Tech Trend 247

Google today announced a new version of its YouTube app called 'YouTube Go' for India to tackle slower network connections. The project is part of company’s 'Next Billion' program through which it aims to connect India’s next billion people to the internet. 

YouTube Go offers a range of features to make it easier for users to watch videos on slow networks. The chief among them is YouTube Go’s ability to share videos among friends. The "social" feature uses Wi-Fi Direct protocol to exchange the files, the company confirmed to Mashable India. 

With YouTube Go, Google is also trying to enhance YouTube’s offline-feature. On the new app, people get a "super low bandwidth" preview of the video they want to download. The company says it is also sharing more information on how much data a video consumes. 

YouTube Go will be launched in India for Android users later this year.

YouTube Go will be launched in India for Android users later this year. It will support several local Indian languages including Tamil and Marathi. Users can sign up for early access at YouTubeGo.com/signup. 

YouTube Go is faster, lighter, and has been built from ground up for the Indian market, Johanna Wright, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube said today at a press conference in New Delhi. The team spent time in rural India to understand the challenges people face with internet access. 

"We believe that no matter who you are, or where you come from, everyone should get an opportunity," Wright said. The company said it spent a lot of time in Indian rural areas to understand the challenges people face in accessing the internet. "You can’t solve these challenges by sitting in Silicon Valley," Wright added.

DarkSky, the popular iPhone and Android weather app with dazzling graphics and hyper-specific forecasts, has made a transition onto your desktop. 

The company launched DarkSky.net earlier this month in an effort to bring its design philosophy and forecasting prowess to a broader audience. Like the app, the website features local forecasts presented in a deterministic way, meaning it will tell you when it will rain, rather than a probability of precipitation. 

DarkSky is the product of a team of six people, none of whom are meteorologists. The Boston-based company would not reveal any user figures to Mashable, but anecdotal evidence gathered through social media suggests it has a sizable, cult-like following.

Adam Grossman, the co-founder of DarkSky, told Mashable the website is in part a marketing move to boost name recognition of the app. 

“The biggest reason we launched this website is DarkSky is an app and a 'for pay' app," Grossman said. "We have a lot of users,” he said, but “it doesn’t get a huge lot of exposure that say a website would.”

“We tried to make, spend a lot of effort making beautiful maps. There’s something different about having it on a big screen,” he said. 

DarkSky relies on two different streams of information to produce the weather forecasts its users rely on. For precise estimates of rain or snow start and stop times, the company projects the movement of radar echoes from federal government weather radars. 

“We take in the raw radar data from the NWS in the U.S. and the Met Office in the UK,” he said.  

For the longer-range forecasts that DarkSky offers, the company pulls in data from about 10 weather models, including the U.S. Global Forecast System, or GFS model, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model, or ECMWF. 

The company then compares historical weather data to the computer model projections and gives each model solution a weighted average based on how accurate their computers calculate each model is for a particular point. 

Grossman said the company's trademark is its precision rainfall forecasts, which other, more popular weather apps aren't doing, or aren't doing well. In fact, when DarkSky first launched, all it offered were minute-by-minute precipitation forecasts out to one hour in advance.

The first time the app says it will rain in five minutes, and then it does, it "kind of feels like magic," Grossman says.

“That’s our hook, that’s what the app is all about. Having that kind of constrained focus gives something for users to latch onto and appreciate.” 

Plans for the website include adding different maps, including snowfall accumulation forecasts. 

"Our goal with the maps is to make them clear and easy to understand," Grossman wrote in a blog post on the company's website. 

"The whole purpose of weather maps is to provide context for the forecast, to give you a bigger-picture view of what’s happening. So often, though, weather maps serve only to confuse and obfuscate, with weird lines, befuddling isobars, and garish colors. So we’ve designed ours to be an aid to understanding, and I think they turned out downright gorgeous."

Interestingly, the company's philosophy that weather maps should be visually striking, and not necessarily complicated, has not earned it many fans in the weather industry itself. 

While meteorologists generally are not in favor of overly complicated maps, to them, isobars (lines of equal air pressure) and other data are crucial to understanding the weather. That's why meteorologists have flocked to high-cost, fully loaded apps like RadarScope, which gives users the ability to access multiple parameters from live Doppler radar feeds in the U.S. and Canada, plus lightning strike data. 

