Sophistication is the name of the measure that allows you to appreciate anything. A few days ago we talked about a quote – Privacy is a myth. Before that, there was a cry going on about privacy tampering by WhatsApp. Some gave an appraisal regarding the same that this platform provides end-to-end encryption, meaning I cannot tap the channel and check the communication between you and your friend. But, now WhatsApp has also announced that they are working on encrypting the cloud data that you store as backup. Let’s know more about this development through this Exhibit blog on WhatsApp cloud data encryption.
I Am Completely Safe
Yeah, this statement will be your next one after this news came out through a Twitter handle, WABetaInfo. According to this handle, WhatsApp is testing cloud data encryption, the backup of which you make or have scheduled through WhatsApp. The recent beta update on Android by WhatsApp (2.21.15.5) has inducted this feature. WhatsApp’s parent firm, Facebook, has started testing it to ensure better portability and deployment to other devices as well.
What does this mean?
Let’s understand it with an example. Consider me a crooked personality who wants to jeopardize your position by using my link with the Home Ministry (Don’t stop reading my articles as it’s just an example as I really don’t have anyone there). Now, I know that I cannot see or read what messages you are sending or receiving through WhatsApp. The one thing I know is that before going to sleep, you have scheduled your backup. So, I will get into space in the cloud where your WhatsApp backup data gets stored. I just love the way I got everything as I started downloading files. But, hey, wait. It is asking for a passcode that I don’t know. Damn encryption has not allowed me to see even the WhatsApp data stored as backup.
Anything more in WhatsApp Cloud Data Encryption
Well, it’s news coming from a Twitter handle. So, even a 280-character tweet cannot give full-fledged information. However, one can assume that there will be a passcode that a user may get after the backup comes with encryption. Hence, as of now, you should welcome this measure by WhatsApp for its cloud data encryption. It’s for sure that it has somewhere relieved you in terms of delivering amplified and enhanced privacy.
As the worldwide grip of Covid loosens, the citizens of Earth breathe a sigh of relief. However, the situation is yet to die down in India, where the cases are on an ever-rising curve. Even with all doctors running on full steam and state-of-the-art medical equipment, the sheer number of cases has become overwhelming.
Luckily, India has a bright silver lining behind this dark cloud. Global technology giants are coming together to do their bit for the recovery and stability of our motherland. Be it Google or Ethereum, these companies contribute massive amounts of money to help India get out of Covid’s web. Here are some of the feats that they have achieved so far.
Swiss computer accessory expert Logitech recently announced its contribution to India. In a press statement, the company confirmed that it was the largest one-time donation in its history, of two million dollars (roughly Rs 14 crores), supporting Oxygen for India. Oxygen for India is working with the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP), United Airlines, Tech Mahindra, and others to provide oxygen cylinders and oxygen concentrators to help those in need.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has also stepped in to help India in its crisis. In a tweet, he announced Rs 135 crore in funding for medical supplies, organisations supporting high-risk communities, and grants to help spread critical information. Yet another American tech giant is Microsoft, whose CEO Satya Nadella also announced in a tweet that the company would support the country by using its voice, resources, and technology to aid relief efforts and help purchase critical oxygen concentration devices.
Apple, too, has announced its support for India. Its CEO Tim Cook confirmed on Twitter that the American tech giant would be donating to support and relief efforts on the ground. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has also confirmed that the company is working with UNICEF to raise ten million dollars (roughly Rs 73 crores) towards India’s emergency response efforts. Samsung has pledged USD 5 million (INR 37 Crores) to contribute to India’s fight against the current surge of Covid-19, providing donations to central and state governments and boosting the healthcare sector with essential medical equipment for hospitals as part of its citizenship initiatives. Samsung will donate USD 3 million to the Centre and the states of Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
Samsung has pledged USD 5 million (INR 37 Crores) to contribute to India’s fight against the current surge of Covid-19, providing donations to central and state governments and boosting the healthcare sector with essential medical equipment for hospitals as part of its citizenship initiatives.
Yet another smartphone giant, Oppo, has also stepped in. It has pledged to donate 1000 oxygenators and 500 breathing machines worth Rs 4.3 crore to the Indian Red Cross Society and the Government of Uttar Pradesh to help in the fight against Covid. They are also donating 5000 units of OPPO Band Style worth INR 1.5 Crore to front-line warriors of the Delhi Police and Greater Noida Authority to help them monitor their health as they serve others.
Another industry giant that is helping India as much as it can is Amazon US. Joining the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Task Force, Amazon US is working with NITI Aayog and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW). As part of this, critical life-saving equipment, including 82 anaesthesia ventilators, 1238 BiPAP machines and 60 ventilators, have already reached India. Amazon US will distribute medical equipment to its on-the-ground community partners such as the American India Foundation, ACT Grants and Swasth, who will distribute it to verified hospitals and nonprofit organisations across the country to ensure it reaches the communities it needs most.
