Concern over Google’s plans to capture more data

According to the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry, Google’s market dominance is based on the data it collects from third-party apps and websites, as well as from searches and location information. The fitness trackers from Fitbit gather user health information like step counts, heart rates, and sleep statistics. The worry is that if Google purchases Fitbit, the tech corporation may be able to get even more detailed information about the user. Rod Sims, chair of the ACCC, emphasises that the combination of Fitbit data with Google’s database will only strengthen Google’s position. According to Sims, this would strengthen its position and increase entrance hurdles for possible competitors.

Concern about the market’s competition

The competitiveness in the wearables sector is another issue that the ACCC is quite concerned about. Market leaders Fitbit and Apple Watch are both well-known brands. There are additional players who are eager to enter the industry. When it comes to internet advertising, the ACCC is worried that Google may prioritise its own wearable gadgets over those of rivals.

The ACCC is concerned that Google would favour Fitbit over rivals when providing crucial connected services like Google Maps, WearOS, the Google Play Store, or smartphone compatibility for Android. Not just Fitbit devices are up for competition. Fitbit offers solutions and software for health and wellbeing to employers, healthcare providers, and insurers in addition to wearable activity trackers.

The Google-Fitbit agreement has drawn criticism from the ACCC as the first regulator to do so. Sims said that the ACCC will closely collaborate with competition regulators in other countries who are also examining the transaction. 

Fitbit will continue to work with both iOS and Android, according to a blog post by Rick Osterloh, Senior VP, Devices & Services at Google. Additionally, Google stated that Fitbit’s attitude to user privacy and security as well as its data collection practises won’t change. Additionally, according to Rick, Google advertisements will not use Fitbit’s health data. The Google acquisition of Fitbit is anticipated to close in 2020.

Details of YouTube’s Video Chapters

The bottom of the video player will display the new YouTube video functionality. It is optional and will only be visible if the creator decides to include it. To produce chapters, creators don’t need to use any specific tools. Simply provide the pertinent timestamps in the video’s description. The video must have at least three chapters and the starting timestamp must be at 0:00. Every chapter must last at least 10 seconds. The Chapters will be automatically selected once the timestamps have been added to the description and the modifications have been saved.

Now, a YouTube video maker only has to begin the description of their video with any timecode other than 0:00 if they don’t want to use the Video Chapters feature but still want to specify certain time codes.

YouTube has started to offer haptic feedback to make it simpler for users to browse the new Video Chapters. The use of haptic feedback alerts viewers to the beginning of a new chapter. However, this function is only accessible via a mobile device.

Chapters for YouTube Videos: Pros and Cons

Viewers will find it simpler to scroll through long-form content thanks to YouTube’s new feature. Additionally, this feature might improve user interest. On the other hand, it can result in less people watching the entire film because they might stop after finishing a certain segment.

Some YouTubers were already stating the timestamp of significant points they had covered in their video descriptions prior to the release of this functionality. In other instances, viewers had to skip forward and search through the films to find the material they wanted to see. Viewers will find it simpler to skip to a certain section of a video thanks to video chapters. It is a straightforward feature that has the potential to fundamentally alter how viewers and YouTube creators produce and consume content.

As the virus spread throughout the world, major tech businesses also saw an increase in fake news. Another recent study by the GDI reveals that tech giants like Google and Amazon are giving money to websites disseminating untruths and conspiracies about the coronavirus. The GDI discovered that 86% of the 50 or more coronavirus conspiracy websites it sampled used Google’s ad services [2]. 

A key objective of significant platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google is to combat fake news.

To learn what tech businesses are doing to manage the deluge of false information and fake news, enter your email address below:

Technologies used by IT firms to combat fake news

1. Google

Google’s first attempt to stop the spread of false information was the Google News Initiative. The three objectives of the campaign were to promote trustworthy journalism and counter incorrect information. to provide journalists with dependable tools for their work and to assist reputable news outlets in expanding.

Google has also collaborated with groups like “First Draft” to launch “Disinfo Lab,” which aims to combat false information during elections.

