Technology Archives - Page 148 of 169

WhatsApp To Soon Launch New Yellow Pages-Style Business Directory

WhatsApp is formally debuting a brand-new business directory feature in the UK, Colombia, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico. The new tools will be introduced for the first time in Brazil, one of Whatsapp’s largest markets, outside of pilot projects.

WhatsApp has revealed the release of a business directory feature that supports in-app transactions. Users can use this feature to find nearby businesses. Users can look up the business by categories including banking, dining, and travel.

After a brief test in So Paulo, Brazil, last year, WhatsApp decided to officially launch the service. In Brazil, the feature is only accessible through Android, however, it is accessible through both Android and iOS in the other four countries.

At a meeting in Brazil devoted to WhatsApp, the company said that the “business search” tool will help people find contacts for businesses more quickly. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, noted, “We want to make it easier for people to get more done on WhatsApp.

Part of that is building better ways to engage with businesses. The ultimate goal here is to make it so you can find, message, and buy from a business all in the same WhatsApp chat.” To start a conversation with a business on Whatsapp, users previously had to enter a mobile number to their phone contacts or follow a link on a different site.

The feature’s release coincides with WhatsApp’s increased marketing of itself as a platform for users to contact businesses in addition to family and friends. According to Meta, more than 175 million users use WhatsApp to communicate with business accounts daily as of October 2020.

Other e-commerce-related features have also been introduced to the service, such as support for in-app shopping.. According to a press statement from WhatsApp, the merchant payments functionality is now being tested in Brazil “with multiple payment partners.”

The business-oriented features of WhatsApp are noteworthy since they represent one of the few means the platform is monetized using the WhatsApp Business API. It doesn’t similarly display ads as Instagram and Facebook, two of Meta’s other top services, do. However, a Meta executive told Reuters a year ago that WhatsApp’s business model “in some form or another” is likely to include adverts in the future.

With the debut of person-to-person payments in 2020, Meta recently announced WhatsApp’s “first-ever end-to-end shopping experience” in India with JioMart earlier this year. However, the expansion in Brazil has been more delayed. The payments function of WhatsApp was shut down by Brazil’s national bank in 2020, not long after it was introduced.

The Financial Times reported in April of this year that Meta was having trouble obtaining payment providers for its payment-to-merchant service.

Over 2 billion people use WhatsApp worldwide. According to the company’s quarterly earnings, which were cited by TechCrunch last month, the click-to-WhatsApp ad business had increased revenue by 80% year over year and was on course to reach $1.5 billion annually.

Recently, Meta reported its first-ever yearly revenue drop and laid off over 11,000 employees.

Sandhya Gupta

I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.

Roku lays off 200 employees after weak Q4 Results

In the perfect example of what appears to be daily job cuts in Big Tech, Roku declared its plans presently to lay off about 200 employees, which represents nearly 7 per cent of its workforce. In an SEC filing, the streaming company stated that it intends to cut jobs in the United States due to economic conditions.

The company estimates that the reductions will cost between 28 and 31 million USD in severance pay, notice pay where relevant, employee benefits contributions, as well as other costs.

“Due to the current economic conditions in our industry, we have made the difficult decision to reduce Roku’s headcount expenses by a projected 5%, to slow down our [Operating Expenses] growth rate. This will affect approximately 200 employee positions in the U.S. Taking these actions now will allow us to focus our investments on key strategic priorities to drive future growth and enhance our leadership position,” Roku said in an official statement.
Source: techcrunch.com

As per Roku, a large percentage of the layoffs will occur in Q4, with the remainder predicted to be “substantially complete” by the end of Q1 2023.

In a statement, Roku said, “Taking these actions now will allow us to focus our investments on key strategic priorities to drive future growth and enhance our leadership position.”
Source: engadget.com

These layoffs arrive after Roku warned during its most recent quarterly results that it expects a year-over-year profits decline in Q4. In pre-market trading today, the company’s stock fell nearly three per cent.

Job cuts in Big Tech have emerged as an unfortunate trend in recent days. Roku’s layoffs arise on the heels of downsizing at Meta, which laid off 11,000 of its employees last week; Twitter, which laid off nearly 3,800 staff members earlier this month; and Amazon and Microsoft.