For forecasters, raw data like that is more useful, even if it's somewhat more complicated and less elegant in presentation. RadarScope's creators were even honored by the American Meteorological Society in 2015.

Welcome to the 2016 presidential election.

Here we have a photograph of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton standing before a crowd full of excited young supporters at a campaign event in Orlando... except the group of "millennials" greeted Clinton by literally turning their backs to her. 

You're probably asking yourself what could possibly be more important than looking directly at the potential first female president of the United States. A selfie, of course.

The iconic photograph, captured by Barbara Kinney — a former White House photographer for Bill Clinton who is currently working full time for the Hillary Clinton campaign — perfectly highlights the essence of this generation's technological priorities.

Though it is unclear whether the massive group selfie session was requested by Clinton herself, the candidate is no stranger to the art of selfie taking.

What a time to be alive.

Mashable has reached out to Barbara Kinney for comment.

In its quest to make itself indispensable, Uber is keen to slide itself into your daily commute.

On Monday, the company announced a partnership in Australia with the travel planning app TripGo, which lets users request an Uber ride to the closest ferry terminal or train, bus or tram station in time for the next departure.

The new service is available in Brisbane, Gold Coast, Melbourne, Newcastle, Perth, Sunshine Coast and Sydney. While the company would like to partner with other Australian transport apps, an Uber spokesperson told Mashable there are no current negotiations underway.

The last mile gap

With this collaboration, Uber is targeting what's known in transport planning parlance as the "first or last mile gap." That's the inconvenient distance between someone's home and a transport hub, which often keeps them driving their own car.

In Sydney, data provided by Uber to Mashable indicates that 10 percent of Uber trips start or end within 200 metres (656 feet) of a "medium frequency public transport hub." In Brisbane, it's nine percent, in Melbourne, eight percent, and Perth, five percent.

Uber has undertaken similar collaborations with travel apps in other countries. In the U.S., it has teamed up with the transit tracking company TransLoc to let users create a journey combining Uber and public transport, as well as order a car in-app.

According to Geoffrey Clifton, lecturer in transport management at Sydney University, these integrations will be particularly useful for people who live in the outer suburbs, where there are longer distances to get home from the train station or bus stop.

Public transport works best when there is a density of population or activity, he suggested, which typically means there are better services closer to the city during peak times and during daylight hours. Those living in further flung areas can be left out, especially at night.

"There isn't really a fully integrated night network [in Sydney], whereas cities like London have that," he said. "Anything that helps fill that last mile gap is useful, and some of these new technologies will have a big benefit there."

Australian cities have by and large pushed poorer communities to the outer suburbs, while the wealthy have taken over urban centres. Is there a risk the government could forgo investment in public transport in these areas if they see private services like Uber stepping in?

It's unlikely, in Clifton's view. "Some people talk about Uber-like services replacing public transport all together, and I think we're very far away from that happening," he said. "I can't see people switching to Uber being enough to cancel a bus service.

"It might even go the other way — people being more confident to take public transport at night if they know they've got some way of going that last mile home."

Nevertheless, the technology gap — whether people in less-served areas always have the technology to order an Uber — or the extra cash to pay for it is another question.

What's in it for Uber?

Well, Uber wants you to know you can always use Uber, but there's more to it than that.

According to Matthew Burke, associate professor at the Cities Research Centre at Griffith University, the company is also trying to diversity its local offering. For Uber, introducing a suite of options that allow it to play an increasingly vital role in someone's commute is "a bit of a no-brainer."

"Uber recently failed in China. Many people have said that was protectionism on behalf of the Chinese state, but I actually think [Didi Chuxing], the competitor, was a better product," he said, pointing out that Didi already had a range of transport integrations, including a bus shuttle service.

"I think [Uber has] been slower than many others in this space ... and this is in part because of working out its legality as it entered the market [in Australia]," he added.

It's also a way for the ride hailing giant to get a head start on competitors. Although Uber does have some homegrown rivals such as GoCatch, it's not facing off a powerful, established product such as Didi in Australia, but that situation may not last forever.

"Those rivals will comes, and those rivals will come in niche areas. For instance, there's a group in Shanghai who only do airport runs," Burke explained. "We're going to see, I think, diversification in the market."

