cryptographers and computer scientists to exist as a blockchain-based digital currency.

A public blockchain is an “immutable” database, which means the record of transaction history can’t be changed.

A functional and decentralised digital currency

Bitcoin is ‘decentralised‘. In other words, it functions via a dispersed peer-to-peer network, rather than through a central authority such as a central bank.

And it does this through the participation of Bitcoin ‘miners‘. This is anyone who chooses to run software to validate Bitcoin transactions on the blockchain. Typically, these people are actively engaged with cryptocurrency.

They are rewarded with bitcoins, more of which are created every ten minutes. But the reward paid to miners halves every four years.

This gradual reduction was encoded into the network by creator Satoshi Nakamoto, who designed it this way to mimic the process of extracting actual gold – easier at first, but harder with time.

Bitocoin miners today earn 6.25 bitcoins for every block mined, down from 50 bitcoins in the early years. This creates an incentive to get involved early, as scarcity increases with time.

Because of this, the price is expected to rise to meet demand. But because future scarcity is known in advance (predictable at four-year intervals), the halving events tend to already be priced in.

Therefore, massive surges and falls in price typically reflect changing demand conditions, such as a growing number of new institutional investors. More and more public companies are now investing in bitcoin.

But what function does Bitcoin provide for society that has people so invested?

Why does Bitcoin matter?

There are a few possible explanations as to why Bitcoin is now deemed significant by so many people.

It’s a ‘safe’ asset

In the face of global uncertainty, buying bitcoins is a way for people to diversify their assets. Its market value can be compared to that of another go-to asset that shines in times of trouble: gold.

Amid the turmoil of a global pandemic, an unconventional US presidential handover and geopolitical power shifts the world over, it’s possible more people view gold and Bitcoin as better alternatives to dollars.

It ties into privacy-oriented ideologies

Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency in general) is not politically and ideologically neutral. It was born of the internet era, one plagued with grave concerns for privacy.

Bitcoin’s intellectual and ideological origins are in the ‘cypherpunk’ movement of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Records of online forums show it was advocated for as an anonymous digital currency that allowed people to interact online without being tracked by governments or corporations, offering an alternative for anyone who distrusts the Federal central banking system.

Perhaps the overt rise of digital surveillance in response to the COVID pandemic has further stoked fears about online privacy and security – again piquing the public’s interest in Bitcoin’s potential.

Why is Bitcoin booming?

Bitcoin’s recent boom in value comes down to a combination of three factors: ideology, social sentiment and hope.

But although these are variable factors, this doesn’t discredit the significance of the digital economy, interest in the technology as it matures and the influence of institutional investors in cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is in an upward market trend, also known as ‘bull market’ territory.

It was designed to increase in value over time through the rules Nakamoto wrote into its software code – which Bitcoin’s most outspoken advocates, known as ‘maximalists‘, vehemently defend.

Imagining new futures

From a larger frame of reference, decentralised cryptocurrencies allow new ways to coordinate without the need for a central arbiter.

And decentralised blockchain-based networks don’t just enable digital money. Similar to ordinary smartphone apps, software developers around the world are building decentralised applications (DApps) on top of Bitcoin and other blockchain protocols.

They have introduced other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum, which are also open platforms for the public.

Other DApps include decentralised financial (DeFi) tools for prediction markets, cryptocurrency borrowing and lending, investing and crowd-funding.

Nakamoto’s audacious experiment in digital currency is working as intended. And what really deserves attention now is what this means for our digital, physical and social futures.

Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, RMIT University and Kelsie Nabben, Researcher / PhD Candidate, RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub / Digital Ethnography Research Centre, RMIT University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

#Tech

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sileeeles · 6 years

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S9+ Review

Visually stunning. Amazing camera. Amazing screen. But as they say, looks aren't everything.

You will noticed that I mention and compare to HTC a lot, and this is because that its my only other point of reference. Its all I’ve had, Android wise, for the past 4 years.

So, mostly in order of things you encounter, I shall try to share my thoughts and feelings. First of all the size. Its fairly large. For people with dinky fingers/hands, I wouldn’t recommend it, I’d go with the regular S9. But the S9+ is perfect for me as I have larger hands and stubby fingers. I’ve always struggled on 4 inches or less especially with typing, I’ll come to that later. The main noticeable difference between the two is the camera setup. Beyond that the S9+ has a slightly larger battery capacity and 2 more gigabytes of ram over the S9.

One of the main things I thought would bug me, is the screen. The rounded corners. Which, overall, costs you 0.1 of an inch of screen real estate. And it hasn’t bothered me at all. Its rather cool and interesting. More interesting than that is the odd aspect ratio. 18:5.9. The .9 apparently accounts for the curvature of the glass at the sides. Which is another thing I thought would bug me. My wife didn’t get the S7 Edge because she thought the curves would be annoying, but these are more subtle and ... less curvy than those models. And it hasn't really been an issue. Sometimes (usually on badly optimized websites and a few pictures) the text spills over the edge no matter what you do, but turning the phone landscape usually makes everything visible. Apps and games all tend to scale themselves to whatever they work best at, but you can have them be full-screen if you wish. It warns you that some apps may no work or behave well when forced into full-screen, but thus far I’ve never had an issue.

The phone has a headphone socket (thank god) and has basically ripped off what HTC was doing with Boomsound. And more specifically, what they were doing with the HTC 10. You see, the Boomsound speakers that were part of the M7/M8/M9 were gone on the HTC 10. At the time (I had an M8), it was like a revelation. Why on earth wouldn't ALL smartphone manufacturers do this? Many of them, including Samsung, put the speaker on the back of the phone which was often muffled by your hand when you were holding it. HTC changed that, although rather than having the two speakers on the HTC 10, they opted to have one at the bottom of the phone, and used the earpiece speaker for the other. It worked, although something was lost in translation. It sounded good, and still a lot better than many of the other phones around at the time,but it never really had clear or consistent stereo or sound. Maybe because the down-firing speaker did the mids and lows, and the earpiece speaker did the highs, which were mostly just tinny and quiet. Rather than just the one speaker now, Samsung has seemingly copied HTC’s effort and used exactly the same system. However, it sounds infinitely better. The sound from it is very clear stereo, at times almost like it surrounds you. Partly, I assume, down to the Dolby Atmos/AKG tuning (which also includes some very nice and good sounding headphones in the box). As far as I know, HTC has not included Dolby in their phones since the Desire HD which also had SRS (and was my preferred sound setting).

We’ve also switched to USB C (also present on the S8/S8+) which is a much welcome improvement. In my experience it has been far more reliable and less damageable than Micro USB ever was, indeed after two years the USB C port on my HTC 10 is still going strong.

The physical buttons are something that will undoubtedly become a point of contention, largely because of the Bixby button. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bothered by Bixbys existence. By and large, you can just disable it and ignore the fact that it was ever there. But the button was placed stupidly. Directly below the volume buttons, particularly on the S9+ where there is a tad more reaching for things, meant that I was pressing it. A lot. Which is a problem. Because initially I disabled Bixby all together. But I didn't really want the button to go to waste. So I searched, and as you would imagine I wasn’t the only one wanting to re-map it. And someone has helped with that, they created an incredibly useful app called bxActions. Which I mapped to the Camera. But of course the same thing kept happening. I pressed the button by accident, and the camera kept popping up. So I disabled it again, and had it play/pause audio when the screen was off. Yes, I do know that there are features like double press and long press, and perhaps it is worth using those instead. However, they are “pro” features you need to pay for.

The home button and hardware touch keys are gone. Replaced instead with Androids navigation bar (which is re-mapable by default so you can put the buttons the right way around). The home key is pressure sensitive (what they call 3D Touch which sounds more like an Apple thing). I’ve not really needed to use it, to be honest, or understand what its for. If the phone is locked, you can press the home key (if you can find it) instead of the power button, which takes you to the lock screen and whatever method of security you happen to have (iris of whatever). But I can bypass needing to do any of that by just using my fingerprint. Which is what I tend to do, beyond the “hey look at this, my phone unlocks when I look at it” novelty. I’m also incredibly aware with this phone that it has the potential to get screen burn in. This increases exponentially with things that are on the screen for longer periods of time than others. Such as the navigation bar. What would lower that risk, is having the position of the symbols move a pixel or so from where it was last time, each time the phone is active or each time the navigation bar is on screen.

The phone, like the models before it including the s6/s7 has a glass back. But in Samsung's case, there is a reason for it extending all the way back to those models as well. How big a reason that is, ultimately, is down the the individual user. And I imagine, most of the individual users would rather they didn't have something that was breakable. As if the front of the phone wasn't already enough of a risk for that. The reason for it is Wireless charging. If you’re like me, nothing will ever beat the cable, and wireless charging is fiddly at best. You need to get it in the right spot, and from what I’ve seen, it was never really that fast. Certainly not as fast as the fast charger.

Using the phone is, at this point, pretty intuitive. If you’ve used Android for long enough, you know where everything is and how everything works. Software wise, there is not much that you can moan about. There is, overall, less bloatware and what there is, most of it can be uninstalled. Samsung wise, their layout of things is a little ... oddly arranged but you get used to it. At this point its pretty close to the way HTC was laying things out.

One thing that does bug me though, is that there is a lot of content they will charge you for. Such as themes. HTC never had such a system, indeed you could create and customize pretty much each area that you wanted. Wallpaper, lock-screen, app background, icons, ringtones, even the background of sms messages. Whilst Samsung themes will do this, there is no option to create each one individually yourself, and there is no way (at least that I’ve found) where you can apply individual items from certain themes. For instance if I only want the icons, I can’t do that. I need to install the whole theme and the re apply my wallpaper and ringtone afterwards etc. Another thing is the warning you get when you turn the volume up so far. I don't need it every time, yes I know its not sensible, its never for very long, go away! Its as bad as the Netflix "Are you still watching?" Yes. And my controller turned off two episodes ago and is over the other side of the room! Go away!

One thing I have been using that I would normally have ignored, largely because it was already there and I wanted to explore, is Samsung Health (which was previously just called S Health). It will allow you to track a variety of things, including steps every day, excersize, heart rate and stress (there are sensors in the phone that include this, which is pretty normal for Samsung). It even allows you to track sleep, and even has the ability to keep track of blood sugar levels and such for diabetics.

A few of the packaged defaults I have changed. For instance the keyboard. There is nothing wrong, or that I found wrong, with the default Samsung keyboard. I am just far to used to Swiftkey, and my defaults within that, so I installed that. It has a one handed mode just like the Samsung default, so it makes it easier to type with one hand. Also the music player I have used, and will probably always use on Android is PowerAmp. Also use Chrome as well.

The camera is probably the most interesting thing about the phone at this point. It was the most heavily marketed aspect of it (because, ultimately, I suspect there isn't much different from the S8+). Whilst everything thats included in it is, at this point, nothing new ... well, except the variable F-stop, maybe, its the way it has been implemented that is cool. More so on the S9+ with the extra telephoto lens. I was an avid user of the slow motion on the HTC 10 (and the M8 I had before it) and for the S9/S9+ to have that in a supercharged way, is very fun for me, although they aren’t the first to include 960FPS. That honour goes to the Sony Xperia XZ I believe.

