Flash Finale

Farewell to Flash | What It means for Digital Video Publishers

Adobe Flash

  It’s been more than five years since Steve Jobs wrote his infamous “Thoughts on Flash” letter citing the high level of energy consumption, lack of performance on mobile and poor security as the reasons his company’s products would not support Adobe Flash technology. Finally, it appears we’re getting closer to the curtain closing on Flash.

Not too long ago, Flash powered a high percentage of the Internet’s vast array of video content. Today, that number is lower. But make no mistake, there are still many Flash-powered multimedia items on the web, including graphics, videos, games and animations, like GIFs, a preferred method of expression for millennials and adults alike.

We’ve been watching HTML5 impede on Flash for a while, and it’s now taking center stage, establishing itself as a predominant creative format, validated by the recent moves by Google and Mozilla that are only helping to accelerate that transition.

Over the years, Flash has become famous for a few less-than flattering features that can all play a role in hindering user experience, including intrusive experiences, increasing page-load times, lowering a site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and security flaws.

"It’s important to remember that Flash was developed in a time where the desktop was king."

Despite all these grievances, the digital-video advertising industry has been forced to use Flash because of VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface Definition), a standard that allows a video ad and a video player to communicate with each other. VPAID provides a way to dynamically swap or customize video-ad creative based on ad decisions, and has long been used for Flash-based video ads on desktops.

When you consider the fact that Flash needs to be installed (as opposed to HTML5, which requires no installation), it’s easy to see why in the long term, it didn’t stand a chance. Some would argue that Apple’s refusal to ever support it should have been a sign of things to come.

However, it’s important to remember that Flash was developed in a time where the desktop was king. The long load times it commands simply aren’t conducive to mobile environments — a deal-breaker for today’s mobile-first world.

What Does The Change Mean For Publishers?

In spite of all this, for digital-video publishers, excitement may not be the initial emotion evoked by Flash‘s funeral. With the goal of increasing browsing speed and reducing power consumption for users, Google’s Chrome desktop browser announced their formerly opt-in setting that pauses plug-in content that isn’t considered essential to the webpage will become a default setting by early September.

This means that if publishers don’t upgrade their format specification, some or all of their video content may no longer be available for people to view; this will certainly affect viewer loyalty and monetization efforts.

For example, Flash video ads served in a desktop Chrome browser will load in a paused state, then the user will have to click the ad for it to play. These ads will still register as impressions. However, it won’t take long for programmatic buyers to scale back their bids on video ad inventory garnering a high number of impressions with no quartiles.

Publishers need to urge their buyers to prepare for the upcoming Flash-pocalypse because, despite the publishers‘ level of preparation, if their buyers don’t have the proper HTML5 creative assets, it will impact their ability to transact, having an impact on publisher revenue and the ability to successfully implement advertiser campaigns.

How Publishers Can Prepare ?

The most crucial thing for publishers is going to be ensuring that their advertisers and demand partners (ad networks, ad exchanges and advertisers) are providing and hosting HTML5 ad creatives moving forward.

Publishers themselves will also need to migrate their tech stack. Not having a complete HTML5 advertising technology stack can potentially impact their ad revenue as buyer bids will eventually subside for non-compatible inventory.

"Publishers need to urge their buyers to prepare for the upcoming Flash-pocalypse." 

Any change that has the potential to have a significant, long-term impact on a publisher’s business is going to be a bit scary. However, in the long run, this change will be better for the digital ecosystem as a whole.

In fact, some advertising technology companies have already begun to automatically convert Flash ads to HTML5 to help make the transition for publishers less painful.

The Impact :

For publishers, one of the biggest wins of Flash‘s depreciation comes in the form of engineering resources saved. Historically, video publishers have always wanted to pick a standard, but the reality is, they haven’t been able to because of the aforementioned VPAID issue.

They’ve essentially been forced to use Flash to keep their ads business running — but also support an HTML5 code base. This means that any software management, maintenance and updates they make, like bug fixes, must be addressed in both code bases, which is very time-consuming from an engineering standpoint.