Google also disclosed the existence of a 24-hour coronavirus reaction team that will be responsible for removing false information from Search and Youtube. 

2. YouTube

For the purpose of reducing the appearance of negative comments, YouTube has updated its ranking mechanism. Additionally, it introduced the Breaking News shelf on the user’s homepage and the Top News shelf in search results. Additionally, it prioritises authoritative content in the search results. To enhance the calibre of news, it also made investments in reputable journalism organisations.

In addition, YouTube has been establishing fact-checking information panels in the United States, Europe, and India. Along with strengthening their machine learning to categorise information as dangerous, unsafe, and fraudulent, it also increased authoritative content in the Watch Next area.

Google-owned The World Health Organization website on the viral outbreak has also been published to YouTube. The hyperlink appeared next to videos as well.

3. Facebook

With the aid of independent fact-checking organizations, Facebook is working to improve its ability to spot false information when it comes to reducing fake news on social media. Facebook is using machine learning to help its response team identify fraudulent and malicious activity.  

Additionally, they started a Facebook Journalism Project. Facebook works with news organisations on this project to create products, services, and tools for journalists that will ultimately assist consumers in making informed decisions.

Additionally, Facebook founded and funds the News Integrity Initiative. The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism oversees this. The initiative’s objective is to raise news literacy in order to boost public confidence in journalism worldwide.

Facebook is including a box in the user’s news feed that directs them to the Centers for Disease Control’s page about coronavirus in an effort to stop the spread of the virus. The World Health Organization would receive an infinite number of free ad credits from the corporation, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to help spread factual information about the situation.

In a recent round of funding, the business received $23 million from backers led by Norwest Partners for its novel approach to creating a new network of healthcare providers for potential Medicare Advantage patients.

The Participating Companies 

For the Medicare Advantage event, numerous healthcare entrepreneurs have amassed thousands of millions of dollars. 

Hiep Pham, the chief financial manager, and David Firdaus, the chief administrator, are joining Lee in the launch of Clever Care’s services. 

The three have a long history of working at various health plans together. 

Lee praised the company’s proposition, saying, “We see to have a unique supplemental advantage on the Eastern Medicine side.”

Nevertheless, there is a problem. 

The Problems

if the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agree to cover the procedures. Lee affirmed, “All of this depends on CMS authorization.

Prior to today, CMS was aware that some complementary therapies, most notably acupuncture, qualified for coverage. Lee and his team are now hopeful that further permissions will follow. 

Lee stated that the problem was particularly severe for the state of California’s ageing immigrant population, who undoubtedly felt uncomfortable using the current healthcare system. 

These communities are mostly made up of non-native English speakers whose needs are not being served by the current service providers.

Medicare Advantage now covers around 35% of all Medicare members, according to Norwest general associate Casper de Clerq. 

In addition to hiring workers for its two offices in Little Saigon in Orange County and Arcadia in Los Angeles County, the company said it will use the funding to develop its California Medicare Advantage health programme.

The city’s Department of Education is switching classrooms over to Microsoft Teams, which has the “same capabilities with appropriate security standards in place,” according to the spokeswoman.

Information on the Ban 

Around 1.1 million students from more than 1,800 schools spread across the town’s five divisions will be subject to the restriction. 

The decision to ban Zoom from schools was partially carried out by New York City’s Cyber Command, which was established in 2018 to assist in maintaining the safety of the city’s residents.

Zoom didn’t respond right away.

The configuration would put purportedly encrypted talks at risk of meddling by Chinese officials, analysts claimed on Friday, and Zoom’s main official expressed sorrow for “mistakenly” relaying a few calls through China. 

Zoom also regrets misrepresenting its service as being end-to-end encrypted.

A flurry of “Zoombombing” complaints led Zoom to change its default settings to automatically allow passwords on video chats. These complaints involved trolls trespassing on secure calls and using them to broadcast obscene material.

Not all schools are believed to find the transition to be straightforward. 