The always on display is cool, although I’ve found that, honestly, id rather have it off than have it on, and if I have it on, the design I’d choose is the edge one. Thankfully the risk of burn in from this is minimal, as it changes position and never stays in one place too long.

Beyond the phone, some of the extras that I have found to be useful are the adapters included in the box. Specifically the Micro USB to USB C adapter. Because, more than once I’ve forgotten my charger, and nowhere (at least nowhere cheap) seems to have USB C cables for sale. They’re all bloody Micro USB. This adapter means that I needn’t worry if I forget my charger again. I just go into poundland and buy a cable. You also get the standard OTG adapter in the box. Samsung's intended purpose for this, I believe, is for you to connect your old phone to it and copy over your content. But it has many more uses beyond that including game controllers, even charging up other devices and connecting USB sticks to your phone.

#samsung #galaxy #s9 #s9+#s9 plus #htc #htc10 #boomsound #dolby #atmos #bixby #bxactions #usbc #android #electronic

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ecoamerica · 1 month

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youtube

Watch the 2024 American Climate Leadership Awards for High School Students now: https://youtu.be/5C-bb9PoRLc

The recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by student climate leaders! Join Aishah-Nyeta Brown & Jerome Foster II and be inspired by student climate leaders as we recognize the High School Student finalists. Watch now to find out which student received the $25,000 grand prize and top recognition!

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thetechmedia1 · 4 years

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Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Career Growth

Digital marketing is the fastest growing industry in India, according to various researches done by reputed foreign and Indian organizations. Rightly so. Because over the last five years, several initiatives such as Digital India and Startup India are seeing most services from almost every sector, available digitally.

Furthermore, mobile data and smartphones are available at very affordable rates in India. Therefore, people living in villages also now have access to various facilities including online shopping, online banking, and online reservation of train tickets, to name a few.

There’re projections that India will emerge as the single largest market of e-commerce and online shopping in the world. And as the single largest user of digital marketing services in the world too.

What Does This Means For Me?

You might wonder what this means for you and me? Actually, it means a lot. The growing popularity of online or digital services heralds a complete change in the way we live or our lifestyles. It also means lots of savings. Instead of driving down or riding public transport to a place to buy something or avail a service, you can do that from the comfort of your home.

And it also means something very important. That digital marketing is the topmost career to pursue right now. Because the demand for digital marketing professionals in India is set to grow exponentially. As I mentioned earlier, there are extensive researches by foreign and Indian companies that clearly indicate this trend.

Source: Poets & Quants

There’s also tremendous scope for a career in digital marketing as increasing numbers of organizations go online and start providing services. The only way to make people aware of these products and services online is through digital marketing. Since digital marketing is also possible through various apps and websites accessible on a smartphone, this career gains extra significance. Because mobile data and smartphone usage in India is also on the upswing.

Careers in Digital Marketing

If we consider the above facts, you’ll clearly see that digital marketing isn’t only a trending career. Instead, it’s a career that provides long-term scope and excellent opportunities for growth.

However, there are some essentials you need to bear in mind to become an excellent digital marketer. That’s possible if you follow the top common and most effective digital marketing strategies for career growth.

Source: Lessons At Startup

What are these strategies? There Are countless. However, I will focus on a few that you can easily adapt if you’ve already done a digital marketing course or, are considering doing one in the near future.

Top Common, Effective Strategies for Digital Marketing Careers

Before I tell you about these top common and most effective digital marketing strategies for career growth, here’s something you should remember. Digital marketing isn’t an easy job. It requires extensive efforts and dedication to become a digital marketing professional.

Therefore, you should be willing to exert extra efforts and rapidly adapt to changes in technologies to retain your edge as a professional digital marketer. If you’re willing to go that extra mile, here’re my top common yet most effective digital marketing strategies for career growth.

1. Take an Excellent Digital Marketing Course

Taking an excellent course from a superb academy is the first top common yet most effective digital marketing strategy for career growth. That’s the very first and most important strategy to make a career as a digital marketer. Most people falsely believe that a digital marketing institute that advertises multiple modules and makes tall claims are good. Because these advertisements attract people.

Instead, I have another definition of an excellent digital marketing course. I would recommend a digital marketing course that’s conducted by a celebrity or reputed bloggers and faculty member that’s currently working with large companies. Faculty members should also have a proven track record of their achievements in digital marketing.

Source: edX

When you find the right institute with the right faculty there’re several amazing things you’ll learn from their success stories. Of course, you’ll also learn all the digital marketing processes. But these faculty members will also provide tips, tweaks, and tricks on how to adapt these various digital marketing processes to meet specific situations.

When you learn from topmost bloggers, social media experts, and content writers as well as other digital marketing experts, you’ll have enough expertise to enter the profession and work for steady career growth.

2. Look for Free or Paid Internships

Learning digital marketing at an excellent academy from well-known industry experts is one thing. And putting these processes into practice is another. Therefore, internships- paid or free- are one of the common yet effective digital marketing strategies for your career growth. Generally, most of the digital marketing company will pay you a small amount of stipend. But that’s fair enough considering you don’t have any experience and you have a lot to learn.

A free or paid internship in digital marketing usually is of three to six-month duration. And sometimes, the organization can also offer you a regular job, provided you learn quickly and are able to fulfill their digital marketing needs.

Source: Dice Insights

An internship is the best strategy because it provides you a stepping stone to this booming profession. You’ll get firsthand experience about what it is to work as a digital marketer. You get opportunities to network with colleagues that have greater experience and learn a lot from them. And above all, you get excellent opportunities to fine-tune the skills you learn at a digital marketing course and test your own capabilities in a real-world environment.

Another excellent advantage of internships: you get to know your own strengths and weaknesses. Just in case you’re unaware, digital marketing consists of several processes. Obviously, no person can become an expert in every process at the same time. You will discover the processes where you can perform exceptionally well. And somewhere you lag behind. You can focus on those digital marketing skills that are difficult while further advancing your stronger skills. This makes you an overall expert in digital marketing and doesn’t leave any gray areas on your resume or CV.

3. Get Your International Certifications

Usually, any excellent digital marketing academy will prepare you to appear for online exams that will earn your international certifications. Who gives international certifications? You’ll be surprised. It’s companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft-Bing, and several others. There’re at least one dozen such certificates you can apply for by appearing for their online exams.

Since these are internationally recognized certificates, you qualify to work as a digital marketer not only in India but anywhere in the world.

Source: Brandastic

There’s one more distinct advantage with international certifications. These certifications have limited validity. That means, to continue retaining your international certifications, you’ll have to pass their online tests either every year or at periods these companies specify. That involves updating your skills daily to ensure your certifications remain valid and you’re able to appear for online tests to retain them every year.

Understandably, it’s not possible to appear for all exams for international certifications at the same time. Therefore, you can appear for them whenever you acquire adequate skills necessary to pass the test. However, getting these international certifications is the best and most effective digital marketing strategy for career growth. Any employer would definitely give you priority over other job aspirants that don’t have such international certifications.

4. Master Content Writing

Content is the king of the blog, as any veteran digital marketer will tell you. Unless you have excellent content on a blog or website, all your digital marketing processes will fail miserably. You also need to remember that content writing is the most difficult part of digital marketing. There Are strong reasons for this, which I’ll try to explain in the following words.

Digital marketing depends upon your knowledge about how to perform technical processes such as Search Engine Optimization, email marketing, social media marketing, and various others. And there are specific guidelines available for these processes. Furthermore, there’s various software available for digital marketing processes.

However, there exists no guidelines or software to create content. Instead, you’ll have to create content using your own writing skills, creativity, and imagination as well as a personal interest in a specific topic. The only software you can use is for SEO processes. And its use is limited too because you can only find different keywords that you can blend with the content. This can help you rank an article or content for a limited period only.

Source: edgy.app

Mastering content writing is important for several reasons. One of them is to gain a wide number of readers. When an increasing number of people follow your posts or those written by others, the popularity of the website grows too. Also, if someone else is contributing or writing articles for a website, you can guide them on specific keywords to use in the article for better targeting the audience through various digital marketing processes.

Also, when you know content writing, it’s easy to distinguish between an article that’s well written or poor. And you’re aware whether any content can land your employer or you in legal problems.

5. Open Your Own Blog

I strongly recommend opening your own blog as part of the common yet most effective digital marketing strategies for career growth. In fact, nowadays almost every company that hires digital marketers looks for employees that have their own blogs. There Are several reasons why employers check if you have your own blog.

The first reason is that, when you have your own blog, it’s very clear that you’ll be performing all digital marketing processes for its promotion and gaining popularity. Why? Because it’s your personal blog and you would love to see it successful.

Secondly, a personal blog also speaks about your own personality. People usually blog about their profession or passion or sometimes, as community service or for a cause that’s personally dear to them and their beliefs. Therefore, a blog indicates your nature, likes, dislikes, and inclinations very clearly.

Source: Life Optimizer

Actually, opening a free or paid blog also offers you an excellent benefit. When you post excellent content and perform digital marketing processes, a blog can make you fairly rich. It can earn you a lot of money. That means you’re not depending upon a single source of income for your livelihood. And you can also become a celebrity blogger such as hundreds of other people worldwide if your blog becomes successful.

Additionally, you can also help your employer to make more profits and advance your digital marketing career. That’s through various processes such as Affiliate Marketing and online sales.

6. Understand Media Buying

Media buying is a very important digital marketing skill. And it will come very handy as an effective digital marketing strategy for career growth. To explain in simplest words, media buying involves bidding for online advertisements on various platforms such as websites, promoting your own website, and through social media.

Source: Vector

Prices of advertising on digital media vary. It usually depends upon bids and immediate as well as long term needs of your employer. Therefore, media buying skills are something you’ll need to fully understand and gain perfection to become a successful digital marketer. Of course, you’ll be learning these skills at an excellent digital marketing course. However, working in a real-time environment during an internship or your own blogs will help you gain that perfection.

Other Common, Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Career

Networking with other digital marketers in your own country and abroad is an extremely important part of an effective digital marketing strategy for career growth. The best way to develop a network of digital marketers is through LinkedIn and Facebook. You can request free or paid assistance from these digital marketers when necessary for your employer.

You can also learn various other things such as web page designing, proper use of apps, plugins, and widgets to promote your career in digital marketing. As I mentioned earlier, digital marketing is a collection of processes. Hence, you can learn a lot and practice them at work or at home.

Conclusion

These tips are common yet effective digital marketing strategies for career growth. Before concluding, I can confidently say that these strategies would help you in developing your career and making money from your own blog.

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#ttm thetechmedia

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iexistband-blog · 4 years

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Spotify meets Augmented Reality - A Five Year Journey

The I-Exist app is available now on the App Store and Google Play!

Thinking about how music might evolve into the future has always been interesting to us, but really, this project started as two guys looking to the past - imagining their younger selves being obsessed with their favorite bands and listening to those albums on repeat. Back then, we would buy physical cds - with the plastic case and the album artwork and everything. Usually all of the lyrics would be in there too, and if you were really into the music, you could look through the pages and sort of get lost in the whole thing while the music played.