Twitter India reminded its users of many features such as Twitter Advanced Search, Twitter Near You and the Latest Tweet to direct people’s searches towards Covid related information in India. LinkedIn has partnered with GiveIndia to raise funds for critical medical supplies.
Among the leading global financial services, Mastercard announced ten million dollars to cover all vaccine-related costs for its India-based employees and immediate family members. It also confirmed that it would allocate funds for additional shipments of 1,000 oxygen generators as part of its CSR effort.
Pledging its support towards India’s fight against coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Canon India has provided essential food and sanitation items across the villages. Canon employees PAN India are enthusiastically coming together and contributing to the PM CARES Fund as well. As part of the support, Canon India is providing 3000 food packets in its adopted villages. In addition to this, to provide sanitation support to children of SOS Children’s Villages of Faridabad, Hyderabad, Canon India has distributed essential items such as sanitisers, liquid soap, cotton masks, etc. other home cleaning products.
Pledging its support towards India’s fight against coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Canon India has provided essential food and sanitation items across the villages.
Mi India has also pledged to donate over Rs 3 crore to procure thousands of oxygen concentrators. They also confirmed they have partnered with GiveIndia to raise Rs 1 crore to support frontline Covid fighters across the country. Amazon India has also collaborated with multiple organisations to import more than eight thousand oxygen concentrators and five hundred bi-level positive airway pressure (BiPAP) machines from Singapore.
OnePlus is also doing its bit to help the country. In a recent blog post, its CEO Pete Lau confirmed that the smartphone giant would donate 400 oxygenators to India to help meet the immediate need for oxygen in several parts. The company also promised to add up to Rs 1 crore to public donations towards the Covid battle.
India’s tech giant and one of the worldwide leaders, Infosys, installed Covid-19 care centres in Pune and Bengaluru for its employees and their families. It will also educate children, expand bed capacity in hospitals, and assist the government in spreading awareness. Tech Mahindra has also announced its Covid-19 vaccination drive for its associates and dependent family members. It confirmed that it would cover all the incurred expenses. Similarly, TCS also announced that it would provide the Covid-19 vaccine to all its employees and family members, starting from May 1, 2021.
IBM India called out to its employees to come together in this crisis. Its chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna, wrote to his employees to support the cause. This resulted in the donation of funds for 2500 oxygen cylinders and is continuing to grow.
Paytm, a popular digital payment platform, successfully raised Rs 1 crore through public donations and added the same amount from its end, which doubled the donations to source oxygen concentrators. Now, the company aims to raise Rs 10 crore! CRED founder Kunal Shah tweeted about the company’s plans to raise funds for procuring one billion litres of oxygen. It also encourages CRED users to donate the CRED coins that are present in their accounts.
Zomato’s founder Deepinder Goyal confirmed that the company’s not-for-profit organisation, Zomato Feeding India, has kickstarted the “Help Save My India” project in collaboration with Delhivery. It aims to raise Rs 50 crore to source oxygen concentrators and related supplies to help hospitals and families in India.
Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin also confirmed via Twitter his donation of Rs 4.5 crore. Naturally, he donated 100 ETH and 100 MKR, whose proof he shared on Twitter. The co-founder of Sun Microsystem, Vinod Khosla, also announced his wish to fund hospitals in India for importing oxygen and other supplies in India. Following that, he received many requests from non-profit organisations, non-government organisations, and private initiatives such as Manjinder Singh Sirsa (President of the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee), the Cancer Aid Society, and Hemkunt Foundation to fund hospitals needing medical supplies to fight Covid, which he gladly received.
Apart from the significant organisations and global tech leaders, there are also many Indian companies working hard to save the country. Among such is Oxicare, which aims to help as many blue collared technicians as possible. The company hires technicians who can repair oxygen concentrators. The efforts were further emphasised on LinkedIn by Rajesh Bansal, who stated that they were on a mission to train 1000 technicians across India.
These companies have proven that despite being divided by the market, they are united by a single cause; the cause of saving lives!
With tech going in all directions at a pace we can’t even catch up with, newer marketing ideas are on the rise. There are so many social platforms and add to it the formats, duration, diversified audience, ‘storytelling’ and so much more. This can be so overwhelming for a marketing professional. Where’s the success? Which social media platform will spell it for me? Which strategy will work the best? This giant did this but the other one did the exact opposite and both went viral. Confused? Let us decode the M in Tech for you.
Let’s get to the main point first.