By switching their platform to HTML5, companies can improve supportability, development time will decrease and the duplicative efforts of supporting two code bases will be eliminated. It will also result in lower operating costs and a consistent user experience between desktop and mobile web.

A major concern for publishers today is the amount of media consumption that’s occurring in mobile environments. They need to prioritize providing the best possible experience on mobile, and the decline of Flash and movement to HTML5 will do just that, as Flash has never worked well on mobile.

Time spent on mobile devices is still climbing steadily; according to eMarketer, U.S. adults will spend more than 5.5 hours per day with digital media in 2015, the majority (2:51) of which will be spent on a mobile device.

Popular desktop browsers, like Chrome, revoking their support for Flash, is a catalyst for HTML5 becoming digital-video advertising’s format for the future.

A Win-Win-Win :

I believe that a Flash-free world will be better for everyone. HTML5 is conducive to the direction media consumption is heading and will positively affect people’s digital-video viewing (a primary concern for today’s digital publishers), creating a better overall Internet experience. It also takes less bandwidth than Flash to run, making it much more efficient for battery life on consumer’s devices.

There will be some initial challenges for digital-video publishers and broadcasters. For example, HTML5 creative is heavier, so they’ll need to be diligent about updating their specs and acceptance. But in the long run, they will be able to provide a better user experience, which in turn will help drives results for their advertisers.

News with such big implications for the digital-ad world can often warrant mixed reactions and spark discussions over who will benefit the most. But this is one change that I think both publishers and advertisers can appreciate and recognize as a huge step forward for the ecosystem.

"Take a bow, Flash; your grand finale is here — and everyone in the audience should be clapping."

Courtesy : Techcrunch

Google vs Facebook

More people read news on Facebook than Google

  Facebook now accounts for more of the traffic to news sites than Google, according to latest results.

Links shared on Facebook and Twitter have become a crucial source of incoming traffic, and have been vying with search as a source of new readers for some time, said results from the analytics firm Parse.Ly.

"The company's latest estimates show that social-media sources accounted for 43% of the traffic to the Parse.Ly network of media sites, while Google accounted for just 38%," Fortune magazine quoted Parse.Ly's chief technical officer Andrew Montalenti as saying.

Google vs Facebook

This is not the first time that Facebook has edged past Google in the traffic-referral race.

"The social network took the top spot by a small amount last October, but this month's lead is far more dramatic.

It is clear that search has hit a kind of plateau and is not really growing any more as a referral source for media.

"There's a lot of effort among media companies being placed on specific social channels like Twitter, but our data shows that Twitter is basically a distant traffic source".

"Facebook is more like a black box in terms of how it operates. And yet it's this huge and growing traffic source".

Traffic analytics firm Parse.ly says its latest figures show the giant social network now accounts for more of the traffic to news sites than Google.

Anyone who works for a major news website or publisher knows that social referrals—that is, links that are shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter—have become a crucial source of incoming traffic, and have been vying with search as a source of new readers for some time. Now, according to new numbers from the traffic-analytics service Parse.ly, Facebook is no longer just vying with Google but has overtaken it by a significant amount.

Courtesy : TOI

47% more accurate than Google Search

Indian-origin 16 year old claims his search engine is 47% more accurate than Google

Anmol Tukrel

Watch out Sundar Pichai. There's a high school project that tops Google's main cash cow, the search engine.

Sixteen-year-old Anmol Tukrel, an Indian-origin Canadian citizen has designed a personalized search engine that claims to be as high as 47% more accurate than Google, and about 21% more accurate on an average.

Tukrel, who just completed his tenth grade, said he took a couple of months to design it, and about 60 hours to code the engine, as part of his submission into Google Science Fair, a global online competition that is open to students aged 13 to 18 years.

"I thought I would do something in the personalized search space. It was the most genius thing ever. But when I realized Google already does it, I tried taking it to the next level," said Tukrel, who was in India for a two-week internship programme at Bengaluru-based adtech firm IceCream Labs.