Flash forward to today, and here we are with our smartphones and these unlimited music streaming services. It’s a pretty amazing thing with all of it at our fingertips, but we felt like there was still something missing. With all of today’s crazy technology, we imagined what it might be like to take that old school album art of cd’s and vinyl, and somehow wrap it around a listener’s head to transport them into another world.

That was five years ago.

We are I-Exist, two life-long musicians who took the red pill and learned how to program and develop in order to bring this idea to life. Looking back on things, it was without a doubt the most challenging thing we’ve ever done, but we learned so much and are finally ready to share some of that perspective with you here.

ENTER THE ALBUM

So with our new album Consciousness, we thought of what it might be like to create a world for our songs to live in - and for people to come and experience them in different ways. We started developing in VR, even though we knew the world wasn’t ready. There is something so undeniable about its power in completely immersing the listener once they have the headset on, but we also kept mobile in mind, knowing that everyone has a powerful smartphone - and wondered if we could create some kind of window into that same world, so everyone could check it out.

As we built out smartphone functionality, we eventually landed on a camera system that reacts to the way you tilt and move your device, similar to how a lot of augmented reality apps work. We layered that with a traditional music player UI so that the user can enter and exit the space - and also have access to traditional app buttons and options.

We thought to ourselves, now that we have these new systems in place, what kind of content is really worth delivering?

IS THIS THE FUTURE?

It’s exciting to come up with something new, but is it what listeners really want? People already have an established routine for listening to music, whether it’s in the car, at the gym, or maybe multitasking with something else while they have their headphones on. How are we supposed to compete with that?

And the answer there is that we probably can’t. Spotify and Apple Music have pretty much perfected the modern listening experience, no matter how passive it might be. But right there is where the key is for us, it’s a PASSIVE experience. We wondered if we could add something more ACTIVE when you want to dig deeper - or for when you finally become a “super fan” of your new favorite artist.

As it turns out, musicians have been creating content like this for years, it’s just gotten lost a bit here in the streaming age. Do you remember deluxe cds? The ones that maybe had a few additional acoustic tracks thrown in at the end? Or maybe a collectors edition that had a full commentary section from the artist? We found that kind of content to be the most compelling and ended up mixing it into our interactive 3D scenes.

We were already familiar with the status quo, and wondered which new ideas are actually worth delivering. Over five years of testing and brainstorming, we landed on three concepts that ended up working best.

EVERY SONG IS A WORLD

We wanted to create an easy and relaxing way to take in the lyrics, so we ended up creating a basic 3D environment for each song - which gives the listener full freedom of movement to walk around in and explore. We imagined each section of the song being represented as a space on the map, and as they move deeper into that space, lines from the song rise up from the ground as text along with an ambient vocal sample playing in the background. They can take it as slow or as fast as they want, it’s all happening in real time..

While you could argue that reading lyrics from a random web search gets the job done, for us, that just isn’t very inspiring. Thankfully, bringing people into this surreal type of dimension turned out to be a pretty cool experience.. You could imagine more ways to give the listener freedom, whether that’s interacting with other sounds or manipulating physical objects, but we’re pretty happy with the basic movement and idea.

AMBISONIC CHAMBER

By the time you download the app, you might have already heard the studio recording of the song somewhere else, but what about the live performance? One thing that traditional music players are stuck with are their static left and right audio channels. What’s great about AR and VR though, is that you are essentially giving the listener control back of their head and ears, which means they can look around freely in the world. This opens up a lot of opportunities for a more immersive listening experience. Audiophiles out there are probably already aware of this stuff, but the way our head and ears move around in a physical space can give our brains cues that they're actually inside a certain type of room.

Anyway, we utilized real-time spatial audio and ambisonics, modeled the room for our private performance, and had a multitrack recording session with acoustic instruments. It ended up being a pretty cool way to give exclusive content to our fans, especially when you consider that we’ll probably never get to play in their living rooms… but now it kind of sounds like we are.

FIRESIDE CHAT

We thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we could sit down at a fire with our fans and tell them some of the deeper stories of how the songs came to be. That would be a pretty intimate way to talk and connect. So that’s what we did. We created a sandy outdoor area with a fire, took the same spatial audio concept from the acoustic room, and just like that… we’re all sitting next to each other by the fire, talking about each song on our new album.

WHAT ABOUT VR?

So those are the ideas that worked out for both AR and VR, but like we said at the beginning, nothing really beats the immersion of a virtual reality headset. If you think about it, this is really the only time we’ll ever have someone’s full focus and attention, and that makes every part of the app more effective. We even made a VR exclusive mode that sort of acts like an interactive visualizer while the original track plays. When you combine that with something like the SubPac, which is a haptic, subwoofer backpack... now their whole body is moving and vibrating with the music. This is pretty much the holy grail, multi-sensory experience that we’d love to give all our listeners, but realize it’s not for most ;-)

WHERE WE ARE TODAY

So after all this time, here we are reporting back to the world with this thing we made. It’s definitely not perfect and we could write multiple other articles about what it’s missing and how it needs improvement - but we’re glad that we didn’t quit and are curious what people might think.

We’re releasing it today with the intro and first world, but in the coming days and weeks we’ll be unlocking portals inside the app that open up new areas and songs. With the whole COVID-19 thing, hopefully that can give something for people to look forward to as they’re locked inside.

Since everyone has a phone, we focused on the mobile build first, which is available now. We’re also releasing on SteamVR on May 12th for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Valve Index, and Windows Mixed Reality. PSVR and Oculus Quest versions are also planned for later in the year, but those are going to take a little more optimization.

So we’ve made it to the end and some things have become clear, but there are still a lot of unknowns. Like… is this something the world even wants? Should we open source the project? If we start getting feedback and decide to continue development, where else could we take it? Feel free to check out the app and let us know what you think! We’ll be waiting for you in a digital, alternate dimension.

Brian and Cameron

I-Exist

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sharepointsaketa · 4 years

Text

Calls Without Charge And More - 5 Mobile Phone Accessories

SharePoint Migrator

YouTube is a dependency and no wonder it is one of the highest visited web sites. People across continents go to YouTube and go many things. They watch videos, upload videos, post comments, and create their channels. Many times the web site gets slower as well as people think that barefoot running is due to your immense traffic website starts to respond poorly. However, the majority of the time it is due to problems at users ends the performance of this video site reduction.

Living Room: Dust ceiling, making guaranteed to spend time in the 4 corners. Dust artwork, fans, etc. Remove curtains and have them cleaned. Dust lamps. Wash windows. If consideration to avail the dream house on your family then it is important for you to see the right SharePoint migrator. The Oshkosh home mortgage will grant you with different kinds of loans programs and policies. Could possibly select the mortgage as per your financial requirement. A few products that you can have to are mindful of while selecting the borrowed funds providers. The provider you actually are to be able to choose in order to be a reputed one. You are able to out information related making use of their company and also the kind of services possess offered thus customers his or her professional years. In this way, you will get knowledge of whether to opt due to the fact services not really. Accessories- Have a have an appearance at other new for your tablet Computer accessories to get. An associated with buyers don't seem to take into consideration accessories a guide but the most important an excellent is ways to protect your investment. Look for tablet protection accessories. In order for visitors to access your site, ought to connect into the server where your site is stored. So imagine, even if you have an excellent speed internet connection, just how much information effectively transferring right now if the internet site were stored on the house computer! Someone grade connection to the web would not ideal for that amount of knowledge per unit of time, required to obtain a web site with regard to access always. Your internet SharePoint Migrator may become frustrated with many usages may incur, and may cancel your service(depending on their policies). You would also break down quickly because it is not made to withstand much continuous use. Here will be the working rule for founders: 83(b) applies only wherein a founder owns stock SharePoint migration which might potentially forfeit its economic value. Where these conditions exist, could normally vital that a founder file the 83(b) election within 30 days of getting the stock grant or face potentially bad tax final outcomes. Well. you see, your hobby is an activity you do for pleasure and you're not interested in generating finances. On the other hand, the industry is a serious activity. It is an activity must in order to generate a reasonable income. If this is the case, then internet addresses that are for free are not meant for. Free domain names are unsuitable regarding any business website and they're only for the purpose of those that want to enjoy a website whose concept is concerning their hobbies. You will likewise use a great deal higher smartphone to obtain form thank you to ground. songs apps and walking/jogging ones that track how far you regarding GPS! They will inform you at the bottom end how several calories you burned. It's so cool. Conserve money like grocery lists ones or recipe lists alter your eating and looking habits within a great tactic. Cell phones do also a lot nowadays, will probably well and also have 1 of the ideal children.

#migrator #online data #accessories #mobile set #security

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fashioninthedigitalage · 4 years

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Technology That has changed the In-Store Shopping Experience

In an article produced by Business Insider, Bethany Biron shows how tech has shaped the retail experience.

It has been a banner decade for advancements in shopping technologies. Ten years ago, none of the technologies that will be mentioned existed. These advancements have shaped the way customers shop and experience brick and mortar retailers and online retailers. Through recent years, we’ve seen entire companies rise to prominence from social media and other non traditional media platforms. Here are Business Insiders top 10 advancements that have emerged over the past decade

Buy-online-pick-up-in-store: According to the companies intelligence and databases, nearly 70% of US consumers have used this method of delivery. Consumers are looking to cut down on shipping costs, and many retailers now offer this service to meet customer demand

Smart dressing rooms: Back in 2015, Ralph Lauren introduced interactive mirrors into in NYC flagship store. This allowed customers to change the fitting rooms lighting, request new sizes and garments, and browse other items in the store. This was the first of its kind, and now many stores offer it as a service to customers. Harrod’s recently added smart mirrors in their beauty department, where shopper can try many different products on without actually having to put them on their skin.

RFID Technology: This acronym stands for radio-frequency-identification, which allows retailers to use a smart label on products. With these labels, companies are able to track inventory and better understand shopping trends.

QR Codes: QR codes have changed many industries, the biggest probably being the retail industry. QR codes helped the development of virtual stores like Amazon Go come to fruition and survive. Customers scan their individual QR codes to enter the store, then once again when they leave. After that the payment is deducted through the Amazon app

Instagram Shopping: For me, this has had a huge impact on my life. I never thought I would be someone who shops from ads off the internet, but I always do on Instagram and only on Instagram. Since Instagram launched shopping on the platform in 2016, Instagram Shopping has allowed verified brands to develop shoppable posts that direct users to the shopping page.

Visual Search: Visual search is like facial recognition, in which a consumer can scan a product to identify the retailer or origin of the item. Pinterest integrated this into their website in 2015, and since has launched a “shoppable pins” to drive e-commerce on the site.

3-D Printing: 3-D printing adds a futuristic and modern look to any product. Many companies like Adidas have been experimenting with 3D printing to find ways of integrating it into their products.

Automated Checkout: another technology used in Amazon Go. This allows stores to go cashier-less, whether that be with though self checkout or simply tracking what the customer picks out then billing it to them once they exit the store.

Chatbots: to me, chatbots are just todays email chains. Companies like Facebook have allowed businesses to used Chatbots by DMing followers of the brands page.

Mobile pay and mobile wallet: Thanks to companies like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, we are able to use our smartphones to conduct payments. Many retailers now offer mobile pay at their cash registers.

