The Product Placement Blog compiled a list of all of the Apple product placements in movies, TV shows, and music videos.
You will find here the most complete list on the web about brands seen in Hollywood movies, TV shows and official music videos, embedded marketing examples and information about them.
It’s 80 pages long, which is notable since Apple doesn’t pay for product placements in television.
The Verge writes about legal issues when an AI composes music.
The word “human” does not appear at all in US copyright law, and there’s not much existing litigation around the word’s absence. This has created a giant gray area and left AI’s place in copyright unclear. It also means the law doesn’t account for AI’s unique abilities, like its potential to work endlessly and mimic the sound of a specific artist.
Not to mention the question of who owns the copyright of this new music. Fascinating discussion here.
Messages posted by an unknown female Microsoft programmer in internal Yammer boards say that white and Asian men are being discriminated against.
To be clear, I am referring to the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate against Asians and white men. I have an ever-increasing file of white male Microsoft employees who have faced outright and overt discrimination because they had the misfortune of being born both white and male.
Microsoft’s 2018 demographic report shows that 55.1% of employees are Caucasian, 31.9% are Asian, and 73.4% are male. Personally, I think it’s a bit telling if you feel oppressed by more equality and diversity.
This morning we heard that JCPenney quietly removed support for Apple Pay from its stores. Now we have a better idea why.
The retailer now claims the move was necessitated by the April 13, 2019 deadline in the U.S. for supporting EMV contactless chip functionality. As of this date, all terminals at U.S. merchants locations that accept contactless payments must actively support EMV contactless chip functionality, and the legacy MSD (magnetic stripe data) contactless technology must be retired. JCPenney was not ready to comply, it seems, so it switched off all contactless payment options as a result. However, it hasn’t ruled out re-enabling them later on, it seems.
Left-wing memes are often very popular on Instagram. They have even made some of the people who share them quite well-off. Now some of those creators want to form a union, according to Vox.
The union, the first major organizing effort for professional meme creators on Instagram, is made up of that latter group, and now has thousands of followers on its official account and an open application process for new members. As Taylor Lorenz notes in the Atlantic, it will probably never be recognized by the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that governs unions, but the organizing drive is still very real: Not only does it use traditional union organizing tactics, but the memers have concrete demands they want Instagram to agree to. And with growing membership, they’ll likely have a bit of leverage.
The Indian election is the world’s largest democratic exercise. There is, unsurprisingly, some concern that it could be undermined by fake news. Bloomberg News met Boom Live, an 11-strong team of fact-checkers that make up 1 of the 7 firms working with Facebook’s efforts.
Based on the early tallies, more than 60 percent of India’s 900 million eligible voters are expected to cast ballots between now and May 19, as the center-left Congress Party tries to seize power from the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party. As in other elections around the world, paid hacks and party zealots are churning out propaganda on Facebook and the company’s WhatsApp messenger, along with Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and other ubiquitous communication channels. Together with Facebook’s automated filters, Boom’s 11 fact-checkers and its similar-size fellow contractors are the front line of the social network’s shield against this sludge.
Apparently, Apple employs a full-time philosopher named Joshua Cohen. But he doesn’t have permission to talk to the media.
The company hired Joshua Cohen, formerly a political philosophy professor at Stanford University to work at Apple University, an institution created by Steve Jobs in 2008 to offer employees the kind of training typically available at university programs. The specifics of this university are kept tightly under wraps.
Apple has made a good start when it comes to privacy, but there are more private features the company can add. Here are four.
…based on Apple’s marketing focus as of late, which has centered on privacy, it’s reasonable to assume that the company will unveil additional privacy protections for users and their data in its next operating systems. What those privacy protections might be is anyone’s guess–but here are my hopes.
End-to-end encryption for iCloud backups is definitely on my wish list. But it should remain optional, because people who forget their password would be unable to access this kind of backup.
In Wired’s latest magazine, Clive Thompson writes that for some programmers, efficiency isn’t just a way to make a job easier. It’s aesthetically pleasing.
