Julia Carrie Wong reported for The Guardian about how Pinterest is taking action against anti-vaccination propaganda that Facebook has failed to address.

Pinterest has responded by building a “blacklist” of “polluted” search terms.

“We are doing our best to remove bad content, but we know that there is bad content that we haven’t gotten to yet,” explained Ifeoma Ozoma, a public policy and social impact manager at Pinterest. “We don’t want to surface that with search terms like ‘cancer cure’ or ‘suicide’. We’re hoping that we can move from breaking the site to surfacing only good content. Until then, this is preferable.”

It doing the socially responsible thing. Common sense isn’t common. We need to have some form of gatekeeping to ensure the right information goes out. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean free reach.

Alex Allegro reported for 9to5Mac that AirPods are the second-best selling Apple product within two years of launch with search rate up 500% year-on-yar.

When comparing between AirPods search interest from December 2016 — the initial month of release — and data from December 2018, Google search rates have skyrocketed a massive ten times over.

Above Avalon explains, Comparing peak AirPods search interest over the three most recent holiday seasons, the juxtaposition is startling. The following are Google search interest for “AirPods” in the U.S. indexed to 100 (represents maximum search interest):

• 2016 holiday season: 10 (AirPods search interest was 10% the volume of peak search interest).
• 2017 holiday season: 20 (100% year-over-growth in search interest)
• 2018 holiday season: 100 (500% year-over-year growth in search interest)

Everyone I know who has AirPods rave about them. Looking forward to the next generation model.

TechNode reported that Baidu has built an AI cat shelter to care for strays.

The shelter, which comes complete with toys, regular dispatches of food and water, and warm spaces to sleep, features feline facial recognition to grant access. It can also check its guests for various diseases and assess whether or not they’ve been neutered. If it identifies a sick cat, a message is sent to a nearby volunteer organization that looks after stray animals to come and administer the required help.

[…]

Baidu’s development is an especially impactful one for northern China’s cat population, with sub-zero temperatures and the difficulty of obtaining food leading Dongbei News to estimate that just 4 in 10 stray cats make it through the winter in the country’s northeastern regions.

Tech can make the world a better place if we put our hearts to it.

Elena Cresci reported on how Apple’s AirPods went from mockery to millennial status symbol.

Of all the widely ridiculed tech products, Apple’s AirPods have experienced an extraordinary turnaround. Back in 2016, they were roundly mocked by the tech industry. Tiny wireless earbuds? It seemed like a recipe for disaster – streets would be littered with these lost headphones, which would clutter up city pavements like discarded gloves and babies’ socks.

It is worth noting that such mockery has often been aimed at Apple products. A classic example is the iPhone. People laughed at the lack of a physical keyboard and the pricing. Then there’s the memes about the iPad name sound like sanitary pads. How’s iconic is the iPad brand today?

Those who don’t understand or appreciate the products are quick to make fun of it. In hindsight, the mockery made good publicity and Apple gets the last laugh.

Reuters reported that Vimeo revenue jumped 54 percent in 2018, paying subscribers near 1 million.

Its 2018 revenue of $160 million — disclosed for the first time by IAC — rose from$103.3 million in the previous year, while the number of paying subscribers climbed 9 percent year-over-year to about 952,000 by the end of December.

Although Vimeo’s revenue is expected to rise “20 to 30 percent in the near-term,” according to its Chief Executive Anjali Sud, the video service is far from making a profit as it burns cash on product development and aggressive marketing to popularize its brand.

This reminds me of an analogy I came across a few days back.

https://twitter.com/marckohlbrugge/status/1092702191448539136

In this scenario, we can take these additional steps:

• Buy $20,000 worth of salt

• Sell for $16,000.

• Now you get a 60% increase in revenue.

People often get too caught up with revenue figures without looking deeper to understand the actual health of a company. That being said, the same applies in the opposite direction. Figures can make the situation look worse than it is if you don’t get to see the bigger picture, or if you look at the numbers with misleading or even wrong information.

Zack Whittaker reported for TechCrunch that Apple is telling app developers to disclose or remove screen recording code.

It follows an investigation by TechCrunch that revealed major companies, like Expedia, Hollister and Hotels.com, were using a third-party analytics tool to record every tap and swipe inside the app. We found that none of the apps we tested asked the user for permission, and none of the companies said in their privacy policies that they were recording a user’s app activity.

Even though sensitive data is supposed to be masked, some data — like passport numbers and credit card numbers — was leaking.

Apple is giving the app developers only 24 hours to remove the screen recording codes, or the apps would be removed from the App Store.

What is notable here isn’t the speed at which Apple is enforcing this. It’s the lack of action from Google or any other Android app stores. If you are using Android version of these apps, it would be safer to assume that these apps are still recording your screens as you use the apps.