It is hard to imagine living in a world without Instagram ads or mobile payments nowadays. They have changed the way we shop and experience retail. Like I said before, I never payed attention to ads until Instagram introduced their ads and shopping features. Mobile integrate everything into one device, allowing customers to go wallet-less. These technologies have helped brick and mortar retailers regain customers, and are helping them get new ones into their stores. If retailers can find a way to integrate technology into stores while still offering them a special experience, I think there is a bright future retail both online and in-store.

https://www.businessinsider.com/shopping-tech-changed-stores-shopping-last-10-years-2019-12#augmented-reality-apps-11

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localbizlift · 5 years

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Social chat app Capture launches to take a shot at less viral success

At first glance launching a new social app may seem as sensible a startup idea as plunging headfirst into shark-infested waters. But with even infamous curtain-ripper Facebook now making grand claims about a ‘pivot to privacy’ it’s clear something is shifting in the commercial shipping channels that contain our digital chatter.

Whisper it: Feeds are tiring. Follows are tedious. Attention is expiring. There’s also, of course, the damage that personal digital baggage left out in the open can wreak long after the fact of a blown fuse or fleeting snap.

Public feeds have become vehicles of self-promotion; carefully and heavily curated — which of course brings its own peer pressures to keep up with friends’ lux exploits and the influencer ‘gram aesthetic that pretends life looks like a magazine spread.

Yet for a brief time, in the gritty early years of social media, there was something akin to spontaneous, confessional reality on show online. People do like to share. That’s mostly been swapped for the polish of aspirational faking it on apps like Facebook-owned Instagram. While genuine friend chatter has moved behind the quasi-closed doors of group messaging apps, like Facebook-owned WhatsApp (or rival Telegram).

If you want to chat more freely online without being defined by your existing social graph the options are less mainstream friendly to say the least.

Twitter is genuinely great if you’re willing to put in the time and effort to find interesting strangers. But its user growth problem shows most consumers just aren’t willing (or able) to do that. Telegram groups also require time and effort to track down.

Also relevant in interest-based chat: Veteran forum Reddit, and game chat platform Disqus — both pretty popular, though not in a way that really cuts across the mainstream, tending to cater to more niche and/or focused interests. Neither is designed for mobile first either.

This is why Capture’s founders are convinced there’s a timely opportunity for a new social app to slot in — one which leverages smartphone sensors and AI smarts to make chatting about anything as easy as pointing a camera to take a shot.

They’re not new to the social app game, either. As we reported last year, two of Capture’s founders were part of the team behind the style transfer app Prisma, which racked up tens of millions of downloads over a few viral months of 2016.

And with such a bright feather in their cap, a number of investors — led by General Catalyst — were unsurprisingly eager to chip into Capture’s $1M seed, setting them on the road to today’s launch.

Point and chat

“The main idea behind the app is during the day you’ve got different experiences — working, watching some TV series etc, you’re sitting in an arena watching some sports, or something like that. So we imagine that you should open the app during any type of experience you have during the day,” says Capture co-founder and CEO Alexey Moiseenkov fleshing out the overarching vision for the app.

“It’s not for your friends; it’s the moment when you should share something or just ask something or discuss something with other people. Like news, for example… I want to discuss news with the people who are relevant, who want to discuss it. And so on and on. So I imagine it is about small groups with the same goal, discussing the same experience, or something like that. It’s all about your everyday life.”

“Basically you can imagine our app as like real-time forum,” he adds. “Real-time social things like Reddit. So it’s more about live discussion, not postponing something.”

Chat(room) recommendations are based on contextual inferences that Capture can glean from the mobile hardware. Namely where you are (so the app needs access to your location) and even whether you’re on the move or lounging around (it also accesses the accelerometer so can tell the angle of the phone).

The primary sensory input comes from the camera of course. So like Snap it’s a camera-first app, opening straight into the rear lens’ live view.

By default chats in Capture are public so it also knows what topics users are discussing — which in turn further feeds and hones its recommendations for chats (and indeed matching users).

Co-founder and CMO Aram Hardy (also formerly at Prisma) gives the example of the free-flowing discussion you can see unrolling in YouTube comments when a movie trailer gets its first release — as the sort of energetic, expressive discussion Capture wants to channel inside its app.

“It’s exploding,” he says. “People are throwing those comments, discussing it on YouTube, on web, and that’s a real pain because there is no tool where you can simply discuss it with people, maybe with people around you, who are just interested in this particular trailer live on a mobile device — that’s a real pain.”

“Everything which is happening around the person should be taken into consideration to be suggested in Capture — that’s our simple vision,” he adds.

Everything will mean pop culture, news, local events and interest-based communities.

Though some of the relevant sources of pop/events content aren’t yet live in the app. But the plan is to keep bulking out the suggestive mix to expand what can be discovered via chat suggestions. (There’s also a discovery tab to surface public chats.)

Hardy even envisages Capture being able to point users to an unfolding accident in their area — which could generate a spontaneous need for locals or passers by to share information.

The aim for the app — which is launching on iOS today (Android will come later; maybe by fall) — is to provide an ever ready, almost no-barrier-to-entry chat channel that offers mobile users no-strings-attached socializing free from the pressures (and limits) of existing social graphs/friend networks; as well as being a context-savvy aid for content and event discovery, which means helping people dive into relevant discussion communities based on shared interests and/or proximity.

Of course location-based chatting is hardly a new idea. (And messaging giant Telegram just added a location-based chats feature to its platform.)

But the team’s premise is that mobile users are now looking for smart ways to supplement their social graph — and it’s betting on a savvy interface unlocking and (re)channelling underserved demand.

“People are really tired of something really follower based,” argues Moiseenkov. “All this stuff with a following, liking and so on. I feel there is a huge opportunity for all the companies around the world to make something based on real-time communication. It’s more like you will be heard in this chat so you can’t miss a thing. And I think that’s a powerful shot.

“We want to create a smaller room for every community in the Internet… So you can always join any group and just start talking in a free way. So you never shared your real identity — or it’s under your control. You can share or not, it’s up to you. And I think we need that.

“It’s what we miss during this Facebook age where everybody is ‘real’. Imagine that it’s like a game. In a game you’re really free — you can express yourself what way you want. I think that’s a great idea.”

“The entry threshold [for Twitter] is enormous,” adds Hardy. “You can’t have an account on Twitter and get famous within a week if you’re not an influencer. If you’re a simple person who wants to discuss something it’s impossible. But you can just create a chat or enter any chat within Capture and instantly be heard.

“You can create a chat manually. We have an add button — you can add any chat. It will be automatically recognized and suggested to other users who are interested in these sort of things. So we want every user to be heard within Capture.”

How it works

Capture’s AI-powered chatroom recommendations are designed to work as an onboarding engine for meeting relevant strangers online — using neural networks and machine learning to do the legwork of surfacing relevant people and chats.

Here’s how the mobile app works: Open the app, point the camera at something you view as a conversational jumping off point — and watch as it processes the data using computer vision technology to figure out what you’re looking at and recommend related chats for you to join.

For example, you might point the camera around your front room and be suggested a chatroom for ‘interior design trends and ideas’ , or at a pot plant and get ‘gardeners’ chat, or at your cat and get ‘pet chat’ or ‘funny pets’.

Point the camera at yourself and you might see suggestions like ‘Meet new friends’, ‘Hot or not?’, ‘Dating’, ‘Beautiful people’ — or be nudged to start a ‘Selfie chat’, which is where the app will randomly connect you with another Capture user for a one-to-one private chat.

Chat suggestions are based on an individual user’s inferred interests and local context (pulled via the phone) and also on matching users across the app based on respective usage of the app.

At the same time the user data being gathered is not used to pervasively profile uses, as is the case with ad-supported social networks. Rather Capture’s founders say personal data pulled from the phone — such as location — is only retained for a short time and used to power the next set of recommendations.

Capture users are also not required to provide any personal data (beyond creating a nickname) to start chatting. If they want to use Capture’s web platform they can provide an email to link their app and web accounts — but again that email address does not have to include anything linked to their real identity.

“The key tech we want to develop is a machine learning system that can suggest you the most relevant stuff and topics for you right now — based on data we have from your phone,” continues Moiseenkov. “This is like a magical moment. We do not know who you are — but we can suggest something relevant.

“This is like a smart system because we’ve got some half graph of connection between people. It’s not like the entire graph like your friends and family but it’s a graph on what chat you are in, so where are you discussing something. So we know this connection between people [based on the chats you’re participating in]… so we can use this information.

“Imagine this is somehow sort of a graph. That’s a really key part of our system. We know these intersections, we know the queries, and the intersection of queries from different people. And that’s the key here — the key machine learning system then want to match this between people and interests, between people and topics, and so on.

“On top of that we’ve got recognition stuff for images — like six or seven neural networks that are working to recognize the stuff, what are you seeing, how, what position and so on. We’ve got some quite slick computer vision filters that can do some magic and do not miss.

“Basically we want to perform like Google in terms of query we’ve got — it’s really big system, lots of tabs — to suggest relevant chats.”

Image recognition processing is all done locally on the user’s device so Capture is not accessing any actual image data from the camera view — just mathematical models of what the AI believes it’s seen (and again they claim they don’t hold that data for long).

“Mostly the real-time stuff comes from machine learning, analyzing the data we have from your phone — everybody has location. We do not store this location… we never store your data for a long time. We’re trying to move into more private world where we do not know who you are,” says Moiseenkov.

“When you log into our app you just enter the nickname. It’s not about your phone number, it’s not about your social networks. We sometimes — when you just want to log in from other device — we ask you an email. But that’s all. Email and nickname it’s nothing. We do not know nothing about you. About your person, like where you work, who’s your friends, so on and so on. We do not know anything.

“I think that’s the true way for now. That’s why gaming is so fast in terms of growing. People just really want to share, really want to log in and sign up [in a way] that’s easy. And there is no real barriers for that — I think that’s what we want to explore more.”

Chatroulette

Having tested Capture’s app prior to launch I can report that the first wave chat suggestions are pretty rudimentary and/or random.

Plus its image recognition often misfires (for instance my cat was identified as, among other things, a dog, hamster, mouse and even a polar bear (!) — as well as a cat — so clearly the AI’s eye isn’t flawless, and variable environmental conditions around the user can produce some odd and funny results).

The promise from the founders is that recommendations will get better as the app ingests more data and the AI (and indeed Capture staff performing manual curation of chat suggestions) get a better handle on what people are clicking on and therefore wanting to talk with other users about.

They also say they’re intending to make better linkage leaps in chat suggestions — so rather than being offered a chatroom called ‘Pen’ (as I was), if you point the Capture camera at a pen, the app might instead nudge you towards more interesting-sounding chats — like ‘office talk’ or ‘writing room’ and so on.

Equally, if a bunch of users point their Capture cameras at the same pen the app might in future be smart enough to infer that they all want to join the same chatroom — and suggest creating a private group chat just for them.

On that front you could imagine members of the same club, say, being able to hop into the same discussion channel — summoning it by scanning a mutual object or design they all own or have access to. And you could also imagine people being delighted by a scanner-based interface linked to custom stuff in their vicinity — as a lower friction entry point vs typing in their directions. (Though — to be clear — the app isn’t hitting those levels of savvy right now.)