Ultimately, Burke sees Uber and public transport working together to evolve a transport situation that has remained largely static thanks to Australia's reliance on the privately owned car.

That's Uber's point, too: "Aligning ridesharing with public transport systems is one of the smartest ways to help people move around the city without the need for costly infrastructure developments or owning a personal vehicle," David Rohrsheim, general manager of Uber Australia, said in a statement.

It may soon be time to let go of owning a car, and in bad news for the labour market, maybe even the human driver.

"Uber is part of a set of transport that will see more and more of us changing our relationship with the car," Burke added. "I think we'll start to see more and more use of these services, more and more for the collectivised car, and less two car or three car households.

"Still, it's going to be difficult to untangle that."

Things just keep getting worse and worse for Samsung.

After weeks of investigating cases of Galaxy Note7 phones catching on fire, destroying people's cars, and even injuring people, Samsung and the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued an official recall for 1 million of the phones sold in the U.S.

As per the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), affected Note7 phones with defective batteries must be turned off and can't be used during flights. Many public transportation agencies like New York City's MTA have also urged riders not to use the Note7.

And then just as safe replacement Note7 shipments started arriving on Wednesday and Samsung announced about 500,000 phones of the 1 million recalled in the U.S. had been exchanged, a Galaxy Note 2 catches on fire during an IndieGo flight from Singapore to Chennai.

India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and Samsung are currently investigating why the phone caught on fire in the first place. 

"We are in touch with relevant authorities to gather more information, and are looking into the matter," a spokesperson from Samsung India said in an emailed statement to Mashable India.

A Samsung spokesperson provided the following statement to Mashable over email: “We have been informed about an incident in India involving a Note 2, which uses a replaceable battery and was released in 2012. We are in touch with local authorities to gather more information and investigate whether there were any external factors involved.”

Following the incident, the DGCA has reportedly advised flyers to "exercise caution while flying with Samsung Note devices" according to spokesperson who spoke to The India Times. "They should either keep these devices switched off or not travel with them."

The last thing Samsung needs is another disaster that paints the company in more bad light.

Note (excuse the pun) the wording and how it urges against using essentially all Samsung Galaxy Note phones during flights. That includes any Note produced since the original device launched in 2011.

It's basically a declaration that SAMSUNG PHONES ARE DANGEROUS.

Talk about terrible timing.

The last thing Samsung needs is another disaster that paints the company in a worse light. It's especially tough at a time when the company's doing everything it can to prevent further tarnishing of its brand. It's also trying to reassure consumers that it has the Note7 situation under control and that new devices are safe to use.

What Samsung doesn't need right now is people scrutinizing the quality of all of the phones it produces. 

But alas, you can't control public perception. People are going to point fingers — even if the Note 2 incident is pure coincidence — at Samsung and demand answers.

And that's what sucks the most for Samsung. The Note7 issue may blow over quickly if it's able to successfully recall even 95 percent of the defective phones, but the brand damage will probably take a lot longer to repair.

Consumers, as loyal as some of us are, really aren't that loyal. We vote with our money and if a company can't assure that its products are safe to use, we'll leave in a heartbeat. Trust is not something easy to regain after major disasters.

Still, if you're a Samsung Galaxy Note user, I wouldn't worry at all.

While we won't know the real cause of the Note 2 incident until the official investigations are completed, it seems highly unlikely the fire is related to the Note7 defects, which prompted the global recall.

As eagle-eyed techies know, the Note 2 was released in 2012 and Samsung no longer sells the phone. And based on the image of the damaged phone that was made public, it looks like the removable battery expanded, which caused it to catch on fire. 

The cause could very likely be a third-party battery and not an official one. While some third-party batteries meet very strict quality control requirements, there are many that don't and those are the ones that are more likely to catch on fire.

Scary as a phone catching on fire on a flight is, it's happened before. Last year, an iPhone 6 inexplicably burst into flames aboard a flight going to Hawaii. And in 2014, there were two reported cases of iPhones catching on fire in people's pockets. Do a Google search and you'll find many more that happen every year.

It's unfortunate, but like I said earlier after the Note7 explosions started rolling in: Any phone could explode. There's no such thing as an explosion-proof phone. 