Tukrel's tinkering kit: A computer with at least 1 gigabyte of free storage space, a python-language development environment, a spreadsheet program and access to Google and New York Times.

To test the accuracy of each search engine, he limited his search query to this year's news articles from The New York Times. He created several fictitious users with different interests and corresponding web histories. Tukrel then fed this information to both Google and his interest-based search engine. Finally, the results from each search engine were compared. 

Anmol Tukrel & Sundar Pichai

Today, personalization is dependent on factors like one's location, browsing history, and the affinity to the kind of apps they install on their phone. That's just one part of the equation. Tukrel claims his algorithm solves the other side of the equation: It understands what a user would like before it serves up the results by dwelling deep into the content of the text, understanding the underlying meaning, before matching it to a user's personality, and throwing up the result.

"For someone to look at a successful Google product and attempt to go one level up, it's astonishing," said Sanjay Ramakrishnan, co-founder of Ice-Cream Labs, and former marketing manager of Myntra. Tukrel, the student of Holy Trinity School in Toronto, said he learnt to code in his third grade, and subsequently picked up on mathematics and coding.

"My computer teacher was pretty impressed with the project. I skipped a year in computer science, so they knew I was good, but may be not so good," said Tukrel, who has put up a link to the test cases online for anyone to view.

Tukrel submitted his paper to the International High School Journal of Science last month, and hopes to study computer science at Stanford University. But before that, he wants to develop a news aggregator based on this technology, and licence it to a few digital marketing agencies as well. Would he become a fellow at Paypal founder Peter Theil's foundation, where one is required to drop out of college to try an idea?

"To be honest, it's incredibly stupid to drop out," said Tukrel. "It's very arrogant to think that your idea is so good, that you don't need to learn anything."

But, Tukrel also runs a company, which has a palindromic name: Tacocat Computers. But, is he legally allowed to?

"Yes. You just need parental consent."

And, what next?

"Eleventh grade."

Courtesy : TOI

Kaspersky Accused

Kaspersky Antivirus accused of creating fake malware for over 10 years

Kaspersky Lab, makers of a popular antivirus service, might have created fake malware for over ten years to harm its competitors. The software was benign, but Kaspersky fooled other antivirus software into marking it as infected.

Two ex-employees told Reuters that the clandestine attack was originally meant to punish smaller rivals that Kaspersky felt were ‘stealing’ its technology.

It basically worked like this: Kaspersky would inject dangerous-looking code into common pieces of software. It would then anonymously submit the files to malware aggregators such as Google-owned VirusTotal. When competitors added the malware to their detection engines, they’d mistakenly flag the original files because of the similar code.

The hoax job eventually included large rivals such as Microsoft, AVG and Avast. These companies had no comment on the Kaspersky allegation, but had previously informed Reuters of an unknown third party trying to trick them into marking false positives.

Reuters’ sources claim they were part of just a small group of people who know about the sabotage, which peaked from 2009 to 2013. Kaspersky allegedly had researchers working from “weeks to months” on the project.

Kaspersky, for its part, denied the claims:

“Our company has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing. Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable.”

Reuters’ sources did not say if they believed the supposed sabotage is ongoing. For more on the allegations, check out the source link below.

Eugene Kaspersky is not happy about the Reuters piece, and took to Twitter to deny the claims - "filled with sensational - false - allegations."

Courtesy : TNW

Sundar Pichai

New CEO of a 'slimmed-down' Google

Sundar Pichai

   The senior vice-president of product will lead a “slimmed down” Google as Page will head Alphabet, the new parent company announced on Monday

When Google announced a surprise restructuring on Monday, a very big spotlight suddenly shone on Sundar Pichai, the executive who will replace Larry Page as Google’s CEO.

Pichai’s appointment is part of restructuring that will end with a “slimmed-down” company. This smaller, search-focused Google will be the largest subsidiary of a new parent company called Alphabet. With Page leaving to head Alphabet, the position of Google CEO became available.