“Internally we imagine that we’re like Google but without direct query typing,” Moiseenkov tells TechCrunch. “So basically you do the query — like scanning the world around you. Like you are in some location, like some venue, imagine all this data is like a query — so then step by step we know what people are clicking, then improving the results and this step by step, month by month, so after three month or four month we will be better. So we know what people are clicking, we know what people are discussing and that’s it.”

“It’s tricky stuff,” he adds. “It’s really really hard. So we need lots of machine learning, we need lots of like our hands working on this moderating stuff, replacing some stuff, renaming, suggest different things. But I think that’s the way — that’s the way for onboarding people.

“So when people will know that they will open the app in the arena and they will receive the right results the most relevant stuff for this arena — for the concert, for the match, or something like that, it will be the game. That’s what we want to achieve. So every time during the day you open the app you receive relevant community to join. That’s the key.”

Right now the founders say they’re experimenting with various chat forms and features so they can figure out how people want to use the app and ensure they adapt to meet demand.

Hence, for example, the chatroulette-style random ‘selfie chat’ feature. Which does what it says on the tin — connecting you to another random user for a one-to-one chat. (If selfie chats do end up getting struck out of the app I hope they’ll find somewhere else to house the cute slide-puzzle animation that’s displayed as the algorithms crunch data to connect you to a serendipitous interlocutor.)

They’re also not yet decided on whether public chat content in Capture will persist indefinitely — thereby potentially creating ongoing, topics-based resources — or be ephemeral by default, with a rolling delete which kicks in after a set time to wipe the chat slate clean.

“We actually do not know what will be in the next one to three months. We need to figure out — will it be consistent or ephemeral,” admits Moiseenkov. “We need to figure out certain areas, like usage patterns. We should watch how people behave in our app and then decide what will be the feed.”

Capture does support private group chats as well as public channels — so there’s certainly overlap with the messaging platform Telegram, which also supports both. Though one nuance between t

#marketing

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pmsocialmedia · 5 years

Text

Social chat app Capture launches to take a shot at less viral success

If you want to chat more freely online without being defined by your existing social graph the options are less mainstream friendly to say the least.

Point and chat

“It’s not for your friends; it��s the moment when you should share something or just ask something or discuss something with other people. Like news, for example… I want to discuss news with the people who are relevant, who want to discuss it. And so on and on. So I imagine it is about small groups with the same goal, discussing the same experience, or something like that. It’s all about your everyday life.”

“Basically you can imagine our app as like real-time forum,” he adds. “Real-time social things like Reddit. So it’s more about live discussion, not postponing something.”

The primary sensory input comes from the camera of course. So like Snap it’s a camera-first app, opening straight into the rear lens’ live view.

By default chats in Capture are public so it also knows what topics users are discussing — which in turn further feeds and hones its recommendations for chats (and indeed matching users).

“Everything which is happening around the person should be taken into consideration to be suggested in Capture — that’s our simple vision,” he adds.

Everything will mean pop culture, news, local events and interest-based communities.

Hardy even envisages Capture being able to point users to an unfolding accident in their area — which could generate a spontaneous need for locals or passers by to share information.

Of course location-based chatting is hardly a new idea. (And messaging giant Telegram just added a location-based chats feature to its platform.)

How it works

Chat suggestions are based on an individual user’s inferred interests and local context (pulled via the phone) and also on matching users across the app based on respective usage of the app.

“Basically we want to perform like Google in terms of query we’ve got — it’s really big system, lots of tabs — to suggest relevant chats.”

Chatroulette

Having tested Capture’s app prior to launch I can report that the first wave chat suggestions are pretty rudimentary and/or random.

Right now the founders say they’re experimenting with various chat forms and features so they can figure out how people want to use the app and ensure they adapt to meet demand.

Capture does support private group chats as well as public channels — so there’s certainly overlap with the messaging platform Telegram, which also supports both. Though one nuance between them is Capture Channels let everyone comment but only admins post vs Telegram channels being a pure one-way broadcast.

But it’s on interface and user experience where Capture’s approach really diverges from the more standard mobile messaging playbook.

If you imagine it as a mash-up of existing social apps Capture could be thought of as something like a Snap-style front end atop a Telegram-esque body yet altogether sleeker, with none of the usual social baggage and clutter. (Some of that may creep in of course, if users demand it, and they do have a reactions style feature linked up to add in so… )

“With our tool you can find people not from your graph,” says Moiseenkov. “That’s the key here. So with WhatsApp it’s really hard to invite people not from your graph — or like friends of friends. And that’s a really tough question — where I can find the relevant people whom I chat about football? So now we add the tool for you in our app to just find these people and invite them to your [chat].”

“It’s really really hard not to like your friend’s post on Instagram because it’s social capital,” he adds. “You are always liking these posts. And we are not in this space. We do not want to move in this direction of followers, likers, and all this stuff — scrolling and endless communication.

“Time is changing, my life is changing, my friends and family somehow is changing because life is changing… We’re mobile like your everyday life… the app is suggesting you something relevant for this life [now]. And you can just find people also doing the same things, studying, discussing the same things.”

Community building

Why include private chats at all in Capture? Given the main premise (and promise) of the app is its ability to combine strangers with similar interests in the same virtual spaces — thereby expanding interest communities and helping mobile users escape the bubbles of closed chat groups.

On that Moiseenkov says they envisage communities will still want to be able to create their own closed groups — to maintain “a persistent, consistent community”.

So Capture has been designed to contain backchannels as well as open multiple windows into worlds anyone can join. “It’s one of opportunities to make this and I think that we should add it because we do not know exact scenarios right from the launch,” he says of including private conduits alongside public chats.

Given the multiple chat channels in the first release Capture does risk being a bit confusing. And during our interview the founders joke about having created a “maximal viable product” rather than the usual MVP.

But they say they’re also armed to be able to respond quickly to usage patterns — with bits and pieces lined up in the background so they can move quickly to add/remove features based on the usage feedback they get. So, basically, watch this space.

All the feature creep and experimentation has delayed their launch a little though. The app had been slated to arrive in Q4 last year. Albeit, a later-than-expected launch is hardly an unusual story for a startup.

Capture also of course suffers from a lack of users for people to chat to at the point of release — aka, the classic network effect problem (which also makes testing it prior to launch pretty tricky; safe to say, it was a very minimalist messaging experience).

Not having many users also means Capture’s chat suggestions aren’t as intelligent and savvy as the founders imply they’ll be.

So again the MVP will need some time to mature before it’s safe to pass judgement on the underlying idea. It does feel a bit laggy right now — and chat suggestions definitely hit and miss but it will be interesting to see how that evolves as/if users pile in.

Part of their plan is to encourage and nurture movie/TV/entertainment discussion communities specifically — with Hardy arguing there’s “no such tool” that easily supports that. So in future they want Capture users to be notified about new series coming up on Netflix, or Disney’s latest release. Then, as users watch that third party content, their idea is they’ll be encouraged to discuss it live on their mobiles via Capture.

But movie content is only partially launched at this stage. So again that’s all just a nice idea at this stage.

Testing pre-launch on various celebrity visages also drew a suggestive blank — and Hardy confirmed they’ve got more pop culture adds planned for the future.

Such gaps will likely translate into a low stickiness rate at first. But when the team’s ambition is to support a Google-esque level of content queries the scale of the routing and pattern matching task ahead of them is really both massive and unending.

To get usage off the ground they’re aiming to break the content recommendation problem down into more bite-size chunks — starting by seeding links to local events and news (sourced from parsing the public Internet); and also by focusing on serving specific communities (say around sports), and also linked to particular locations, such as cities — the latter two areas likely informed by in what and where the app gets traction.

They’ve also hired a content manager to help with content recommendations. This person is also in charge of “banning some bad things and all that stuff”, as they put it. (From the get go they’re running a filter to ban nudity; and don’t yet support video uploads/streams to reduce their moderation risk. Clearly they will need to be very ‘on it’ to avoid problem usage mushrooming into view and discouraging positive interactions and community growth within the app. But again they say they’re drawing on their Prisma experience.)

They also say they want this social app to be more a slow burn on the growth front — having seen the flip side of burn out viral success at Prisma — which, soon after flooding the social web with painterly selfies, had to watch as tech giants ruthlessly cloned the style transfer effect, reducing their novelty factor and pushing users to move on to their next selfie lens fix.

“As data-driven guys we’re mostly looking for some numbers,” says Moiseenkov when asked where they hope to be with Capture in 12 months’ time. “So I think achieving something like 1M or 2M MAU with a good retention and engagement loop by then is our goal.

“We want to keep this growth under control. So we could release the features step by step, more about engagement not more about viral growth. So our focus is doing something that can keep engagement loop, that can increase our spend time in the app, increase the usage and so on, not driving this into the peak and like acquiring all the trends.”

“Conclusions are drawn from Prisma!” adds Hardy with investor-winning levels of chutzpah.

While it’s of course super early to talk business model, the question is a valid one given Capture’s claims of zero user profiling. Free apps backed by VC will need to monetize the hoped for scale and usage at some point. So how does Capture plan to do that?

The founders say they envisage the app acting as a distribution tool. And for that use case their knowing (only) the timing, location and subject of chats is plenty enough data to carry out contextual targeting of whatever stuff they can get paid to distribute to their users.

They are also toying with models in a Patreon style — such as users being able to donate to content authors who are in turn distributing stuff to them via Capture. But again plans aren’t fully formed at this nascent stage.

“Our focus right now is more like going into partnerships with different companies that have lots of content and lots of events going on,” says Hardy. “We also are going to ask for permission to get access to music apps like Spotify or Apple Music to be aware of those artists and songs a person is interested in and is listening to. So this will give us an opportunity to suggest relevant new albums, maybe music events, concerts and so on and so forth.

“For example if a band is coming to your city and we know we have access to Apple Music we know you’re listening to it we’ll suggest a concert — we’ll say ‘hey maybe you can win a free ticket’ if we can partner… with someone, so yeah we’re moving into this in the near future I think.”

via Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2leHg4a

#IFTTT #Social – TechCrunch

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un-enfant-immature · 5 years

Text

Social chat app Capture launches to take a shot at less viral success

If you want to chat more freely online without being defined by your existing social graph the options are less mainstream friendly to say the least.

Point and chat

“Basically you can imagine our app as like real-time forum,” he adds. “Real-time social things like Reddit. So it’s more about live discussion, not postponing something.”

The primary sensory input comes from the camera of course. So like Snap it’s a camera-first app, opening straight into the rear lens’ live view.

By default chats in Capture are public so it also knows what topics users are discussing — which in turn further feeds and hones its recommendations for chats (and indeed matching users).

“Everything which is happening around the person should be taken into consideration to be suggested in Capture — that’s our simple vision,” he adds.

Everything will mean pop culture, news, local events and interest-based communities.

Hardy even envisages Capture being able to point users to an unfolding accident in their area — which could generate a spontaneous need for locals or passers by to share information.

Of course location-based chatting is hardly a new idea. (And messaging giant Telegram just added a location-based chats feature to its platform.)

How it works

Chat suggestions are based on an individual user’s inferred interests and local context (pulled via the phone) and also on matching users across the app based on respective usage of the app.

