Facebook is trying to convince you that it’s a protector of small businesses. Given Facebook’s track record of anticompetitive behavior and privacy issues this is hardly believeable. The main target of Facebook’s new ad campaign is Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature that Apple has deployed with iOS 14. Instead of letting users being tracked by...
Author: Martin Treiber
Eight App Trends for 2021
In 2021 we’ll see the continuation of several trends that have been around in 2020. This is not surprising, since these trends have been gaining momentum in the last couple of months. 1. Voice User Interface Personal assistants will continue to grow in usage on mobile devices. They come with more and more features and...
VR Meetings Are Weird, but They Beat Our Current Reality | WIRED
Spatial’s app, which is available on HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets, allows users to create virtual meeting spaces, called Spatial Rooms, and invite others to join. The app is free to use, but users can pay for premium features, like the ability to record meetings. “We’re not trying to sell you...
Proximity Chat
During the pandemic we’ve gotten used to a primarily virtual social and work life. Meetings take place on platforms like Zoom or Jitsi and are working reasonable well. Watching your coworker with a video-stream is surprisingly effective and generates a kind of remote closeness. Online workouts do not involve sharing the same sweatty gym and...
Smart City Project XP
In the Smart City Project XP (Ephemeral Computing Service Plattform) a digital platform for citizens is being developed. One of the main goals of the project is to involve citizens as active participants in helping to shape the platform. For this purpose, special (“no-code”) tools are developed to publish services or apps on the platform....
Smart City Projekt XP
Im ITEA Projekt XP (Ephemeral Computing Service Plattform) wird eine digitale Plattform für Bürgerinnen und Bürger entwickelt. Eines der Hauptziele des Projektes ist die Einbindung von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern als aktive Beteiligte um die Plattform mitzugestalten. Dazu werden eigene (“No-Code”) Tools entwickelt um Services bzw. Apps auf der Plattform zu veröffentlichen. Diese Tools erfordern keinerlei...
YouTube introduces audio ads
Google is moving into the audio ad territory on Youtube. This is particularly notable, since there are more than 2 billion monthly music listeners on YouTube, according to the company. The competion pales in comparison: Spotify, by contrast, reaches 185 million monthly users. Audio is actually where the money is: Internet audio advertising revenue reached...
Move Over, Zoom—Voice Memos Are the Real Way to Stay in Touch | WIRED
The ongoing Covid pandemic stretches us to our limits. During the last months, many of us have been quarantining or (self-)isolating and working from home. The Aspen Institute has studied the effects and published several reports with the telling titles: “Lessons in Loneliness” and “Artificial Intimacy.” Bascially, there is no one size fits all technical...
What we learned from dogfooding call a BOX
Google used the term dogfooding (“eating your own dogfood”) in 2009 to describe the practice of an organization using its own product. We did recently a very similar thing with call a BOX, a self-storage service. After we finished the implementation of the webapge and the progressive web app for our customer, we simply used...
LAL – Little Activity Language
lal is a lightweight Service composition and execution language that is tailored towards the requirements of mobile infrastructures. lal has a considerable small set of abstractions that are easy to understand for people – in comparison with workflow languages like BPEL or YAWL. The latter are used to specify each step that is necessary towards...