Problems Caused by the Ban

Following the conclusion of town schools on March 16, Zoom quickly sprang to fame as the go-to video calling service, as first reported by Chalkbeat. 

However, a Brooklyn-based school principal pushed the magazine to stick with Zoom, citing the “clunkiness” of Microsoft’s service as a reason why it would be more difficult to remotely teach their pupils.

A representative for the city claimed that it has been teaching schools how to use Microsoft Teams for “many weeks.”

The department “remains to evaluate and monitor developments with Zoom,” according to the spokesman, and will advise schools with any changes. However, the spokesperson did not completely rule out a return to Zoom.

Ventilator Requirements

For patients who are hospitalised with COVID-19, a respiratory infection brought on by the coronavirus, ventilators are an essential component of medical equipment. 

When COVID-19 affects the lungs, it can cause pneumonia and other serious respiratory distress signs. 

Ventilators are used to assist patients in breathing and fighting the disease because there is currently no scientifically proven cure. 

According to the New York Times, there are around 160,000 ventilators in the United States and an additional 12,700 in the National Strategic Supply.

As the COVID-19 epidemic spread across the U.S., G.M. said on Friday that it is working with Ventec Life Systems to facilitate the increased production of respiratory care commodities including ventilators that are needed by an increasing number of hospitals. 

Ford stated in an email sent on Sunday that it is prepared to assist the organization, including possibly providing additional tools and building ventilators.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted on Saturday that he had discussed ventilators with Medtronic. 

These exchanges were later confirmed by Medtronic in a tweet. 

Without providing further details, he had earlier stated that SpaceX and Tesla would use ventilators to operate.

One component of the strategy was a $1 billion investment in decarbonization-focused climate change mitigation technologies. 

The Approach 

There were little specifics available at the time, but it appears that the plan is getting clearer now that it is starting to become clearer who will be in charge of the programme.

References and investigation into Brandon Middaugh’s LinkedIn page reveal that he now holds a point on the investment fund.

Middaugh has been employed by Microsoft for more than four years, during which time she contributed to the creation of the company’s climate policy as one of its designers. 

Middaugh oversaw the distributed power strategy in her previous position as a member of the company’s Cloud Energy and Sustainability unit. She also helped to establish a partnership between Microsoft and the PJM, an East Coast local transmission organisation that manages the power network for much of the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

Some people who have analysed the company’s finances believe that Middaugh is moving forward with taking a position on the use of the $1 billion fund that Microsoft said in January.

Increasing the carbon charge the company has placed on its direct radiation across its supply and utility chains is one aspect of the strategy.

By supporting plans and technologies that can reduce radiations with a modern generation or efficiency technologies, or capture and extract carbon from the atmosphere, the $1 billion funds is a part of the fight to reduce radiations from suppliers and consumers.

Activities of Other Businesses 

Amazon made a promise at the end of the previous year to switch to 100% renewable electricity by 2030 and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. 

Alphabet has been developing renewable energy initiatives under its moonshot business in the meantime, and it has long been an investor in technologies that help the environment, such as using renewable energy to power its services.

If the world is to decrease the immediate effects of extreme climate change, all of these tasks will require additional effort from businesses and financial institutions across every industry.

What Do the Data Indicate?

According to information released this week by the CA DMV, Lyft tested 19 autonomous vehicles on Californian city streets in 2019.

These 19 cars, which were in operation from December 2018 to November 2019, collectively covered about 43,000 miles while operating autonomously.

The declaration is the most recent indication that Lyft is working to advance its Level 5 autonomous vehicle plan.

The California DMV, which oversees the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads in the state, requires businesses to submit a yearly report that includes details like the total number of AV miles travelled and the number of vehicles.

It also requires businesses to report “disengagements,” which refers to each time a self-driving car leaves autonomous mode due to a technology failure or a human safety operator taking manual control for security reasons.

Plan Level 5 for Lyft

The Level 5 strategy for Lyft, which refers to the SAE automated driving level where the vehicle controls all driving in all circumstances, was launched in July 2017. Currently, Level 5 employs over 400 employees in the United States, Munich, and London.