“Basically we want to perform like Google in terms of query we’ve got — it’s really big system, lots of tabs — to suggest relevant chats.”

Chatroulette

Having tested Capture’s app prior to launch I can report that the first wave chat suggestions are pretty rudimentary and/or random.

Right now the founders say they’re experimenting with various chat forms and features so they can figure out how people want to use the app and ensure they adapt to meet demand.

But it’s on interface and user experience where Capture’s approach really diverges from the more standard mobile messaging playbook.

Community building

On that Moiseenkov says they envisage communities will still want to be able to create their own closed groups — to maintain “a persistent, consistent community”.

Not having many users also means Capture’s chat suggestions aren’t as intelligent and savvy as the founders imply they’ll be.

But movie content is only partially launched at this stage. So again that’s all just a nice idea at this stage.

Testing pre-launch on various celebrity visages also drew a suggestive blank — and Hardy confirmed they’ve got more pop culture adds planned for the future.

“Conclusions are drawn from Prisma!” adds Hardy with investor-winning levels of chutzpah.

#TechCrunch

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hub-pub-bub · 5 years

Link

Journalism of high value is discriminated against by a system that favors massive and commercial social media platforms functions, e.g. its fast and easy sharing function.

Over the past years, the news publishing industry has experienced three considerable technological changes: the transition from the analog to the digital, social media boost and increase in the usage of mobile devices.

Now, when digital publishing is developing around the world at an extraordinary speed, and readers are increasingly willing to read through mobile apps, two global companies, Facebook and Google, are dominating the advertising and traffic market in digital space, forcing newspapers to change their existing business and distribution models.

Is this a no-win situation?

How about we start with a simple question – who is a publisher? Oh, yes, this is a person or a company who is responsible for creating, preparing and distributing printed or digital publications. Most of us can give a few examples of the world-known publishing houses like HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, or newspapers such as the New York Times or Washington Post.

Let’s move on. What are the biggest social media platforms and technology enterprises? Probably, among the companies you have thought of, were Google or Facebook, am I right? They facilitate the sharing of information on a global scale.

Today, content creators have to be active on different social media channels. They are responsible for writing an article and promoting it. The mutual dependence between the publishing industry and the digital spaces is more complicated than it would seem at first glance. There is no doubt that the publishing process has changed; as a result, we need to redefine the concept of a publisher.

It is time to ask if the difference between the words “publisher” and “platform” is an etymological trifle or the cause of a conflict of interest?

Source of news

The point lies in the way we get and consume news today.

People scroll down Facebook, Twitter or other social sites many times a day, staring for just a few seconds at the titles and headers without going deeper into an article. We got used to having the latest news immediately.

Facebook Remains a Major Gateway to Online News

No publisher in the history of journalism had such an impact on global news consumption as Facebook.

Therefore, it’s no wonder that publishers use digital solutions and social platforms that help them stay on the competitive market. This is a strategy used by more and more companies – it is about running a business based on digital platforms, using them primarily for promotional activities. All types of publishers has long been active in this way, promoting their content on Facebook or optimizing it for Google. Are the results really worth it?

Monetizing strategy in the digital reality

Google and Facebook have dominated the network traffic and have consumed most of the revenue from digital advertising. It means that these two world companies are collecting revenue equal to what used to be a payment for high-quality journalism.

The social media offer information for free now, meanwhile content creators pay too little for the value they provide to users.

Facebook and Google are the most important sites for news traffic. According to publishing industry monitors Parse.ly, by the end of 2016 Facebook was responsible for 45 percent of referral traffic to publisher sites, and Google 31 percent.

Newspapers publishers in their business models focused mainly on the sale of advertising space, while Facebook or Google paid equally much attention to effectively reaching a highly profiled user and accounting for the effects of the campaign. Facebook’s advantage over the other media channel also results from the number of users many publishers can only dream about. What is more, Facebook and Google integrate on their platforms content created by both of these groups.

Google built the software that provided all of the services that an advertiser would need to place an ad to a targeted group. This system was:

far more efficient than what publishers had offered – advertisers did not need to negotiate and purchase ads through face to face,

far more targeted – there was no guess-work as to the demographic target that was seeing the ads,

more scalable – the market size was exponentially larger than the one that a publisher could offer.

In addition to the ability to track users more effectively, Facebook’s other advantage in advertising was the amount of data it had, pertaining to their lives and behaviors. Not only data that users shared willingly, but also data collected by observing their behavior on the platform and also across the Internet. With all of this knowledge, ads could be targeted at specific groups and inserted directly into their news feeds.

This digital duet determines how the content can be delivered, which text is a priority, what appears in searches and news channels without the participation of publishers who bear all the costs, while Google and Facebook yield most of the profits. And the most important advantage they gain is capturing the users’ (readers’) data.

It seems that newspapers need digital platforms because of the possibility to reach more readers than before.

But the advantages of each platform are difficult to assess, and the use of them is associated with several problems for publishers:

insufficient return on investment,

loss of branding,

no users’ data,

migration of ad revenue.

In the face of the above mentioned doubts news publishers have to ask themselves what monetizing strategy they want to choose:

continuing the costly business of maintaining their own publishing infrastructure, with smaller audiences but complete control over revenue, brand, and data

releasing control over user data and advertising in exchange for the meaningful readership growth offered by technology companies and social media platforms.

Secret weapon

There is something that gives newspapers publishers a huge advantage – the content they create, which their readers want. Of course, only if their articles are relevant and substantial, not full of unreliable information focused only on achieving mass clicks by Internet users.

New division of roles has emerged. The giants can impose their own rules. First of all, they have permission on how information should be displayed. Another objection concerns a very important topic today. According to the publishers, the rules set by Google and Facebook are conducive to generalizations and the creation of fake news.

The truth about fake news

On the one hand, publishers appreciate the efforts of Facebook and Google to display content to users who would probably never reach for them. But on the other hand, the giants are currently dominating the Internet, so it is necessary to play according to their rules.

This results in the division of revenues from the market and also the risk of lowering the quality of journalism, an example of which may be fake news, which often cannot be distinguished from real information.

Global and rapid spread of false information forced the long-awaited debate on the rights and obligations of technology companies and social media platforms which are responsible for sharing content.

Protecting the independence of good journalism, which becomes a part of social media, is a challenge for publishers and platforms today.

In 2016, battered by the negative publicity around Facebook regarding “fake news”, Mark Zuckerberg retreated from his rigid position that his creation was “just a technology company” to acknowledge that it was a “new kind of platform.”

Who is who?

News publishers are trying to understand and learn how to work with these powerful forces in the industry. The rapid adaptation of smartphones by the new type of readers has changed media consumption, transforming technology companies offering mobile apps and operating systems into information media.

Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder of the world’s largest advertising agency, WPP, put it like this:

We have always said Google, Facebook and others are media companies and have the same responsibilities as any other media company… They cannot masquerade as technology companies, particularly when they place advertisements.

It would seem that the division that has functioned so far is simple and understandable.

A publisher: a company or a person that prepares and issues books, journals, or music for sale, responsible for the creating and distribution of digital or printed publications.

Social media platforms: technology that enables communication and distribution of information which is used by publishers/companies to promote their content digitally.

Facebook as a company has to make an important decision. Do they want to function as a platform (technology company)? Should their service change its status to the publisher, and content to publications and, as a result, become the world’s largest publishing company?

As of the third quarter of 2018, Facebook had 2.27 billion monthly active users. This “platform” reaches more people than any media organization in history.

No-win situation?

Over the years, news publishers have drowned in their customers’ data, but they have no ability or motivation to imagine what they can do with it. The data analysis has become an integral part of successful publishing, and along with giving data to dominating platforms, publishers realized that they lost something more valuable than money.

Platforms that are based on the use of data to build, run, improve and earn, thanks to their design will always have a huge advantage simply because they operate on a large scale. Publishers began to understand that technology companies know more about their readers than they do.

Now, in the face of Google and Facebook domination, publishers have to look for new sources of traffic and revenue:

having their own development and acquiring readers strategy

trying different ways to monetize content

moving the promoting activity to smaller platforms like Flipboard or Pinterest

The newspaper business model was traditionally based on ad revenues — it was about 80% advertising, 20% circulation. A shift happened in 2014, primarily due to the fall in print advertising (and print publishing altogether) but also the increase in digital subscriptions.

The disappointment in digital ad revenue is pushing publishers to rethink monetizing strategies like paid subscriptions and paywalls, despite the fact that social platforms and Google are to some extent based on free or cheap information flows.

PressPad News Paywall Model

The readers’ attitude is changing and the acceptance of paying for online news is growing.

What we are really seeing is a sort of back to the past situation — where, before Facebook, publishers had to grow their site and… everyone was focused on the diversification of sources. And then Facebook just became the easiest way to grow traffic.

Let’s play together

According to Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School report:

Platforms, particularly Facebook, have dramatically altered their attitude toward news publishing (…). Facebook added a Head of News Partnerships in the shape of former journalist Campbell Brown, hosting a series of workshops and hackathons focused on how to make Facebook better for journalists, and engaging in a vigorous program aimed at raising the issue of media literacy in the public sphere.

For the publishing industry, it is important to ensure a united front so that they can negotiate more effectively. That is why American industry body called the New Media Alliance (NMA), which represents nearly 2,000 media outlets including some of the world’s most influential publishers in the world, wrote to the US Congress demanding the anti-trust exemption, so they could collectively bargain with Facebook and Google.

New Media Alliance is going one step further, perceiving the platforms’ activity as a threat to the freedom of speech. The complaint, isn’t so much about the fact that newspapers’ primary source of revenue came from classified listings and advertising — it’s about freedom.

The NMA press release states:

Quality journalism is critical to sustaining democracy and is central to civic society. To ensure that such journalism has a future, the news organizations that fund it must be able to collectively negotiate with the digital platforms that effectively control distribution and audience access in the digital age.

One of the solution to avoid further expansion from technological giant is to combine powers. If publishers create the unified front, speak with one voice in negotiations with Facebook and Google (pushing for stronger intellectual property protection, better subscription model support, and fair share of revenue and data), they can build a more sustainable future for the information industry.

Has something changed?

Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships at Facebook, said:

We’re committed to helping quality journalism thrive on Facebook. We’re making progress through our work with news publishers and have more work to do.

Whilst Google told “The Los Angeles Times”:

We remain deeply committed to helping publishers with both their challenges, and their opportunities.

The price of independence

The current situation of getting and sharing revenue on the news market forced both sides – publishers and technology companies – to think about the speed of digital changes, thanks to which they realized that their defining, activity and monetizing strategy require changes.

If the news publishers want to keep independence, they have to find financial models which work regardless of the social media situation. This may mean using platforms as a tool to reach and engage audiences, but not relying on them to monetize content. It may also entail a considerable balance of funding for journalism.

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These two technology giants are now managing larger advertising revenues, which have long relied on the information departments, which makes the publishers try to find a solution that will stop the budget losses. The question remains what and when the end of Facebook and Google domination will be, because it surely is only a matter of time before they will be replaced.