The Main Focus
It is not in the ‘what’ and ‘where’ you begin your campaign but in the ‘how’. We already know this but when it comes to current happenings in the marketing world, we completely forget this. Some might argue YouTube is outdated and IGTV is the new lasting trend, others will call YouTube the stepping stone to success. Let’s get rid of the herd mentality.
For instance, if the world is leaving Twitter behind and going all out on TikTok, should you too? If you’re a fitness brand that wants to showcase how cool the new treadmill meter is then yes but if you’re a pharmaceutical company who wants to talk about the importance of chlorine in swimming pools, then maybe not. You get the point, don’t you? While the whole world is saying a ‘no’ to Twitter and you’re a media company churning out fresh news stories by the hour, would you go with the world? If you do, I’m afraid you’d be losing out on thousands of people who are your REAL audience.
Follow Your Audience
Technology enables you to perform and deliver in so many directions, you’re literally spoilt for choice but what choice you make is not based on the abundance of technology that you have in your box but the one that will make you stand out of it. Follow the technology that your audience follows. Period. Market your products and services in a format that your audience consumes the most. If it is videos, create fantastic and visually appealing videos that add value and put them on YouTube, TikTok and Facebook. Make use of IGTV’s vertical format. If it is static images, make them interactive and appealing and create a campaign for Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook. If textual content does the best job for you, get on your Twitter now. Use Tumblr to build a community and lure them to your website.
The How
You see the opportunities there? There’s an unbelievable amount of things you can do on the social media side of tech but more than ‘where’ you do what you do, it’s about how you do it too. While we did talk about the ‘where’, it is time to talk about the ‘how’. Formats are very important to understand when it comes to digital marketing. An infographic might create a ‘wow’ factor on Pinterest and drive traffic to your website but it might not be an option for Twitter. Animated GIFS might be good for Instagram and Twitter but not the best for Pinterest or Tumblr. So much happening here? Confused again? Let’s simplify it for you.
When you’re building your digital marketing strategy, here’s how you go about it.
Define your audience
Define the social platforms best suited for your products/services (forget the herd mentality)
Define the formats best suited for the social platforms you choose.
That’s how simple it really is. What will create an impact will be your brand message and the way you communicate with your audience. Technology will keep throwing new apps and social platforms at you but you need to follow the above steps to keep simplifying things for you as a marketer. Keep filtering everything new in order to not get carried away. Use new tech platforms wisely and build your digital strategy without hiccups. Whatever you do, don’t miss out on new stuff and while you do that, don’t forget what your brand is all about!
Facebook has been learning and consistently improving its experience for the users. The social media company is creating quite a few experiences fo it’s users right from the time it was launched for the world. In recent times, the popularity of Facebook has dipped slightly because of TikTok which is a short video creation platform, not very much alike to its other platforms like Instagram and Whatsapp.
In the recent pandemic situation, Facebook has already announced ‘Messenger Rooms’ and also announced the increase of user limit to eight on WhatsApp video calling. Now the Facebook-owned company Whatsapp will soon start showing advertisements to its users.
The move could follow soon after Facebook is done with the merging of the platforms Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Since the time in 2014, when Facebook acquired the instant messaging platform WhatsApp, Facebook has been trying to draw monetary profits from one of the most popular messaging platforms in the world, WhatsApp. However, there have been internal discussions and disagreements for the same. But now, there are on and off reports of Facebook’s intention to bring ads on this messaging application.
This could soon follow after Facebook is done with integrating all of its platforms – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. You could soon start seeing ads and it is only to be seen how people all over the world would receive it. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption for its chats and hence is very secure, The major issue of user targetted ads would be the security and how much of it will be compromised when the ads would be able to access user data.
While WhatsApp could be showing ads to those who have a Facebook account, the company fears that users could delete their Facebook accounts if they find out what is drawing the ads towards their WhatsApp. This could have a severe negative effect and at least Facebook, which has been seriously threatened by the identities of other popular social media applications should repeatedly think about.
While this appears to be a very distant thought got Facebook, for now, there could be changes in the way we see and use its other popular platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp. Merging or putting too many changes into these platforms could see a negative effect and dip in users, especially when there are other social media/short-video applications which are way more engaging and rewarding to the users. This could end up being a major threatening to Facebook’s very existence.
The current pandemic situation has kept most of the people inside. Apart from the people working in healthcare and essential services, people have been asked or rather say forced to contain themselves inside the four-walls if their homes.
As naturally, it would come to every one of us, being confined in the house is not exciting and this everyone is looking to connect to their friends, family and the whole world for that matter with their phones and laptops. Things like online deliver and OTT platform engagements have shot up and similarly, chat and video conferencing applications are enjoying this sudden blast of unprecedented traffic. Hence developers are taking this opportunity to develop new avenues to help more and more people connect in this current situation.