Even though Apple has thus far been an exception, it has decided to impose a hiring freeze that is expected to last until late 2023. Similarly, Disney is reportedly freezing hiring and planning layoffs, while Netflix laid off about 300 workers in June. Streaming companies, including Roku, have encountered the dual difficulties of an uncertain economy and revenue downturn following a surge during the coronavirus pandemic.

Suhani Jain

I am a student pursuing my bachelor’s in information technology. I have a interest in writing so, I am working a freelance content writer because I enjoy writing. I also write poetries. I believe in the quote by anne frank “paper has more patience than person

WhatsApp Rolls Out New Feature for Group Chats

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

WhatsApp has been striving to improve the user- experience of group users. The Facebook-owned messaging application a while back increased the maximum number of members in a group. It also unveiled a brand-new Communities feature, which enables WhatsApp users to manage numerous groups under a single roof.

The corporation has officially started to introduce new group functionalities for desktop users. According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is launching a new feature that will enable some beta testers on Desktop beta to view profile photos inside of group chats.

For quite some time, the new WhatsApp feature, which permits PC users to view profile photos within group chats, has been in the works, and statements about the feature have indeed been sighted in previous beta versions.

According to the report’s screenshot, the feature will also allow you to view an image of the member in the group chat screen just beside their name. As of now, the app only displays the names of the members.

To determine whether you have gotten the latest feature, you just have to open a group chat. As previously stated, the feature is currently only available to beta users. However, the company is expected to roll out the feature in a public upcoming update.

WhatsApp officially unveiled a companion mode for smartphone users having Android in the form of a beta update. According to a report by WABetaInfo, a few fortunate beta testers on the Android system are now able to use the WhatsApp companion mode which was highly awaited.

The feature was previously available to just a few Android-based tablet users last month, and it is now accessible to mobile phone users as well. You could use a single WhatsApp account on some other smartphone with the help of the new companion mode.

However, my updates and bugs are still going on. Users will experience a series a changes.

WhatsApp is yet to fix two bugs disclosed by WABetaInfo. A tweet quoted, “Some users are experiencing crashes when downloading videos after installing the latest version of WhatsApp beta for Android. In addition, WhatsApp may continuously play a conversation tone when sending a message.”
Source: thehindubusinessline.com

Suhani Jain

YouTube expands shopping features to combat digital ad slowdown

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

According to the Financial Times on November 15, Tuesday, YouTube is adding shopping features to its short-form video service which is like TikTok, as it seeks to broaden its revenue stream, which has been decreased by falling ad spending.

“Viewers in the U.S., India, Brazil, Canada, and Australia can see the tags and interact with them and we’ll continue to bring tagging to more creators and geographies,” a Google spokesperson said.
Source: usnews.com

Ad sales on Alphabet-owned YouTube fell to US$7.07 billion in the third quarter, down from US$7.2 billion the previous year, as advertisers cut back on ad spending in the name of an economic downturn.

According to the newspaper, the streaming platform is also trying out new commission strategies for influencers who sell stuff via links in videos.

Reuters’ request for comment was not immediately responded to by YouTube.

The report information came only months after YouTube introduced a brand-new way for creators to make a living on short-form videos, launching advertising on its video feature Shorts and offering video makers 45 per cent of the profits.

The internet’s most popular video site has had difficulty keeping up with TikTok, the app that began by organising lip-sync and dance video content and has since grown to 1 billion monthly users.

YouTube sincerely hope that the new shopping features will boost its earnings from digital advertising. The site is introducing new features that will allow users to purchase products directly from videos and learn more about the products they are watching.

This is in addition to the existing features, which allow users to add items to their shopping carts and keep them for later use. In addition, when users are watching videos on YouTube, a new “shopping shelf” will show up on the right side of their screen. This shelf will display similar products that users can purchase as well as product information.

Suhani Jain

Google to pay $391M to settle Android location tracking lawsuit

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

Google has consented to pay 391.5 million USD to settle an android location tracking lawsuit filed by an alliance of 40 U.S. attorneys general.

“For years Google has prioritized profit over their users’ privacy,” said Attorney General Rosenblum. “They have been crafty and deceptive. Consumers thought they had turned off their location tracking features on Google, but the company continued to secretly record their movements and use that information for advertisers,” he said in a statement late on Monday.
Source: bleepingcomputer.com

According to the android location tracking lawsuit settlement, the United States Attorneys General found while investigating a 2018 Associated Press article that Google swindled Android users and monitored their locations ever since least 2014, even when they assumed location tracking was not active.