#newspapers #Digital Publishing #digital distribution

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monstrousthingsrp · 7 years

Text

Time Period Quick Reference:

Courtesy the lovely Erin (@incre-et-painture) we now have a handy-dandy little reference to help us all “flow with the times” without having to struggle between either spending precious time researching or winging it and hoping for the best! She actually lived in England during the period in which our game is set, so if you have additional questions about the setting she’ll be happy to help you out--

Although keep in mind that this is an alternate universe. As such, specific individual facts and historical events may be different. So don’t worry about getting bogged-down in the details; after all, this is a world in which The Cold War was replaced by The Worldwide Witchunt Wars. There probably was no Cuban Missile Crisis; there may not have even been a Space Race! We’ve left particular historical details vague enough that we can tailor them to suit whatever plot-points we all decide to develop.

So just as with the timeline, view the following as a reference guideline, not a checklist to obey!

Technology:

This is probably the most important one for us, as unlike most Potterverse games we’re actually playing in a world where your character very well might have access to the sort of technology that we take for granted in our current lives -- albeit several generations older than what we’ve got on hand now!

Most computers operate using ethernet cords to connect to the internet, laptops weigh an extremely portable 52 pounds, basically, and camera phones are cutting edge technology. The pictures taken with them are notoriously grainy at this stage and definitely not the crystal clear video we’re used to.

Most mobile phones operate on a “top up” method where you pay for minutes. They’re called track phones in the U.K. Also, most people are paying per text message sent, but it’s still a popular method of communication. You can top up your minutes in most convenience stores and by calling into your provider’s number. There aren’t any smartphones, apps, and other things like that. Public payphones still exist, although they are fading out by this point.

Travel is done by taxi, bus, and tube. Lyft and Uber do not exist. Londoners love the Tube and definitely travel that way frequently. For frequent travelers, Oyster cards are refillable cards that are similar to the Metro cards we use in the US. In fact, 2004 was the first year that Oyster cards existed. They can also be used on the bus and train, but not on taxis.

Please also remember that trains are a popular method of travel for Europeans. They’re also very reliable and a great way to get around. (As for whether people would be comfortable sharing a carriage with someone who’s got stars by their eyes, well...)

Pop Culture: Sport

As much as it breaks my heart, Manchester United won the FA cup in 2004. (Mod Note: her Erin, maybe in this messed-up world West Ham isn’t a total lost cause? I mean, sport doesn’t have to have happened the same as it did in reality, and we’ve got so many crazy things going on here already -- wealthy Weasleys, werewolf-friendly Blacks, a living Regulus...stranger things could happen, right?)

For those of you interested in talking football, here are the league tables for that season. Please keep in mind that different teams are in different leagues so, if your character follows a team, make sure you know who they play. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004%E2%80%9305_Football_League

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004%E2%80%9305_FA_Premier_League

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004%E2%80%9305_Football_League_Championship

Pop Culture: Telly

The Television lineup in Britain in real 2004-2005 contained the shows:

Little Britain

Spooks

Eastenders

Still Game

Dr. Who (the new series had just started, but the reruns were still extremely popular and well-loved by a majority of British people)

Casualty

The Doctors

Holby City

River City

Blue Peter

Strictly Come Dancing

And news is broadcast on the BBC News

For a comprehensive list, please see this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_programmes_broadcast_by_the_BBC

Please pay attention to the years listed for each program to make sure that it’s applicable...and feel free to make up shows of your own that might exist in this reality! Just keep in mind that TV in England was a much smaller, lower-budget, more contained entity than the overwhelming glut of channels going on in America.

Pop Culture: Music

This will be a painful trip for some of us. After all, I think we’d probably all rather forget that Kelis ever proclaimed that her milkshake brings all the boys to the yard. However, it’s a sad fact that she did, and this is the time when it happened!

Now again, we are living in an alternate reality here, so feel free to make up other songs and singers and groups -- both mundane and magical; maybe the Weird Sisters and Celestina Warbeck don’t exist here (and maybe they do) but there are surely still some magical musicians (maybe some taking advantage of the “dangerous” aura their magic grants them, while others might try and downplay it) so please, let your imaginations run wild! Maybe this Brittany Spears never sang Toxic but rather Cursed...maybe this Goldie Lookin Chain wrote Wands Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do. Who knows, have fun! The following list is for reference so that you know what kind of music and what kind of bands (probably) exist in this world and this time. And, maybe, to give you all a trip -- pleasant or otherwise -- down nostalgia lane. Enjoy!

Here are the Top 100 Songs of 2004 in the UK:

01 Eamon ~ F**k It (I Don't Want You Back)

02 Eric Prydz ~ Call On Me

03 Anastacia ~ Left Outside Alone

04 DJ Casper ~ Cha Cha Slide

05 Usher featuring Lil' Jon & Ludacris ~ Yeah!

06 Frankee ~ FURB (F U Right Back)

07 Kelis ~ Milkshake

08 Mario Winans featuring Enya & P Diddy ~ I Don't Wanna Know

09 3 Of A Kind ~ Baby Cakes

10 Michelle McManus ~ All This Time

11 Britney Spears ~ Everytime

12 Michael Andrews featuring Gary Jules ~ Mad World

13 Destiny's Child ~ Lose My Breath

14 The Shapeshifters ~ Lola's Theme

15 Outkast ~ Hey Ya!

16 LMC vs U2 ~ Take Me To The Clouds Above

17 O-Zone ~ Dragostea Din Tei

18 The Streets ~ Dry Your Eyes

19 Busted ~ Thunderbirds / 3AM

20 Usher ~ Burn

21 Britney Spears ~ Toxic

22 Natasha Bedingfield ~ These Words

23 Ozzy & Kelly Osbourne ~ Changes

24 Boogie Pimps ~ Somebody To Love

25 Kelis ~ Trick Me

26 The Rasmus ~ In The Shadows

27 Band Aid 20 ~ Do They Know It's Christmas?

28 Nelly ~ My Place / Flap Your Wings

29 D12 ~ My Band

30 McFly ~ 5 Colours In Her Hair

31 Girls Aloud ~ I'll Stand By You

32 Cassidy featuring R Kelly ~ Hotel

33 Jamelia ~ Thank You

34 Peter Andre ~ Mysterious Girl

35 Maroon 5 ~ This Love

36 Eminem ~ Just Lose It

37 Rachel Stevens ~ Some Girls

38 Khia ~ My Neck My Back (Lick It)

39 Christina Milian ~ Dip It Low

40 McFly ~ Obviously

41 JoJo ~ Leave (Get Out)

42 Deep Dish ~ Flashdance

43 Lemar ~ If There's Any Justice

44 J-Kwon ~ Tipsy

45 Will Young ~ Leave Right Now

46 Sean Paul featuring Sasha ~ I'm Still In Love With You

47 Brian McFadden ~ Real To Me

48 Girls Aloud ~ Love Machine

49 Katie Melua ~ The Closest Thing To Crazy

50 2Play featuring Raghav & Jucxi ~ So Confused

51 Twista ~ Sunshine

52 Sam & Mark ~ With A Little Help From My Friends / Measure Of A Man

53 Robbie Williams ~ Radio

54 Blue ~ Breathe Easy

55 The Black Eyed Peas ~ Shut Up

56 Twista ~ Slow Jamz

57 Busted ~ Who's David

58 Ice Cube featuring Mack 10 & Ms Toi ~ You Can Do It

59 U2 ~ Vertigo

60 Girls Aloud ~ The Show

61 N*E*R*D ~ She Wants To Move

62 Christina Aguilera featuring Missy Elliott ~ Car Wash

63 Nina Sky ~ Move Ya Body

64 Anastacia ~ Sick And Tired

65 Maroon 5 ~ She Will Be Loved

66 Ja Rule featuring R Kelly & Ashanti ~ Wonderful

67 Goldie Lookin Chain ~ Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do

68 The 411 ~ Dumb

69 Usher ~ Confessions Part II / My Boo

70 Special D ~ Come With Me

71 Kelis featuring Andre 3000 ~ Millionaire

72 Keane ~ Somewhere Only We Know

73 Duncan James & Keedie ~ I Believe My Heart

74 Jamelia ~ See It In A Boy's Eyes

75 Natasha Bedingfield ~ Single

76 The 411 featuring Ghostface Killah ~ On My Knees

77 Franz Ferdinand ~ Take Me Out

78 Gwen Stefani ~ What You Waiting For?

79 Basement Jaxx featuring Lisa Kekaula ~ Good Luck

80 George Michael ~ Amazing

81 D12 ~ How Come

82 Kylie Minogue ~ I Believe In You

83 4-4-2 ~ Come On England

84 Jay Sean featuring The Rishi Rich Project ~ Eyes On You

85 Avril Lavigne ~ My Happy Ending

86 Rachel Stevens ~ More More More

87 Enrique featuring Kelis ~ Not In Love

88 Ultrabeat ~ Feelin' Fine

89 Jennifer Lopez ~ Baby I Love U

90 Green Day ~ American Idiot

91 The Streets ~ Fit But You Know It

92 Sugababes ~ Too Lost In You

93 Victoria Beckham ~ This Groove / Let Your Head Go

94 Ronan Keating ~ She Believes (In Me)

95 Shaznay Lewis ~ Never Felt Like This Before

96 Britney Spears ~ My Prerogative

97 Ashlee Simpson ~ Pieces Of Me

98 Busted ~ Air Hostess

99 Outkast featuring Sleepy Brown ~ The Way You Move

100 The Black Eyed Peas ~ Hey Mama

For the rest of 2004 in music in the real world, please go to this wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_in_British_music_charts

Random Stuff:

Since the standard closing time for a pub is 11 PM, that’s when “Needles” closes. There are after-hours nightclubs, and people probably go to them, but Needles does its last call at 10:45.

Prostitution is not illegal in Britain, but running a brothel is. Basically, a person can sell themselves, but you can’t sell other people. (I just feel like this is useful information.)

Gun Control Laws had banned both automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Rifles were still allowed for those with hunting permits.

Courtesy Millie @theinvisibleboi: 2004 is also the year Facebook launched (although at that point it would have still been restricted to school e-mail accounts) and the Olympics were held in Athens, in case anyone wanted to feel old! (Probably wix would not be allowed to compete...but if anyone wants to create some kind of controversial Olympics history or event for this world, or otherwise alter history to conform to to AU, please feel free!)

Again, please use this wonderful collection of data that Erin has so helpfully provided us with for as general reference, not uncompromising and stone-set facts that you must know, utilize, and memorize! None of us are expert historians and unless you do something really obvious like reference an iPhone or One Direction, we aren’t going to call you out on it -- especially when an “error” might just be a difference between this world and our own. This is just to help you get in the “vibe” of the time period, not information that you’ll be tested on later. So don’t panic, stay loose, and feel free to get creative!

Thanks once more to Erin for putting this together for all of us, and remember that if you have questions about anything else regarding England in 2005, please feel free to message her and she’ll help out as best she can!

#hp au #hp au rp #hprpg #hp roleplay #bio rpg #world building

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endenogatai · 5 years

Text

Apple’s increasingly tricky international trade-offs

Far from Apple’s troubles in emerging markets and China, the company is attracting the ire of what should really be a core supporter demographic naturally aligned with the pro-privacy stance CEO Tim Cook has made into his public soapbox in recent years — but which is instead crying foul over perceived hypocrisy.

