Many every day tasks involve the use of smartphones. From activating a smart home appliance, to buying tickets, to checking in at a venue – many of these short lived (“ephemeral”) activities require users to install a mobile App upfront to complete the task at hand. From the perspective of the user, installing a full...
Author: Martin Treiber
Luna, Amazon’s cloud gaming service uses a PWA
article-context-nav context-nav article article-hero-lede article-hero post-contents Amazon Luna is Amazon’s cloud gaming platform that goes live for early access customers in October. The most interesting part is that Luna is a progressive web app for iOS. This approach lets Amazon circumvent Apple’s App Store fees. As a user, you’ll simply download the PWA from the...
PWAs go VR
Facebook mentioned that they are planing to support Progressive Web Apps for their Oculus Browser. This is quite interesting since it opens new possibilites for PWAs. Of course, there are not many details available availale (yet) and it remains to be seen, how it actually works: I forgot to mention this yesterday: Oculus Browser may...
Daring Fireball: Online Privacy Should Be Modeled on Real-World Privacy
John Gruber from Daring Fireball gives a very good description of how online ad tracking would work in the physical world: Imagine if you were out shopping, went into a drug store, examined a few bottles of sunscreen, but left the store without purchasing anything. And then immediately a stranger approached you with an offer...
iOS 14 privacy settings will tank ad targeting business, Facebook warns | Ars Technica
cache hit 1167:single/related:d5f16d9fcf20b60755becc1a3f964ce4 empThe imminent changes of the privacy settings of the iOS 14 will severely limit Facebook’s ability to track users’ activity across their app ecosystem and the Internet as a whole using the IDFA. Ultimately, this will prevent Facebook from showing targeted ads to users inside other, non-Facebook apps on iPhones. In a...
Subscription or no subscription?
Subscription or no subscription? Companies selling Apps face a tough decision. One one hand, customers don’t like to add another monthly subscription, because they already have so many. They question if an App subscription is really worth it, even if it’s only a few dollars. On the other hand, App developers simply need to finance...
Facebook begins merging Instagram and Messenger chats in new update
Facebook has started the “big merge” of their messaging platforms. It has rolled out a new feature on Instagram that allows users to chat with their friends on Facebook. The overall goal is to unify the messaging platforms of its hugely popular apps to allow cross-messaging among Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It remains to be...
Does advertising without tracking cookies work?
Imagine a web without tracking cookies. Wouldn’t that be nice? You might argue that this isn’t feasible, because for all those nice free content and services, ads need to be very efficient to generate the highest possible click through rate. Ad tech companies like Google or Facebook, argue that microtargeting is the solution for publishers...
ITEA3 PO Days 2020 – Ephemeral Computing Service Platform
We’re participating at this year’s ITEA Project Outline Preparation Days with a project idea centered around ephemeral computing. In fact, the working title of our proposal is Ephemeral Computing Service Platform (ECSP, pronounced XP) and we hope to attract partners from the ITEA community and maybe even beyond. Usually, the ITEA PO Days are a...
Intel, MIT and Georgia Tech Improve Machine-Programming Code Similarity System
A team of researchers from Intel, MIT and Georgia Tech has published a tool that has the potential of helping developers to write code automatically. The tool, called machine inferred code similarity – or MISIM for short – is able to get the intends of pieces of code. It does so by “looking” at the...