Many of today’s programmers have their efficiency aha moment in their teenage years, when they discover that life is full of blindingly dull repetitive tasks and that computers are really good at doing them.
I’m not a programmer, but I’m a big fan of efficiency and optimizing my life. I don’t go as far as the “optimized self” movement, but I like to automate whenever possible. The less time you spend doing repetitive tasks, the more you can spend enjoying life.
This is part of Andrew’s News+ series, where he shares a magazine every Friday to help people discover good content in Apple News+.
Roughly 500 million iOS users have been affected by a cyberattack that takes advantage of an iOS Chrome bug.
The attacks are the work of the eGobbler gang, researchers said, which has a track record of mounting large-scale malvertising attacks ahead of major holiday weekends. Easter is coming up, and the crooks are banking on consumers spending a lot more time than usual browsing the web on their phones.
Another research firm says this attack can also affect Safari users. Be careful this weekend.
This week, TikTok got banned in India. Apple removed it from the iOS App Store in the country. However, the video-sharing app remains hugely popular with a young audience worldwide. Bloomberg Businessweek looked at why.
TikTok decides what videos to show by tapping into data, starting with your location. Then, as you start watching, it analyzes the faces, voices, music, or objects in videos you watch the longest. Liking, sharing, or commenting improves TikTok’s algorithm further. Within a day, the app can get to know you so well it feels like it’s reading your mind. That’s why Jade, the Oklahoma teen, mostly sees videos of people dancing, while her mom regularly gets clips of dog tricks.
This week, Facebook banned far-right groups in the UK. These included the likes of Britain First and the English Defence League. At Wired, Matt Reynolds looked at the profound shift by the company this move signalled.
And Facebook says it will go further than just banning these organisations and individuals. It will also go after their followers…This is a dramatic switch for a company that, until a month ago, still talked about itself as a digital “town square” – a space where all voices, including the distasteful and dubious, jostled for attention, free from any interference. It is a seductive ideal that harks back to the early days of the internet and its promise of unfettered freedom of speech.
Apple has hired former Lionsgate Executive Vice President Danielle DePalma. She will be a Senior Film and TV Series Marketing executive, leading on promoting Apple’s forthcoming content. Deadline reported that she will report to Head of Video Marketing Chris Van Amburg.
DePalma was a Lionsgate veteran who spent about a decade at the company before leaving in January. At Lionsgate she previously served as SVP digital marketing and VP new media and marketing, overseeing the digital/social media campaigns for such movies as The Hunger Games franchise and Kick-Ass.
Microsoft closed its eBook store several weeks ago. People lost their books, but at least the company refunded them. Because of this, Michael Kozlowski of Good e-Reader says people are experiencing a “crisis of confidence” in eBooks.
I believe that ebooks are suffering from a crisis of confidence. It is beginning to be quite difficult to trust a retailer to not disappear overnight with your ebooks, no matter how big they are…A recent study published in the journal Electronic Markets found that the vast majority of people felt a constricted sense of ownership of ebooks versus physical books, based on the fact that they don’t have full control over the products.
He also mentions how a lot companies use DRM on eBooks, which factors into the “You license, not own, your eBooks” argument. I’d like to point out that Apple Books doesn’t apply DRM to most if not all of its books. I can take books I buy on there and move it to another service if I want, which makes me feel as if I truly own them.
ZDNet writes:
The term 768k Day comes from the original mother of all internet outages known as 512k Day.
512k Day happened on August 12, 2014, when hundreds of ISPs from all over the world went down, causing billions of dollars in damages due to lost trade and fees, from a lack of internet connectivity or packet loss
This time we’re much better prepared. However,
There will certainly be some network operators and corporate end-user organizations who will be caught unaware and will experience problems…
Facebook and Apple’s approach to privacy has long differentiated the two firms. While that remains the case, things are changing Writer, and recent Background Mode guest, Lance Ulanoff looked at the next phase of the battle between companies.
Facebook hasn’t traditionally cared much for [privacy], for example, while Apple has bent over backwards to market privacy features. But the tide may be shifting, depending on how you interpret some recent product announcements. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently committed himself to “building a privacy-focused” platform, while Apple announced a slate of new services that a different, less scrupulous company might use to harvest user data.
