Technology • Innovation • Publishing — Issue #96

8 min readMay 26, 2020

Innovation

‘Apple Glass’ details leaked, will cost $499 and work with prescriptions A prolific leaker has detailed Apple’s forthcoming augmented reality glasses, and says that Apple will call them “Apple Glass” appleinsider.com • Share

Facebook Messenger Adds Safety Alerts — Even in Encrypted Chats RT @benedictevans Facebook analyzing messages for abuse (scams, grooming), even for end-to-end encrypted msgs, by looking at metadata rather than the content (which it can’t read). Expect this to become a bigger part of FB’s defense of encryption. www.wired.com • Share

Technology

Instagram launched Guides — a new way to discover recommendations about.instagram.com • Share

One badly designed online form leads to a AUS $60B error in the Australian government job retention scheme Cripes indeed! HT @neilperkin A good case-study in why digital UX is important — one badly designed online form leads to a AUS $60 Billion error in the Australian government job retention scheme. Cripes. (HT @tomskitomski) www.smh.com.au • Share

WeChat now offering ‘trust points’ as credit scoring for its 600m users WeChat Pay, the digital e-wallet owned by Chinese Big Tech Tencent, has announced it will be giving all 600 million of its users a credit rating based on “payments points” which will determine a “trust” value for each of them. www.fintechfutures.com • Share

Your face mask selfies could be training the next facial recognition tool Clearview AI, a controversial facial recognition company, claimed it has a First Amendment right to scrape more than 3 billion images from social networks to use for its database. www.cnet.com • Share

Texas Instruments pushes firmware update to **permanently** cripple the functionality of its graphing calculators RT @douglevin Texas Instruments pushes firmware update to **permanently** cripple the functionality of its crazy expensive graphing calculators, infuriating hobbyist community (ostensibly to help prevent cheating on exams, though it won’t really in reality) #edtech linustechtips.com • Share

Publishing

How The Publishing World Is Staying Afloat During The Pandemic Quarantine may be a golden opportunity to finally read “War and Peace” — but it’s not an easy time for the book industry. www.huffpost.com • Share

Support Black Mamas Bailout & WORD Bookstore MT @rgay For the coming week I got to partner with @wordbookstores to support the nonprofit of my choice. If you buy my books from them this week they will donate 10% of all sales to the Black Mamas Bailout Fund. www.wordbookstores.com • Share

Unsold book returns in coming weeks could be another blow for publishers Physical bookstores in Canada are down 63% year over year and may flood publishers with returns. www.thestar.com • Share

Pinterest Taps Influencers, Publishers to Drive Shoppable Content Pinterest is making a push for shoppable content with a new feature allowing users to buy curations by guest editors from publishers and influencers. wwd.com • Share

90.63% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google RT @ThadMcIlroy “”90.63% of pages get zero traffic from Google.” — from @Ahrefs study of over 1 BILLION web pages.“ ahrefs.com • Share

Google’s digital-ad dominance is harming marketers and publishers, says new study The report comes as the Justice Department is drafting an antitrust lawsuit against the company. adage.com • Share

Publishers urged to tell Apple to stop ‘screenshot’ piracy of paid-for news www.pressgazette.co.uk • Share

The Washington Post’s virtual literary event calendar www.washingtonpost.com • Share

Bill Clinton and James Patterson Announce Next Novel Together ICYMI President Bill Clinton and author James Patterson will cowrite a second novel together, ‘The President’s Daughter,’ to be published jointly by Alfred A. Knopf and Little, Brown in June 2021. www.publishersweekly.com • Share

Atlantic Media lays off 70 staffers amid advertising collapse nypost.com • Share

Why Sofas? These Books Explain the Joys and Mysteries of the Home Whether you live in an apartment, house, mansion or cabin, here are books that will help you explore the meaning of where you are right now. www.nytimes.com • Share