In fact, any device with a battery could potentially explode or catch on fire. Companies do their best to create controllers that monitor and regulate a battery to prevent it from overcharging and overheating, but defective batteries can happen (as was the case with the Note7) and people can (and do) push their phones beyond their advertised limits.

Generally, most phones go through their lifespans without any issues. If you're using an old Note or Samsung phone with removable batteries, we highly recommend using official batteries and not cheap knockoffs; the lower prices are tempting, but not worth potential risk and injury.

It's just really, really too bad for poor Samsung. The company just can't catch a break.

Amazon might be getting a little worried.

Pricing details for Google's upcoming smart speaker, the Amazon Echo-like Google Home, may have just been leaked and they suggest that Google's speaker will be a lot cheaper than Amazon's.

The speaker will sell for $129 when it goes on sale later this year, according to a report in Android Police. Google Home, which the company first introduced at its I/O developer conference in May, is a speaker that also has Google Assistant built in. (You can preview the assistant in the company's new messaging app, Allo.) It can also control smart home devices, complete searches and help you manage tasks like managing your grocery list.

If true, the $129 price tag would make Google's offering extremely competitive with Amazon's Echo line. Amazon's flagship Echo sells for $179.99 while the portable Amazon Tap costs $129.99

The report didn't provide specifics around availability, just that the Google was set to unveil the price at its upcoming Pixel event in October. But, given that Google previously promised the device would be available in the fall, it seems safe to assume it will go on sale soon after October's unveiling. 

Android Police also reports that Google will show off a new 4k-ready Chromecast at that event, called Chromecast Ultra. That device will sell for $69, according to the site's sources.  

A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Mashable will be covering the event live from San Francisco so stay tuned for our full coverage.

Count down three seconds in your head. It goes fast, right?  I bet you did it the "one-hippopotamus way." That's actually considerably more than 3 seconds. Ask Siri to set a 3-second timer and then try to read something on the web.

Exactly, it's barely enough time for a sentence, including this one.

A couple of years ago, Facebook apparently set 3 seconds or less as the benchmark for actual video ad engagement. A choice that, on its face, seems rational, even preferable for media planners and advertisers. 

Anyone who spends under 3 seconds watching a Facebook video ad was, for the last couple of years, not factored into the social media giant's average viewing time. 

Of course, an average that doesn't account for the total number of viewers, whether they're engaged or not, is probably not much of an average — a fact Facebook belatedly discovered and confessed to in a well-hidden blog post. Now, though, as ad partners stepped forward and called foul, Facebook made a more public apology, but insisted that "it did not impact billing," which is another way of saying that everyone got what they paid for.

The measure of a view

I bet advertisers and their partners miss the good old days, when a media platform (newspapers, magazines, TVs) simply handed them audience numbers. The size of the audience dictated how much a media company could charge for inches, pages and minutes. No one could prove if people skipped the ads in print and, before the DVR, everyone ignored the fact that most of us used commercials as snack and bathroom break times.

The problem is that the explosion of social media and mobile video has led to the rise of engagement as a measure of success. YouTube does a good job of measuring video engagement. It knows when a video is playing, for how long, and if it stopped playing. They still don't know if you left it playing and walked out of the room.

I am a little surprised that advertisers are trying to equate YouTube and Facebook video ad views. 

I am a little surprised that advertisers are trying to equate YouTube and Facebook video ad views. The interfaces and consumption styles are so different.

On YouTube, you find video and play it on a page basically devoted to that video. Facebook's newsfeed puts everything on a sort of user-controlled assembly line. Users scroll up and down, only occasionally pausing to actively engage with a piece of content or maybe an ad. Much of what they see in the newsfeed hits their retinas for a second or two. Even if a video autoplays, they might scroll right by it. This is why so many Facebook videos feature text overlays — you can ingest a sentence much more quickly that you can understand what's going on in a moving image.

I honestly don't think it's easy to know when people truly engage with video and if engagement leads to brand recognition or even action (buying a product or service), but you would think that measuring average video views would be a solved problem.

It's clearly not. In fact, there is no system or any kind of agreement about how to measure this stuff, which basically makes Facebook the poster boy for this entire mess.