The Mueller Report has now been uploaded and released to the public, and it has been heavily redacted. It’s 448 pages long.
This report is submitted to the Attorney General pursuant to 28 C.F.R. § 600.8(c), which states that, “[a]t the conclusion of the Special Counscl’s work, he…shall provide the Attorney General a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions [the Special Counsel] reached.”
Apple’s Vice President of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson was recently named one of Business Insider’s 100 people transforming the world of business. The publication has a fascinating interview with the Apple exec, in which she talks about Apple’s aim to make an iPhone from only recycled materials.
Since joining Apple in 2013, Jackson has driven initiatives like Apple’s decision to run on 100% clean energy and the Daisy recycling robot, which it announced in 2018 after debuting its first iPhone-dismantling machine called Liam in 2016. “We’re feeling really good about the fact that we’ve watched this idea go from a pilot stage with Liam to full production stage in Daisy,” Jackson said…Apple’s initiatives under Jackson come as advocacy groups have criticized the company and other large tech firms and accused them of kneecapping efforts to minimize manufacturing waste
AirPods are hugely popular. Everywhere you turn people have them hanging out of their ears. While they bring a lot of benefits, not least for Apple, Buzzfeed News looked at the awkward social situations the wireless headphones can create.
Unlike traditional headphones, AirPods are the kind of things you can keep in your ears at all times, and many people do. Their sleek design and lack of wires make it easy to forget they’re resting in your head. And their status symbol shine doesn’t exactly scream “take me out.” This may be great for Apple and its bottom line, but it’s making life weird for people interacting with those wearing them. Are they listening to me? Are they listening to music? A podcast? Just hanging? It’s tough to know.
The Texas Privacy Protection Act (HB 4390) was introduced last month, and it would require opt-in consent from consumers before companies could use their data for targeted ads. Advertisers aren’t happy.
Without the ability to effectively advertise online due to opt-in consent barriers, revenues will be impacted and companies that rely on such revenue may no longer be able to support free and low cost content and services that Texans desire, such as online newspapers, social networking sites, mobile applications, email, and phone services,” the ad industry writes in a letter sent last week.
The groups add that the constant requests for consent will frustrate consumers and also “desensitize” them, which will reduce “their sense of control over their privacy.”
Not everyone was rejoicing at the news that Qualcomm and Apple had settled their differences. An Australia-based trader with the handle ‘Arminoxx’ revealed that he had woken up in the night to look after his crying baby. At the same time, he sold some of his position in Qualcomm, trying to limit his expected losses. That was hours before the firms settled. The move cost the trader a $50,000 return, according to MarketWatch.
“I live in Australia, so I am mostly sleeping during U.S. trading hours,” [the trader] said. “However, I woke up at 4 a.m. and decided to put a limit sell order of $0.06 on my options to salvage my losses given that only 2 days are remaining till expiry, and went back to sleep.” Ouch. Arminoxx, in an exercise in self-flagellation, tallied what he would have made had he slept through the night: $50,000 or a 6,000% gain.
Wisconsin’s governor wants to renegotiate his deal with Foxconn, saying he doesn’t believe the jobs promised as part of the deal will come.
“Clearly the deal that was struck is no longer in play and so we will be working with individuals at Foxconn and of course with (the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.) to figure out how a new set of parameters should be negotiated.”
Wisconsin forced people out of their homes, claiming the site of the Foxconn plant was blighted, and now it’s changing its mind. Shameful.
File this under, “we suspected that might happen.” CNBC writes:
Samsung’s $1,980 Galaxy Fold phone is breaking for some users after a day or two of use. A review unit given to CNBC by Samsung is also completely unusable after just two days of use.
Maybe the customers are holding it wrong. Android Central also has details.
A day after Qualcomm and Apple reached a settlement, CNBC released an interview with Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf.
Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf joins CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” to discuss the Qualcomm-Apple settlement and the company’s future in 5G.
I can’t directly link the video here but I think it’s worth watching.