Business

Nearly Half Of The Twitter Accounts Discussing ‘Reopening America’ May Be Bots Discouraging, but not surprising HT @LWShanley -> Scrolling through your Twitter feed, it may not be obvious when you come upon a bot account — something that is more likely to occur in the era of COVID-19. Carnegie Mellon University researchers have discovered that much of the discussion around the pandemic and stay-at-home orders is being fueled by misinformation campaigns that use convincing bots. www.cs.cmu.edu • Share

Amazon says deliveries returning to normal after COVID-19 crush HT @BISG Amazon says 1- & 2-day delivery times should gradually return in coming weeks as they catch up from the coronavirus demand surge. They recently lifted restrictions on amount of inventory suppliers can send to Amazon warehouses. www.digitalcommerce360.com • Share

Amazon launches its first big-budget game, a shooter called Crucible Watch this space -> Amazon has ramped up its expansion into the games industry with the release of Crucible, a free-to-play shooter big-budget game. www.cnbc.com • Share

Apple is now selling Amazon’s Eero mesh routers on its website www.theverge.com • Share

Facebook to launch new shopping feature across apps Facebook Inc is launching Shops, a service that will allow businesses to display and sell products on Facebook. Facebook will be working more closely on product integrations with Shopify and seven other online commerce platforms going forward. Shops will be free for businesses to access with the expectation that it will boost consumer engagement and ad sales. www.reuters.com • Share

All your reaction GIFs now belong to Facebook, as it buys Giphy for $400M RT @arstechnica “…making Giphy a Facebook company can give Facebook access to all the data generated by those searches and API calls from other platforms, which is exactly the sort of behavior Facebook is under investigation for right now.” arstechnica.com • Share

Twitter unveils ‘don’t @ me’ feature for silencing trolls and ‘reply guys’ Users will have the option to turn off replies, but some worry it may even increase the toxicity. adage.com • Share

With BuzzFeed’s new feature, you can take a Quiz Party with friends techcrunch.com • Share

Walmart winds down Jet.com four years after $3.3B acquisition of e-commerce company www.cnbc.com • Share

Resources & Opportunities

BookConline Virtual on May 30-May 31 free on Facebook www.bookcon.com • Share

Women in Innovation 2020 is on June 1-June 5. Virtual and free this year! Or you can buy a $20 ticket and enter a raffle to win a 30-minute 1:1 virtual mentoring session with one of 50 top-notch #WIN2020 female role models. All collected funds will be donated to The Bowery Mission. www.win20.org • Share

The Bronx Book Festival June 6 is virtual and free MT @thebxisreading This year, the #bronxbookfestival is virtual! #thebronxisreading #tbir #BXBF20 www.thebronxisreading.com • Share

WNDB Emergency Fund for Diverse Creatives in Children’s Publishing RT @diversebooks Applications for our Emergency Fund for Diverse Creatives are still open! The fund will provide financial aid to diverse authors, illustrators, and publishing professionals in #kidlit who have lost income during the pandemic. diversebooks.org • Share

#ReadIndieForward Campaign Underway RT @ABAbook Last week, @ShelfAwareness and @Sourcebooks launched a new movement to support indie bookstores by partnering on #ReadIndieForward, a campaign to help indies not only survive during the COVID-19 pandemic, but thrive — now and into the future. www.bookweb.org • Share

Updated Publishing Industry Resources Doc MT @_smromero This is a resource aimed at aspiring/emerging pub professionals. The doc contains a TOC, information + relevant links for each entry, as well as a form link to add resources to the doc. docs.google.com • Share

RWA Announces a New Award for a New Era RT @romancewriters A new award for a new era: the RWA Board of Directors is thrilled to announce the introduction of a brand-new award, The Vivian, named after trailblazing RWA founder Vivian Stephens, with a planned fall 2020 launch. www.rwa.org • Share

Remembering the Nearly 100,000 Lives Lost to Coronavirus in America I’m sure you saw the graphic of The New York Times front page. You need to check out this online interactive presentation of it. RT @emilybell The @nytimes online presentation of its stunning front page is a wonderful piece of work too. The scroll has dignity and impact. www.nytimes.com • Share