A pilot programme in Palo Alto that provided rides to Lyft employees there marked the beginning of a trial on city roads in California in November 2018. On-demand rides were provided throughout the trial along predetermined routes, such as those between the Lyft office and Caltrain.

Since then, the organisation has expanded the pilot’s geographic and temporal scope. In comparison to six months earlier, Lyft was moving four times as many autonomous miles every quarter by the end of 2019.

On a closed-course track in East Palo Alto that it started in November 2019, Lyft is conducting additional testing. The business claimed it used this facility, which can be altered to include crossings, traffic lights, and merges, to test software before deploying its vehicles on city streets.

Despite the fact that there has been much published about a wide variety of new or relatively new analytics companies, founder and CEO Iris Shoor claimed that the majority of them were not developed for Oribi’s clientele.

How Does ORBI Function?

According to Shoor, “a lot of businesses are more focused on the upper end.” The Mixpanels, Heap Analytics, and Adobe Marketing Clouds are generally where these resolves are based in terms of professional resources and combinations.

Oribi, on the other hand, is designed for tiny and average firms that don’t own huge technical units, she continued: “They have substantial activities and several hundred thousand dollar monthly digital marketing plans, but they don’t have a unit for it. And I’m going to presume that they’re all using Google Analytics.

According to Shoor, Oribi was developed specifically “to fight with Google Analytics” by making it possible for everyone within the company to access the data they need without having to have developers construct unique code for each event they need to track.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no coding involved when using Oribi’s plugins for platforms like Shopify and WordPress.

That’s probably because Oribi is now keeping track of each major step in the consumer experience. Additionally, it enables the team to choose the transformation goals they should concentrate on without the necessity for coding.

What Makes Oribi Unique?

Shoor countered Oribi’s claims with analytics programmes that offer “more and more data” without helping users understand what to do with it.

She replied, “We’ve designed something that is considerably cleaner. We provide them an understanding of how things are going, and we build all these different inquiries and correspondences about which parts of the funnels are malfunctioning and where they can improve, into the framework.

Oribi is already used by significant companies like Audi, Sony, and Crowne Plaza, but the company is now focusing on American customers.

Shoor stated that although there are plans to open an office in the United States in the upcoming year, Oribi is not doing so at this time.

Nonetheless, it is undoubtedly a problem that every small organisation with a significant number of mobile staff faces.

Information About The Investment

This issue is being expertly tackled by OptimoRoute, which recently announced that it has raised a $6.5 million Series A financing led by Prelude Ventures.

The service, which was developed by a group of former Google and Yelp workers, lets companies set their own restrictions.

Then, whether they are doing deliveries or scrubbing pools, it automatically creates regular routes for their drivers.

Not only are OptimiRoute’s costs frequently lower than those of some of its competitors in this market, but it also offers drivers and customers a mobile experience that includes live tracking, ETAs, and the opportunity to change routes in real-time as needed.

Businesses can plan with OptimoRoute for specific days of the week or up to five weeks in advance.

Also, the company is presently testing out a pickup and delivery service for both people and goods, as well as help for multi-day long-distance travels.

The OptimoRoute Story

Route optimisation, according to the company’s co-founder and CEO Marin ‘ari,’ is unquestionably a typical academic issue.

Many factors (such as how much merchandise can fit in a van, hourly rates, the skills required to complete a particular repair, etc.) are taken into account by OptimoRoute, which gives businesses the option of selecting several preferences for route optimisation.

At the moment, OptimoRoute has about 800 customers, ranging from small enterprises to large energy firms like Southern Star Central Gas Pipeline, which uses the service to manage the routes of over 300 maintenance engineers.

Users notice more productivity from their representatives as a result of the reduced driving distance, but they also reduce their overall carbon footprint, as noted by ari.

The business invested a lot of time on enhancing the core algorithms that support the service.

However, the company mistakenly believed that most of its customers would be extremely sophisticated logistics managers, but it turned out that small and medium-sized businesses also had a lot of needs.