Page said Pichai was the natural choice to lead Google.

Pichai “has really stepped up since October of last year, when he took on product and engineering responsibility for our internet businesses. Sergey and I have been super excited about his progress and dedication to the company”, Page said in a post.

Google to restructure into new holding company called Alphabet.

“I feel very fortunate to have someone as talented as him to run the slightly slimmed down Google and this frees up time for me to continue to scale our aspirations. I have been spending quite a bit of time with Sundar, helping him and the company in any way I can, and I will of course continue to do that.”

Page went on to say that Pichai will continue to stretch boundaries and ensure that Google in its new form “can continue to make big strides on our core mission to organize the world’s information”.

Colin Gillis, technology analyst at BGC Partners in New York, said Pichai’s appointment was a smart move given the current fight for talent in technology. With Twitter and others looking for new bosses the former Android and Chrome boss is top of many head hunters’ lists.

“My sense is he is someone in high demand,” said Gillis. Offering him the top job at Google may keep him in the fold.

“Since joining Google in 2004, Sundar has led a number of key consumer products which are now used by hundreds of millions of people and, prior to his current role, served as Google’s SVP of Android, Chrome and Apps,” according to the documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He has bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, a master’s degree from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Eric Schmidt, who was executive chairman at the old Google and will now become the executive chairman of Alphabet, tweeted out the announcement, saying: “Really excited about the vision and brilliance of Sundar .. he’s going to be a great CEO!”

“I would challenge you to find anyone at Google who doesn’t like Sundar or who thinks Sundar is a jerk,” Caesar Sengupta, a vice-president who has worked with Pichai for eight years, told Bloomberg last year.

“If there’s anybody that could take over as CEO one day, I would see Sundar as being a great choice for doing that,” Maarten Hooft, partner at the venture capital firm Quest Venture Partners told Business Insider last year. Hooft and Pichai worked together for six years between 2006 and 2012. “There’s a lot of smart people [at Google], but in terms of the consumer products he’s worked on so far, I doubt they would be as successful without Sundar being there.”

In addition to being well liked, Pichai has been previously described as the “most powerful man in mobile” and the “man behind Google’s most important products”.

Courtesy : theguardian

Yahoo's Tool fixes one of the Biggest Problems with Email

Yahoo fixes the Biggest Email Problem

Marissa Mayer - CEO Yahoo!

      Starting next week, Yahoo Mail is getting a beefed-up search feature that's better at helping its 255 million users dig through your email for the stuff you want, reports the New York Times.

It's super common for e-mail users, like me, to use their e-mail as a total online life archive. Photos, documents, coupons, whatever else I need, I just do a Gmail search and dig through messages dating back to 2007 until I find what I was looking for.

The new Yahoo Mail search is designed with that in mind. If you search for "Photos from Disneyland," its algorithm will apparently go to work and just display an impromptu photo gallery culled from your messages.

It can also help you narrow a search, so that if you're looking for your American Airlines boarding pass, it won't also show you every marketing e-mail you've ever gotten from them. Another potential use is for finding coupons from a store while you're at that store, sifting through your unopened promo email.

Google, the world's No.1 Internet search company, has tried to tackle this problem from a different direction. The company takes a more proactive approach with tools like the Inbox app and Google Now, which automatically surface information inside of emails that it thinks are relevant based on contex such as geographic location and time of day. But Google's actual email search function works mostly the same as it has for the last almost-decade.

For Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive who for years oversaw the design of Google's search engine, the focus on email search is a natural move. Mayer recently amended Yahoo's search partnership with Microsoft, giving Yahoo new freedom to develop search offerings.

The technology that Yahoo is employing here will also go into other products like Fantasy Sports and the new Livetext app, per that report. It can also be used for smarter, more personal search.

It's an important move for Yahoo, which has spent most of the last decade allowing Google to leapfrog it in terms of search innovation. Now let's see how the new email search tool works in real life.

