The Face of Change: 3 Apps Disrupting Enterprise Social Media

As individuals in the 21st century, we all have a sense of what people mean when they use the phrase “social media.” Immediately, our minds populate a list that includes sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We may even have knowledge of enterprise-specific programs like Slack that have changed the face of professional messaging.

What many digitally savvy people are unaware of, however, is that there are many other platforms that are disrupting enterprise social media as we know it – and if you want to stay ahead of the curve, you need to get on board. For companies committed to digital leadership, these are the three new, must-have apps.

The Next Generation of Visuals

Multimedia social network use has become the gold standard these days, as you can see by dropping in on just about any professional or personal account across the complete range of platforms. Sam Ovens’ peppers his Twitter feed with screenshots of client interactions, companies share video from their product development team, and when all else fails, even major brands aren’t above posting a few baby animal images. Soon, though, this approach to visual won’t be enough, thanks to apps like Storehouse.

What Storehouse brings to the table that sets it apart from other image dominated programs, like Instagram or Snapchat, is the ability to coordinate different sources of images. That means it can pull from your Instagram, Flickr, camera roll, and more to help you create elaborate social media narratives. Although TechCrunch recognized Storehouse as a top appin 2015, most companies haven’t started using it as part of their overall marketing strategy.

The Competitive Edge

There are two main components to brand development and management – the narrative you put out about your brand and what others say about it. While you control that first component, it can be hard to keep up with the broader commentary pointed in your direction, and that’s where Brand24 comes in.

Brand24 is a social media monitor, tuning into your different accounts to catch whatever feedback comes your way, and alerting you to positive and negative comments that may require further attention. This is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of things and prevents you from missing key customer service opportunities.

The Organizer You Always Needed

In business, sometimes the greatest innovation comes from finding new ways to do old things – progress isn’t always product-focused. That’s what makes Buffer such an innovative tool; it offers a better management system for handling the overwhelming weight of social media.

Plenty of platforms are focused on helping you plan and schedule for a single site, but Buffer ties together Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and more for a simplified experience. You won’t believe how much time you were wasting coordinating your social media until you see how much easier Buffer makes it.

The role of social media in business will only continue to grow in coming years, so it’s important to stay on the cutting edge, adopting new apps to make your job easier and your strategies more innovative. These three apps are just the beginning of a total social media transformation.

This Blog was first published on: http://smarterware.org/2016/10/face-change-3-apps-disrupting-enterprise-social-media/

Beware Skype, WhatsApp is getting video calling feature

You already send text messages and make voice calls with WhatsApp, now you can also make video calls through the app — provided you’ve an Android phone, for now.

 Though the company hasn’t begun advertising this yet, but new beta versions of its Android app come with the ability to make video calls. If you and your friend are both on the latest beta version of WhatsApp for Android, you will now see "Video Call" and "Voice Call" options when you hit the dialer button on top. Do note that the feature is still in early stage, so the video feed could stutter at times.

To get this feature, you will need to grab the latest beta version of WhatsApp. The company maintains an official beta testing program on Google Play, and one can sign up for it by tapping the "Become a Tester" button. Alternatively, you can also download the latest beta build of WhatsApp from third-party site APKMirror. The website offers Google-signed apps. Ensure that you snag version 2.16.318 or higher of WhatsApp.

Earlier this month, some Windows Phone users reported that they had received the video calling feature on WhatsApp. Now that WhatsApp has started to exude video calling ability on Android’s beta apps, it seems likely that its iOS and stable Android versions will follow the suit soon.

Video calling is one of the most sought after features on WhatsApp. The Facebook-owned company has in many ways revolutionized how people text, and in recent times, how they make voice calls. Though there are a plethora of apps and services that offer video calling ability — many of them for free — WhatsApp getting this feature would be noteworthy because of its one-billion plus users.

IBM, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon form enormous AI partnership

On Wednesday, the world learned of a new industry association called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, and it includes some of the biggest tech companies in the world. IBM, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have all signed on as marquis members, though the group hopes to expand even further over time. The goal is to create a body that can provide a platform for discussions among stakeholders and work out best practices for the artificial intelligence industry. Not directly mentioned, but easily seen on the horizon, is its place as the primary force lobbying for smarter legislation on AI and related future-tech issues.

Best practices can be boring or important, depending on the context, and in this case they are very, very important. Best practices could provide a framework for accurate safety testing, which will be important as researchers ask people to put more and more of their lives in the hands of AI and AI-driven robots. This sort of effort might also someday work toward a list of inherently dangerous and illegitimate actions or AI “thought” processes. One of its core goals is to produce thought leadership on the ethics of AI development.

So, this could end up being the bureaucracy that produces our earliest laws of robotics, if not the one that enforces them. The world “law” is usually used metaphorically in robotics. But with access to the lobbying power of companies like Google and Microsoft, we should expect the Partnership on AI to wade into discussions of real laws soon enough. For instance, the specifics of regulations governing self-driving car technology could still determine which would-be software standard will hit the market first. With the founding of this group, Google has put itself in a position to perhaps direct that regulation for its own benefit.

But, boy, is that ever not how they want you to see it. The group is putting in a really ostentatious level of effort to assure the world it’s not just a bunch of technology super-corps determining the future of mankind, like some sort of cyber-Bilderberg Group. The group’s website makes it clear that it will have “equal representation for corporate and non-corporate members on the board,” and that it “will share leadership with independent third-parties, including academics, user group advocates, and industry domain experts.”

Well, it’s one thing to say that, and quite another to live it. It remains to be seen if the group will actually comport itself as it will need to if it wants real support from the best minds in open source development. Below, the Elon Musk-associated non-profit research company OpenAI responds to the announcement with a rather passive-aggressive word of encouragement.

The effort to include non-profits and other non-corporate bodies makes perfect sense. There aren’t many areas in software engineering where you can claim to be the definitive authority if you don’t have the public on-board. Microsoft, in particular, is painfully aware of how hard it is to push a proprietary standard without the support of the open-source community. Not only will its own research be stronger and more diverse for incorporating the “crowd,” any recommendations it makes will carry more weight with government and far more weight with the public.

That’s why it’s so notable that some major players are absent from this early roll coll — most notably Apple and Intel. Apple has long been known to be secretive about its AI research, even to the point of hurting its own competitiveness, while Intel has a history of treating AI as an unwelcome distraction. Neither approach is going to win the day, though there is an argument to be made that by remaining outside the group, Apple can still selfishly consume any insights it releases to the public.

Leaving such questions of business ethics aside, robot ethics remains a pressing problem. Self-driving cars illustrate exactly why, and the classic thought experiment involves a crowded freeway tunnel, with no room to swerve or time to brake. Seeing a crash ahead, your car must decide whether to swerve left and crash you into a pillar, or swerve right and save itself while forcing the car beside you right off the road itself. What is moral, in this situation? Would your answer change if the other car was carrying a family of five?

Right now these questions are purely academic. The formation of groups like this show they might not remain so for long.

This blog was first published on: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/236459-ibm-google-facebook-microsoft-amazon-form-enormous-ai-partnership