Rev2.org

Sometimes, words are not enough to tell someone how you really feel, especially when talking via mobile or through social media. Emoticons can help users express feelings that normally would be conveyed via facial gestures.

Although these images are seemingly simple, trivial or even quirky, they have been a hit with savvy social media users. Now they are set to invade Facebook Messenger to help users communicate things that words alone might not convey. On Monday, the biggest social network upgraded its Messenger app with a few cute and colourful stickers.

These stickers are emoticons that show various feelings in the same way as facial expressions. The update has already been made available for the Facebook Messenger on Android and will be introduced in the iOS Messenger applications in the coming weeks.

Facebook’s stickers are currently still free, but there is a possibility that they might start charging a small fee for some stickers in the future. The social networking app Path also unveiled stickers recently, offering the first two packs for free but charging for additional packs. On Monday, Path also introduced new packs of stickers that included Peanuts characters.

Facebook first introduced its stickers in the general iOS app last month. Afterwards, new images crafted by illustrator Matt Jones were launched, including 16 facial expressions that show sympathy, surprise, cheerfulness and sadness.

In addition to this update, Facebook also resurrected the feature enabling users to delete conversations from their inboxes with just the swipe of a finger.

Internet security experts are looking into a new approach to protecting sensitive data. Instead of merely relying on password protection, websites can use “honeyword” passcodes, or dummy passwords that would trigger an alarm if someone is hacking the website’s database or someone’s account.

This proposal follows the hacking of high-profile portals last year wherein user data was compromised. Some of the sites that were hacked include eHarmony, LinkedIn, Twitter, Evernote, LivingSocial and dating site Zoosk.

As these decoy passwords are usually never accessed and are not really owned by actual users, they may be used to transmit an alert to website administrators once they have been hacked.

The proposed measure also complements the use of dummy accounts and was suggested in a research paper entitled “Honeywords: Making Password-Cracking Detectable”. The study was jointly authored by MIT cryptography professor Ronald Rivest and RSA Labs researcher Ari Juels.

This security measure requires multiple passwords for each individual account, but only one is the actual password. If someone uses one of the dummy passwords, a “honeychecker” system housed on a separate computer would issue a warning to the website’s administrators.

“This approach is not terribly deep, but it should be quite effective, as it puts the adversary at risk of being detected with every attempted login using a password obtained by cracking. Thus, honeywords can provide a very useful layer of defence,” said the researchers.

Administrators could also tweak how the system will respond to an ongoing hack, including suspending a particular account or tracing the location of the hacker.

Uber, a startup that wanted to test an idea of allowing people to use an app to hail a cab, has won its day in court, getting permission to deploy through the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC).  The lawsuit had been brought by the city (likely at the behest of some vested interests) because they claimed that the app (and others like it) blur the lines between a taxi and a liveried car (limousine) service.

New York City boasts one of the world’s most complex transit industries in a quasi public-private partnership of various services and transportation options that often collide in various ways (figuratively and literally).  Over time, the laws, regulations, and lobbying in and around these various services have become myriad and hard to follow.  Most of the charges brought against TLC (and by implication, Uber who was providing the test app) were pretty ludicrous on their face: discrimination against the elderly and the lack of an environmental impact study, for starters.

The judge dismissed the charges one at a time, usually on technicalities or for failure to show clear evidence.

Similar apps to the one created by Uber, collectively called e-hail apps, have run into similar opposition from established transportation groups and governance bodies in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and other places.  The TLC was one of the few to circumvent an outright ban by rolling out a “pilot project” for an e-hail service to test the idea.

In the New York case, the judge rightly noted that with only one exception, an elderly man brought in to substantiate the “discrimination” claim, every petitioner in the case against TLC and Uber was someone with a vested interest commercially opposed to the e-hail concept.

TLC and Uber plan to roll out the app in a year-long test program starting very soon, now that the suit is decided.