Courtesy : BusinessInsider

7+ Steps to Browse any Banned Websites

How to Browse any Blocked Websites?

 

#1. Use a proxy to browse the site in anonymity. There are tons of "free proxy servers". When you are using proxy servers please ensure you are not using it to access your banking or sharing any personal data since the data can be intercepted by the third party. But it's an easy way to access blocked sites. You can configure your browser to use proxy server using a special port or directly access proxy server and use the url bar provided in their site to type the address you want to visit. Here is a list of few free proxy servers:

   a. Hidemyass   -   https://www.hidemyass.com/proxy

   b. Kproxy         -  http://www.kproxy.com/

   c. Proxify         -  https://proxify.com/

#2. Use a paid VPN service. They typically provide you servers from many different country - pick one which won't block the sites you want to visit. VPN service usage can be tracked down so use it wisely. And "ibvpn" is cheap and speed is good too.

#3. Use TOR free service to roam the internet without any sort of censorship.

#4. For ease of use install Firefox add-on or Chrome extension. Here are few to help you with: Browsec, Zenmate, Hola(No Linux support) and Frigate.

#5. Use a smart DNS service. Here is a list of services: https://7labs.heypub.com/tips-tricks/best-smart-dns-providers.html

#6. Visit translate.google.com and type in the URL to access your site. Will work for few type of sites only.

#7. The best trick and the most free/simple one if you are slightly technical inclined. Ping the domain and get the IP address then put a host entry in /etc/hosts if you are in Linux/Mac, if using windows the etc/hosts can be found under c:\windows\system32. The entry should be in the form of "ipaddress yourcustomdomainname.com" yourcustomdomainname.com can be any name which isn't blocked.  After you access the primary url and when you navigate to a new link again it might say the site is blocked but just again change the name of the primary domain in URL to your hosts entry domain name and it would work.

#8. If your isp is really stupid you can directly use ip instead of domain name to avoid the restriction without using any of the above mentioned method.

@ Please don't take this learning for accessing Porn sites.

Author : Navin Sylvester

Yahoo Livetext is Here!

Yahoo reveals Livetext, its new silent Video Chat app...

         Yahoo has a new way to connect with your friend. At an event today in Manhattan, Yahoo announced a new app called Livetext, available tomorrow in the iTunes store. Yahoo describes the app as "live video texting," essentially a combination of self-facing live video and chat. Each Livetext starts as a live stream akin to Periscope, which is then overlaid with text messages typed by the user in real time, scrolling upwards like a conventional texting program. Each Livetext is one-to-one and doesn't begin until both parties agree to open the channel, cutting down on the potential for spam or abuse.

The result is a combination of traditional texting and more media-rich platforms like Snapchat and Beme. But while those apps work with both video and audio, Livetext is entirely silent, communicating only through muted video and text. The result falls somewhere between a Snapchat and a GIF, a combination Yahoo hopes will foster a sense of intimacy among users. "We want to create the emotional connection," said Yahoo product manger Arjun Seti. "We want to make sure you can get into a conversation as quickly as possible." The app is also ephemeral, deleting the chats and video as soon as the app is closed.

Livetext first appeared earlier this month for users in Hong Kong and Thailand, but hasn't been available elsewhere before now. Much of the team working on the app came from Yahoo's 2014 acquisition of MessageMe, an app with similar features.

Livetext is Yahoo's first move back into messaging in recent years, after effectively abandoning the once-popular Yahoo Messenger. Messenger apps like WhatsApp and WeChat have proven explosively popular in recent years, leading to increased interest in across the industry. Facebook launched its own stand-alone messenger app earlier this year. It's still unclear how Yahoo plans to make money off of Livetext, but for now, the focus seems to be on building a strong user base. "We want to start by finding that audience," said Yahoo VP Adam Cahan. "Once you get to scale, there are opportunities to monetize."

Yahoo Livetext is ranked as the Top 10 Android Apps for August 2015.

http://www.mensxp.com/technology/portable-media/27103-top-10-android-apps-for-august-2015.html