While Android users were deceived into believing that disabling “Location History” in the smartphone’s settings would deactivate location tracking, this other account setting, “Web & App Activity,” which has been enabled by default, allowed the company to collect, store, and utilize the customers’ personal information i.e. location data.

The agreement reached today also requires Google to implement extra user-friendly account control mechanisms and restricts the firm’s use and storage of certain types of location data.

Google will also be required to be transparent with its users about its location data tracking and collection practises, such as displaying extra details when location-related account settings are toggled and displaying detailed information about what data it harvests and how it is used.

“The company’s online reach enables it to target consumers without the consumer’s knowledge or permission,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said on Monday.

“However, the transparency requirements of this settlement will ensure that Google not only makes users aware of how their location data is being used, but also how to change their account settings if they wish to disable location-related account settings, delete the data collected and set data retention limits.”
Source: bleepingcomputer.com

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission fined Google 60 million USD in August for deceiving and obtaining location data from Australian Android users for approximately two years which was between January 2017 to December 2018, using the same strategy.

According to the ACCC, Google has taken corrective measures to address the problems that resulted in these financial penalties by 20 December 2018, with customers no longer being shown inaccurate information implying that resetting location history stops gathering data regarding their location.

In January 2022, France’s National Commission on Informatics and Liberty charged Google $170 million for infringing on internet users’ freedom of consent by making it difficult to reject website tracking the cookies by hiding that option under multiple clicks.

The firm was also charged 11.3 million USD in November 2021 for aggressive data collection, €220 million in June 2021 for choosing its services over competitors, 1.7 billion USD in March 2019 for anti-competitive practices in online advertising and $2.72 billion in June 2017 for misusing its high position in the market to manipulate search results.

Suhani Jain

Google to release Nest Wi-Fi Pro update next week to fix slow internet speed

Leave a Comment / News, Tech News / By Suhani Jain

Google will launch a software upgrade for the brand-new Nest Wi-fi Pro close to the start of the next week to resolve some users’ slow Internet speeds.

Google unveiled its newest IoT products, such as the Nest Wifi Pro, on October 4. The model looks hardly anything like most Wi-Fi routers and costs 200 USD, but it may be valuable for those who are committed to the Nest ecosystem and want a mesh networking setup. Why? The model includes Wi-Fi 6E, which expands on 802.11ax connectivity to provide customers with access to the 6 GHz band. As a matter of fact, the device is evidently future-proof and performs better.

Sanjay Noronha, Google Nest Wifi’s product lead said that “the company is currently investigating reports of a small number of users experiencing reduced Internet speeds on Nest Wifi Pro routers, and that its teams are working to roll out a fix,” as reported by The Verge.
Source: business-standard.com

Considering the combo of performance assurances and high price tag, it is not surprising that some customers were dissatisfied when they discovered a bug that in some cases, was restricting the Nest Wifi Pro to speeds of only around 50 Mbps.

It is noticeably slower than what one might anticipate out of a Wi-Fi 6E device which in actuality, for so many customers, may have signified a dramatic drop compared to the hardware they were using before purchasing Google’s. Luckily, it appears that the firm has heard the complaints and is hard at work on a bug fix.

Not every Nest Wifi Pro owner has reported slow internet speed issues. Google told The Verge that this issue affected only a small percentage of its users. The spokesperson said that Google is working on a bug fix for the issue and that it will begin the launch to consumers close to the start of the next week that means Monday is unclear, but it appears to be only a matter of days away.

According to the statement provided to The Verge, it appears that users in the United Kingdom were more likely to be affected by this glitch than consumers in the United States. That reason for the bug might well be connected to point-to-point protocol over ethernet (PPPoE). It is generally used by DSL service providers in the United Kingdom and DSL is still accessible in many other places, and those users may also be affected.

Google did not go into detail about why these slow speed issues are occurring, allowing the reader to presume what they can, from the information given. In the meantime, if you’ve a non-Pro Google Nest Wi-fi mesh network router and are undergoing slow speeds, the firm has an assistance document outlining possible solutions.

Suhani Jain

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