The problem for this subset of otherwise loyal European iPhone users is that Apple isn’t offering enough privacy.

These users want more choice over key elements such as the search engine that can be set as the default in Safari on iOS (Apple currently offers four choices: Google, Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuckGo, all U.S. search engines; and with ad tech giant Google set as the default).

It is also being called out over other default settings that undermine its claims to follow a privacy by design philosophy. Such as the iOS location services setting which, once enabled, non-transparently flip an associated sub-menu of settings — including location-based Apple ads. Yet bundled consent is never the same as informed consent…

6/ and @Apple also defaults to ON, approx 13 location settings the moment a user enables location settings

that includes using YOUR location to support APPLE’s advertising business interests & $$$. By ‘enabling location based services’ you give your consent to this

@tim_cook pic.twitter.com/scYSg94QgY

— Privacy Matters (@PrivacyMatters) October 19, 2018

As the saying goes you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But the new normal of a saturated smartphone market is imposing new pressures that will require a reconfiguration of approach.

Certainly the challenges of revenue growth and user retention are only going to step up from here on in. So keeping an otherwise loyal base of users happy and — crucially — feeling listened to and well served is going to be more and more important for the tech giant as the back and forth business of services becomes, well, essential to its fortunes going forward.

(At least barring some miracle new piece of Apple hardware — yet to be unboxed but which somehow rekindles smartphone-level demand afresh. That’s highly unlikely in any medium term timeframe given how versatile and capable the smartphone remains; ergo Apple’s greatest success is now Apple’s biggest challenge.)

With smartphone hardware replacement cycles slowing, the pressure on Cook to accelerate services revenue naturally steps up — which could in turn increase pressure on the core principles Cupertino likes to flash around.

Yet without principles there can be no brand premium for Apple to command. So that way ruin absolutely lies.

Control shift

It’s true that controlling the iOS experience by applying certain limits to deliver mainstream consumer friendly hardware served Apple well for years. But it’s also true iOS has grown in complexity over time having dropped some of its control freakery.

Elements that were previously locked down have been opened up — like the keyboard, for instance, allowing for third party keyboard apps to be installed by users that wish to rethink how they type.

This shift means the imposed limit on which search engines users can choose to set as an iOS default looks increasingly hard for Apple to justify from a user experience point of view.

Though of course from a business PoV Apple benefits by being able to charge Google a large sum of money to remain in the plum search default spot. (Reportedly a very large sum, though claims that the 2018 figure was $9BN have not been confirmed. Unsurprisingly neither party wants to talk about the terms of the transaction.)

The problem for Apple is that indirectly benefiting from Google eroding the user privacy it claims to champion — by letting the ad tech giant pay it to suck up iOS users’ search queries by default — is hardly consistent messaging.

Not when privacy is increasingly central to the premium the Apple brand commands.

Cook has also made a point of strongly and publicly attacking the ‘data industrial complex‘. Yet without mentioning the inconvenient side-note that Apple also engages in trading user data for profit in some instances, albeit indirectly.

In 2017 Apple switched from using Bing to Google for Siri web search results. So even as it has stepped up its rhetoric around user privacy it has deepened its business relationship with one of the Western Internet’s primary data suckers.

All of which makes for a very easy charge of hypocrisy.

Of course Apple offers iOS users a non-tracking search engine choice, DuckDuckGo, as an alternative choice — and has done so since 2014’s iOS 8.

Its support for a growing but still very niche product in what are mainstream consumer devices is an example of Apple being true to its word and actively championing privacy.

The presence of the DDG startup alongside three data-mining tech giants has allowed those ‘in the know’ iOS users to flip the bird at Google for years, meaning Apple has kept privacy conscious consumers buying its products (if not fully on side with all its business choices).

But that sort of compromise position looks increasingly difficult for Apple to defend.

Not if it wants privacy to be the clear blue water that differentiates its brand in an era of increasingly cut-throat and cut-price Android -powered smartphone competition that’s serving up much the same features at a lower up-front price thanks to all the embedded data-suckers.

There is also the not-so-small matter of the inflating $1,000+ price-tags on Apple’s top-of-the-range iPhones. $1,000+ for a smartphone that isn’t selling your data by default might still sound very pricy but at least you’d be getting something more than just shiny glass for all those extra dollars. But the iPhone isn’t actually that phone. Not by default.

Apple may be taking a view that the most privacy sensitive iPhone users are effectively a captive market with little option but to buy iOS hardware, given the Google-flavored Android competition. Which is true but also wouldn’t bode well for the chances of Apple upselling more services to these people to drive replacement revenue in a saturated smartphone market.

Offending those consumers who otherwise could be your very best, most committed and bought in users seems short-sighted and short-termist to say the least.

Although removing Google as the default search provider in markets where it dominates would obviously go massively against the mainstream grain that Apple’s business exists to serve.

This logic says Google is in the default position because, for most Internet users, Google search remains their default.

Indeed, Cook rolled out this exact line late last year when asked to defend the arrangement in an interview with Axios on HBO — saying: “I think their search engine is the best.”

He also flagged various pro-privacy features Apple has baked into its software in recent years, such as private browsing mode and smart tracker prevention, which he said work against the data suckers.

Albeit, that’s a bit like saying you’ve scattered a few garlic cloves around the house after inviting the thirsty vampire inside. And Cook readily admitted the arrangement isn’t “perfect”.

Clearly it’s a trade off. But Apple benefitting financially is what makes this particular trade-off whiff.

It implies Apple does indeed have an eye on quarterly balance sheets, and the increasingly important services line item specifically, in continuing this imperfect but lucrative arrangement — rather than taking a longer term view as the company purports to, per Cook’s letter to shareholders this week; in which he wrote: “We manage Apple for the long term, and Apple has always used periods of adversity to re-examine our approach, to take advantage of our culture of flexibility, adaptability and creativity, and to emerge better as a result.”

If Google’s search product is the best and Apple wants to take the moral high ground over privacy by decrying the surveillance industrial complex it could maintain the default arrangement in service to its mainstream base but donate Google’s billions to consumer and digital rights groups that fight to uphold and strengthen the privacy laws that people-profiling ad tech giants are butting hard against.

Apple’s shareholders might not like that medicine, though.

More palatable for investors would be for Apple to offer a broader choice of alternative search engines, thereby widening the playing field and opening up to more pro-privacy Google alternatives.

It could also design this choice in a way that flags up the trade-off to its millions of users. Such as, during device set-up, proactively asking users whether they want to keep their Internet searches private by default or use Google?

When put like that rather more people than you imagine might choose not to opt for Google to be their search default.

Non-tracking search engine DDG has been growing steadily for years, for example, hitting 30M daily searches last fall — with year-on-year growth of ~50%.

Given the terms of the Apple-Google arrangement sit under an NDA (as indeed all these arrangements do; DDG told us it couldn’t share any details about its own arrangement with Apple, for e.g.) it’s not clear whether one of Google’s conditions requires there be a limit on how many other search engines iOS users can pick from.

But it’s at least a possibility that Google is paying Apple to limit how many rivals sit in the list of competitors iOS users can pick out an alternative default. (It has, after all, recently been spanked in Europe for anti-competitive contractual limits imposed on Android OEMs to limit their ability to use alternatives to Google products, including search. So you could say Google has history where search is concerned.)

Equally, should Google actually relaunch a search product in China — as it’s controversially been toying with doing — it’s likely the company would push Apple to give it the default slot there too.

Though Apple would have more reason to push back, given Google would likely remain a minnow in that market. (Apple currently defaults to local search giant Baidu for iOS users in China.)

So even the current picture around search on iOS is a little more fuzzy than Cook likes to make out.

Local flavor

China is an interesting case, because if you look at Apple’s growth challenges in that market you could come to a very different conclusion vis-a-vis the power of privacy as a brand premium.

In China it’s convenience, via the do-it-all ‘Swiss army knife’ WeChat platform, that’s apparently the driving consumer force — and now also a headwind for Apple’s business there.

At the same time, the idea of users in the market having any kind of privacy online — when Internet surveillance has been imposed and ‘normalized’ by the state — is essentially impossible to imagine.

Yet Apple continues doing business in China, netting it further charges of hypocrisy.

Its revised guidance this week merely spotlights how important China and emerging markets are to its business fortunes. A principled pull-out hardly looks to be on the cards.

All of which underscores growing emerging market pressures on Apple that might push harder against its stated principles. What price privacy indeed?

It’s clear that carving out growth in a saturated smartphone market is going to be an increasingly tricky business for all players, with the risk of fresh trade-offs and pitfalls looming especially for Apple.

Negotiating this terrain certainly demands a fresh approach, as Cook implies is on his mind, per the shareholder letter.

Arguably the new normal may also call for an increasingly localized approach as a way to differentiate in a saturated and samey smartphone market.

The old Apple ‘one-sized fits all’ philosophy is already very outdated for some users and risks being caught flat-footed on a growing number of fronts — be that if your measure is software ‘innovation’ or a principled position on privacy.

An arbitrary limit on the choice of search engine your users can pick seems a telling example. Why not offer iOS users a free choice?

Or are Google’s billions really standing in the way of that?

It’s certainly an odd situation that iPhone owners in France, say, can pick from a wide range of keyboard apps — from mainstream names to superficial bling-focused glitter and/or neon LED keyboard skins or indeed emoji and GIF-obsessed keyboards — but if they want to use locally developed pro-privacy search engine Qwant on their phone’s native browser they have to tediously surf to the company’s webpage every time they want to look something up.

Google search might be the best for a median average ‘global’ (excluding China) iOS user but in an age of increasingly self-focused and self-centred technology, with ever more demanding consumers, there’s really no argument against letting people who want to choose for themselves.

In Europe there’s also the updated data protection framework, GDPR, to consider. Which may yet rework some mainstream ad tech business models.

On this front Qwant questions how even non-tracking rival DDG can protect users’ searches from government surveillance given its use of AWS cloud hosting and the U.S. Cloud Act. (Though, responding to a discussion thread about the issue on Github two years ago, DDG’s founder noted it has servers around the world, writing: “If you are in Europe you will be connected to our European servers.” He also reiterated that DDG does not collect any personal data from users — thereby limiting what could be extracted from AWS via the Act.)

Asked what reception it’s had when asking about getting its search engine on the Safari iOS list, Qwant told us the line that’s been (indirectly) fed back to it is “we are too European according to Apple”. (Apple declined to comment on the search choices it offers iOS users.)

“I have to work a lot to be more American,” Qwant co-founder and CEO Eric Leandri told us, summing up the smoke signals coming out of Cupertino.

“I understand that Apple wants to give the same kind of experience to their customers… but I would say that if I was Apple now, based on the politics that I want to follow — about protecting the privacy of customers — I think it would be great to start thinking about Europe as a market where people have a different point of view on their data,” he continued.

“Apple has done a lot of work to, for example, not let applications give data to each by a very strict [anti-tracking policy]; Apple has done a lot of work to guarantee that cookies and tracking is super difficult on iOS; and now the last problem of Apple is Google search.”

“So I hope that Apple will look at our proposal in a different way — not just one-fits-all. Because we don’t think that one-fits-all today,” he added.

Qwant too, then, is hoping for a better Apple to emerge as a result of a little market adversity.

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