Help me understand

It bothered me that I sort of sympathized with Facebook. If no one can agree on how to measure video ad views, how can Facebook be blamed for trying to do it their own way? Another part of me, though, knew that Facebook chose a measurement system that favored their platform and its performance. Once they do factor in all those Facebook users seeing a video ad for 3 seconds or less, the Facebook video add engagement numbers are going to drop, by a lot.

I decided to turn to an expert to help me work through some of my conflicting concerns and feelings.

In my inbox was an email from Brian Shin. He's the founder and CEO of Visible Measures, a social video measurement and activation company.  Visible Measures recently put out a report on engaged viewing times that shows, according to the company, that actual consumer attention is more important than view counts. 

Shin, who's been in the industry for 15 years and has a business degree from MIT's Sloan School of Management, seemed to have the answers. I wanted to clear up my own confusion and see if my feelings of sympathy for Facebook were ill-founded.

I was curious if you thought Facebook was trying to be fair by not counting any views below 3 seconds. After all, what can you glean in that period of time? Even on auto-play, you might see a second of a video ad.

Shin: Video viewership is like a going down a funnel. At the top of the funnel, you have viewers scrolling through their feed and the video player loads. On Facebook, before 3 seconds, those are considered 'ad impressions.' Progressing down the 'funnel' — if viewers stay long enough — that's when the video view event is triggered. So much money now is being spent on buying video views (which is an improvement over buying just 'ad impressions' or buying based on CPMs - cost per thousand impressions), but there is no standardization on what constitutes a video view. Hence the need to know your Engaged Viewing Time across platforms. 

How might Facebook have better measured engagement? Should they have factored in every potential view — anyone the ad is served to whether it played or not? What would that have done to their engagement numbers?

Shin: Properties [like Facebook] do not show you the whole funnel — 

video player loads ->

ad impressions ->

video views ->

viewing time ->

video completions

— for lots of reasons including not wanting to enable dissection of their economics or traffic patterns. Facebook should have shown, at a minimum, the total video views and combined it with an objective measure of Engaged Viewing Time. The inaccuracy of 'self-reported' stats is why an objective measure is needed. The lack of standardization in terms of how video views are calculated is why an objective measure of time is needed that goes across YouTube, Facebook and other places selling cost-per-view (and other forms of) video advertising.  

So much money now is being spent on buying video views... but there is no standardization on what constitutes a video view.

Facebook including ad impression data (the stuff before 3 seconds) would not help. Marketers are paying for views (post-3 seconds) and they need to know the "value" of what they bought — demonstrable by viewing time. 

How much of all this is media buyers and advertisers still not understating the nature of social media video engagement — especially video advertising on these platforms? It is fundamentally different than the video on YouTube, after all, which isn't even designed as a scroll. If you view a video on YT, you will likely see a pre-roll ad.

Shin: Much of the growth in video today is being driven by these 'social' experiences and we would include YouTube in that category. If you look at places like nbc.com, espn.com, etc., that's really repurposing and monetizing TV content or 'longer form' video. 

But places like YT, FB, Twitter, etc., are pushing advertising that offers more user choice (option to skip or scroll, or share or repost, comment, etc.) and that is presenting both opportunities and challenges for marketers.

Marketers are embracing this idea of more interactivity and choice in video advertising (hence the now billions of dollars going into cost per view and other types of video advertising). But the constantly evolving landscape requires new measures of consumer attention (vs. just ad impressions). Attention in video would include finding all the views that you are generating across all properties and copies and sharing (what we call True Reach) and the actual time that consumers are spending with your video content (what we call Engaged Viewing Time). Provide total views + viewing time (and you know the spend) — you can better assess the value of your ad campaign.

Here's what I glean from what Shin said. 

As long as companies like Facebook make up their own measurement strategies, there will be a fundamental inequity in video ad measurement on social media platforms and other services that include video ads. 

Standards would help, but so would more transparency from Facebook and others. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, someone needs to step in and level the playing field for everyone. 

We all agree that video is the future, so it's time to get on board with a future that's equitable and fair. Facebook's mea culpa is a step in the right direction, but no matter what it might cost them in the short term, an agreement on video ad metrics will probably help them and everyone else make billions more in the future. 

In the end, I realize this was never about 3 seconds of video. It's about math, averages, the measure of engagement and standards. Facebook simply couldn't run away from those realities anymore — certainly not in three seconds or less.