Facebook’s sales soared 38 per cent in Q1 2013 thanks to its flourishing ad business for mobile devices, according to a CNN report.

Mobile advertisements contributed 30 per cent of the firm’s overall ad revenue in Q1 2013. This translates to a huge gain compared to Q3 2012’s ad earnings and from essentially nothing a year ago.

This is because Facebook started working on its mobile ad business only a few quarters ago, and the most notable move back then was the rollout of its new iOS application.

While the higher earnings from mobile ads bolstered its revenue, the growth in the social network’s monthly active users for both desktop and mobile users is falling. Comparatively, it soared by 54 per cent year-on-year to 751 million in Q1 2013 versus an annual increase of 61 per cent in Q3 2012.

The growth rate is also forecasted to become more sluggish as mobile users are coming into parity with the overall number of users. The company also reported that the total active users per month climbed to 1.11 billion, of which 751 million accessed the site via their smartphones and tablets.

However, shares of Facebook were basically flat during after-hours trading after the revenue report was released.

During the post-earnings conference call, Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg spent a fair amount of time discussing advertising and the firm’s plans to continuously incorporate ads without putting off users.

“Over the long term, the thing that’s going to drive the business is the ads that are very high quality … things people are interested in,” added Zuckerberg.

To offer better interaction between its users and their smartphones, Samsung has finally unveiled its virtual personal assistant named Sherpa in the UK.

Sherpa is an indirect rival of Apple’s Siri. It was first launched in the Iberian Peninsula and became the top most downloaded app for Android in Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries.

Although it is still in beta, the virtual assistant app utilises Natural Language Processing (NLP) to retrieve information online and can be commanded to perform several tasks via touch, typing or voice.

The app advertises itself like Google Now, which was recently made available on iOS. Sherpa will provide users with the best possible answers to their queries. It will also attempt to guess your question before you even ask it, for example, by providing information on the place where you are currently located as well as local news and weather forecasts. On top of that, it lets you play songs without even downloading them.

Sherpa is different from other apps because it has the ability to complete voice-enabled online transactions via PayPal. Developed with the help of founder Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria’s NLP study, Sherpa can fully understand 250,000 ideas and is capable of “five levels of linguistic analysis, including morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and functional.”

Sherpa’s UK variant has also been tailored to the country, with regional versions for Ireland and Scotland so that users can fully appreciate the application’s features such as informational searches, managing schedules, completing transactions and autonomous operation.

Analysts on Wall Street are worried that Apple may have passed its peak in attracting consumers to the latest, newest iPhone offering.  Traditionally releasing a new iteration of the popular smart phone every year, the iPhone has become the phone of choice for many of the nation’s tech-savvy and fashion conscious.  Now, however, that trend may be changing as more and more are purchasing older, less costly last-generation phones instead.

The shift towards cheaper phones has begun to nibble at Apple’s profit margins, as these older phones are often sold by stores and providers at deeply discounted prices as Apple sells off its remaining old-generation inventory at bargain basement prices to promote its latest and greatest.  Currently, many service providers like AT&T and Verizon are giving away the iPhone 4 for free or nearly so with a contract signing or renewal.  Compared to the $199+ iPhone 5 (with contract), that becomes a no-brainer for many consumers intent on keeping costs low and who seem to see little to entice them with the newest Apple offering.

Apple, of course, downplays the significance of this and points to its “black hole ecosystem” – a tendency of new Apple customers to remain Apple consumers, coming back again and again as brand loyalty remains high for the company.

Further, Apple’s self-released sales figures show continual growth.  The company sold 4 million of the iPhone 4S in 2011 in its first three days whereas the iPhone 5 sold five million in that same amount of time last September.  Further, prices for the new iPhone 5 have dropped earlier than with older models on their release, indicating that Apple may be seeing the sales slump and working to mitigate it.

Finally, the growing trend of buying older phones also means that Apple’s other profitable venue, apps, are suffering as those who purchase older, less capable phones tend to also buy fewer apps for them.