As it would be, video calling applications have seen a massive spike in their traffic. WhatsApp, Messenger, Zoom and Houseparty are the ones which are enjoying the major share of the fame now. However, each one of them come with their flaws. WhatsApp can only connect four users per call, Zoom can handle multiple user connections (100) but recently it has been subject to data hacks and private user data was leaked due to security issues. Houseparty is another solution but the sheer number of notifications it keeps pushing can irritate anyone off from using it.
Facebook, on the other hand, is learning from the situation and recently has announced the ‘Messenger Rooms’ which will allow a group of 50 people to connect on a single video call. Not only this, on Facebook Messenger Rooms, one can post links in their news feed, groups or even create event pages.
How does it work? One can simply create a room and users can join the room via their browser. The moderator or room creator can also lock the rooms to prevent unwanted people from entering which seems like a form of moderation.
Messenger Rooms is said to have Zoom-like features including the background changing effects which is done to avoid people seeing the cluttered background at times. Moreover, Facebook has added multiple filters and lighting effects to compensate for any lighting defects on video. The Facebook Messenger Rooms will be launched in a few weeks; pointing that it is currently under rapid development.
It is said that approximately 700 million people are using various applications to make calls daily. Zoom has been plagued by privacy and security issues. It has breached the 300 million user limit already. This is a massive spike in user demand and Facebook is surely taking notes while doing its homework. The video-meeting platforms have seen a massive surge in users since the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced millions of people to work from their homes.
Facebook’s is known for its unparallel reach all across the globe. This is not just recent but Facebook has been enjoying high levels of popularity close to a decade now, since its inception in 2006. However, with recent competitors like TikTok from ByteDance, facebook’s unparallel territory was being threatened with the massive growth surge for other services, TikTok being one of the biggest. For a matter of fact, ByteDance’s is the second-largest competitor after Facebook.
With new challenges and hurdles cropping up on FB’s way, the American giant has now has found its way to incorporate in a better way in India. In a very recent announcement by the social media company, it said to have invested a net capital of $5.7 billion for 9/99% stake in India’s Reliance Jio Platform. Reliance Jio is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries and is three-and-half-years old at present. Not only this, but it is also the biggest telecom operator here in India. The nation’s most valued firm deals with more than 370 million subscribers currently.
This deal puts Jio at a valuation of $65.95 billion on a pre-money basis. Facebook is now the largest minority stakeholder in this Indian telecom market. This is by far the largest investment for a minority stake by a tech company globally; also being the largest Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the technology sector in India.
The venture could see a lot of collaborations spring up in the coming days, especially the one on the cards would be Jio Mart (an e-commerce JV between Reliance Digital and Jio) which is the nations largest retail chain along with WhatsApp. India is counted as one of the biggest markets of WhatsApp as well as one of the most popular smartphone app. This essentially means that with Jio Mart and Whatsapp, they can connect with several businesses, big and small and provide product purchase experience in a seamless mobile-only experience.
Reliance Jio started its commercial rollout of 4G data around the second half of 2016 and took the local market by storm with its on-paper free services like calling, data and SMS. This also kickstarted a price war with the local telecom companies which eventually forced out a lot of competition with its sheer presence and unmatchable prices. Reliance Jio stayed true to their words and have been providing a great experience to its users with minimum costs and lots of free services in India where the market is nothing but price-sensitive, leading Jio to become the top telecom providers in India.
Reliance Jio also offers services like Saavn (music streaming platform), JioTV and payment services like JioPay.
With the recent turn of events, Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a post “ We’re making a financial investment and more than that, we’re committing to working together on some major projects that will open up commercial opportunities for people across India”.
Facebook’s investment is not only restricted to Reliance Jio but also a social commerce platform Meesho and Unacademy where it wrote a cheque of $15 million each to these startups earlier this year.
In a video message, Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and MD of Reliance Industries said that “ At the core of our partnership is the commitment that Mark Zuckerberg and I share for the all-around digital transformation of India and for serving all Indians. Together, our two companies will accelerate India’s digital economy to empower you, enable you and enrich you.”
Mr Ambani also added that fact that JioMart and Whatsapp will enable 30 million neighbourhood stores (also known as Kirana stores in India) to be able to transact digitally. WhatsApp has been working with the Indian government to enable digital payments services in India which is still at large due to certain regulatory issues.
With TikTok’s blindsiding of Facebook, this move comes as a huge upper hand both in terms of reach and business for both the companies and together we can assume to witness some very interesting services being rolled out in the years to come.
