Instagram has announced that it is finally rolling out a new feature that social media managers had been desperately wanting for some time.
The company says it will now allow businesses to schedule their posts on the platform. Before today's update, business users had to use multiple workarounds to post at scheduled times, but the platform itself did not offer any such feature, whether on its apps or on the web. The feature, however, is only available to business users for now, though it will be available for all users by early 2019.
While the long-overdue new feature is a welcome change for social media managers everywhere, there's a major caveat that simply needs to be noted. The feature is not applicable to ads, nor is it directly available with the product itself. What the company has done, is add support to the Instagram Graph API, which will now allow social managers to add the functionality to their own products and services.
The API is available to all marketing partners of Instagram as well as Facebook - the social media behemoth that owns the photo-sharing platform. Hootsuite has already announced its support for the scheduling feature, with Sprout Social, SocialFlow and others also sooner rather than later.
It's worth noting that the latest features are the Instagram's API platform that will result in the old API getting replaced by the newer 'Instagram Graph API', which also adds support for a couple of other new features called 'Business Discovery' and 'Mentions'. While the former lets users view the profile of other businesses, the latter allows business profiles to view posts they've been tagged in.
If you've ever traveled by air, you know that catching a flight on time is already a huge nightmare but waiting for a delayed flight can get even frustrating. Google, as expected, now plans to curb this problem by trying to predict flight delays.
The search giant has announced that it's updating the Google Flights platform to not only show confirmed delays with an explanation, but also predict flights that may be delayed. It has decided to put the machine learning algorithms into place to use all the historical information about a particular flight to predict if it is likely to be delayed.
Google does not plan to go on a tagging rampage for random flights that might be delayed. It has decided to only flag potential delays in flight times when the probability of the same is around 80 percent. This will give you a rough idea of how the situation is looking at the real-world, especially during sudden climatic changes.
google flights
Now, if you want to check if your flight's been delayed or not, just navigate to Google Flights to search for your airline and flight number or flight route, and you'll be provided with all necessary details for your flight.
All this jibber-jabber helps us to get the full confidence in your flight on time. It is only a neural network, which learns as the task progresses, so Google has advised users to reach the airport on time to avoid their flight.
In addition, Google is now trying to provide
Founded in late 2016 by Jase Bosarge and based out of Provo, Utah, tech startup 'Cake' has announced that it has secured $ 5 million in funding from Peak Ventures, Pelion Ventures and Kickstart Seed Fund. The company makes Android and iOS apps available for download.
If you like Tinder's swipe feature, chances are, you'll love Cake browser. Sure, you may not need another browser application on the mobile search results must be displayed on a touch-enabled mobile device. Because the first search result in your preferred search engine is often the one that you need, the cake takes you directly to that page, bypassing the entire index of search results. In case you're looking for something else, you can always swipe left to get the next result. Thankfully, however, unlike Tinder, you can always swipe right to back to the previous result if you so desire.
The feature extends across all search categories, so whether you're searching for general info, images, videos, or news, the same formula will apply to all web searches. Users will be able to choose their preferred search engine, but you will not be able to customize news sources, so you will get it or not.
Google announced Tuesday that Google Play in 2017 took action against "bad apps" by eliminating apps and developer accounts from the platform.
The tech giant claims to have been used to detect bad apps with identifiers like impersonation, inappropriate content, and malware to root out over 700,000 apps and 100,000 developers in 2017, which is a 70 percent jump from the preceding year. "In fact, 99 percent of apps with abusive content were identified and rejected before anyone could install them," was a claim mentioned on Android Developers Blog.
Impersonation
Google, on its Android Developers Blog, states that impersonators or 'copycats' are the most common red signal for apps from Google Play. In 2017 alone, the Mountain View giant removed as much as 250,000 apps that were caught impersonating big titles. The impersonators carried out this practice through deceptive methods such as "confusable unicode characters or hiding impersonating app icons in a different locale."
Inappropriate Content
Much like any other Safe For Work public platform online, Google Play does not allow any kind of inappropriate content. Inappropriate content, according to the company's definition, includes pornography, extreme violence, illegal activities, and hate. Google claims that its advanced machine learning models help quickly sift through app submissions and flag them for inappropriate content. Human reviewers then jump into the scene, with tens of thousands of apps removed in the last year.
Malware
And, finally, another red flag for Google is the presence of Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs) that can cause harm to device users. Apps involved in phishing, fraud, and trojans are part of this list. The tech giant claims that PHAs are small in volume but research to remove them is being heavily invested in. With Google Play Protect - Google's malware scanning feature - at I / O 2017, the annual PHA installs have gone down by 50 percent year on year, the company said.
"Despite the new and enhanced detection capabilities that led to a record-high takedowns of bad apps and malicious developers, we know a few still manage to evade and trick our layers of defence.We will take this very seriously, and will continue to innovate our We are committed to making Google Play the most trusted and safe app store in the world, "said Andrew Ahn, Product Manager at Google Play.