Elio Able Tech

Following  Facebook strategy it appears that it is about to announce new features particularly in its Facebook Messenger   The development stage for an in-store mobile payment capability. According to The Information , following a source code analysis of the iPhone Facebook Messenger app it can be seen and noted commands such as " pay in person" and "pay directly in Messenger when you pick up the item "  therefore it can be deduced that Facebook Messenger can have in-built the capability for in-store purchasing features. Nevertheless, Facebook was not yet responded to this new feature which is most likely in a development stage.  Furthermore, it is already possible send money to a friend via Facebook Messenger, however the iOS app code implies that Facebook will most likely expand Facebook Messenger features and capabilities as a payment tool. This follows a similar pattern in the peer-to-peer payment feature was also predicted months ahead of officia...

Facebook Personal Digital Assistant on Messenger App via Artificial Intelligence  The messenger app has moved another level in terms of capabilities for its users, following this new capability. As a result this new offering is a competing solution with the other IT giants such as Apple   Siri , Google and Microsoft   Cortana  in the digital personal assistant arena. The Facebook Messenger lead David Marcus stated: We are beginning to test a new service called M. M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people. The differentiating factor from other Artificial Intelligence  services currently available as from the examples mentioned above is that the facebook service called M is able to complete tasks on a user behalf.  Furthermore, it can also purchase items, organize orders to be delivered to your friends locati...

Facebook Moments  automatically creates music videos of any grouping of six or more photos.  Facebook Moments , the new photo-sharing app from Facebook that adds new functionality and features to sharing photos with friends was first announced a while ago, where users are able to send photos that they may have on their smartphones. It now follows that a new update allows people to create videos with these photos too and even adding music to the final result. The way the app works is will automatically create a video of shared photos which you can be customized, personalized, friend tagged and subsequently sharing on Facebook timeline. The new features and capabilities are not original as other social networking apps already offers similar solutions such as Flipagram , or those automatically created animations that Google Photos provides through its “ Assistant ” feature, which also creates stories. Feel Free to add your comments to this post, thank you.

Following  F8 conference , it was announced a new Messenger Platform  with new possibilities for partner apps.  The new opportunity is available to 600 million users that can create and share content using third-party tools, furthermore communicate directly with businesses without the need to call or email.  The content tools platform and apps already have initial partners such as  ESPN , JibJab , Wordeo and Giphy , in an Messenger update from today .  In this context, Facebook is also starting a new development venture with partners to be able to offer business chat capabilities. To complement this new opportunity, it was released an SDK  for developers to enable to start building engaging content. The new Messenger content apps can be accessed within a triple-dot button in the composer window next to options to add photos, where there are links into app stores to enable download of new content apps. Each content information...

Facebook  latest R&D developments in computer vision and pattern recognition  have produced impressive results with DeepFace .  The produced facebook technology is now capable to recognize people's faces almost as accurate as an average human (with 97.5 percent accuracy). The recognition results shown provides great results although within short variety of scenes. The  Facebook  researchers were capable of building 3D models from simply using faces from photos, it then follows that the 3D models can be used and rotated to improve accuracy and thus provide matching/recognition of similar features faces captured at different angles.  The Facebook DeepFace algorithm as expected requires to be trained on an extensive pool of faces in order to achieve best and optimum accurate results but that is a common practice for any smart system. At present its capability consists of identifying up to 4,000 identities based on a database of over 4 million indivi...

Facebook users can now backup their photos and videos that they were tagged by their friends via the new feature from the service  IDrive . The way the new feature works is that as the on-line backup service traditionally has it users connecting their local PC drives it is now also possible to connect to facebook and enabling it users to back up photos and videos to its servers on the cloud as a service. Furthermore, it is not just simply backing photos and videos it now also offers the capability to back up photos and videos where a user has been tagged by its friends. This tagging feature means that in many cases if a user friend that owns the photo or video decides in the future to untag or delete the photo or video, or even further if the friend no longer is a friend, the original photo or video is still included in a user IDrive backup. The data from Facebook once backed up, it can be accessed from any web browser or via the iOS app. There are other backup similar services suc...

The revamped Facebook mobile app and its messenger app on iOS and Android platforms now include an option whilst messaging friends that allows users to reply to messages with a one-tap thumbs-up Like button replies. This new feature visible as Like Replies is also now available whilst accessing via m.facebook.com, however it does excludes for the time being the desktop website version. For mobile accessing Facebook with its new Like button thumbs-up sticker, does simplify interactivity and messenger emotion expression.  Feel Free to add your comments to this post, thank you.

Facebook users now have the possibility to be able to give star ratings on movies, TV shows and books. This new feature arrives in a context where a new development “Sections”  which is capable of showing to users which apps they use in a more interactive engaging feedback. This latest development was initiated for production back in mid-March  where it was included on the new designed Timeline.  It is easier now and more streamlined the way a user can look at home tab in the below left column, where it is displayed a list of different content types with apps having their own Section. It then follows that a user may configure their profile About tab.  In an overall data semantic understanding and business intelligence processing it can now include richer data with users opinions embedded directly into the Facebook graph . On the post-processing side of data analysis for users the output is a leaner data on Facebook Graph Search results for a user favour...

Earlier today it was announced by  Facebook  a new interesting tool called Graph Search (currently in beta) , that will make searching for friends locations and activities in a visual connected way, furthermore the tool was presented by Facebook as an innovative engaging solution.  It then follows, that this new tool may have a positive implication on the traditional search market where it will position itself as a way that makes daily searching on Google  a little less exciting.  The way that the  Graph Search  tool works is that it has features and capabilities which allows users to search for interests, friends location including preferences previously set by the members of the social network, from the connected "friends". The results should be quite customized to each user, where the expectations is that friends recommendations on current affairs, literature, commerce, business, travel, art, among many other topics will be seen as highly engag...

Popular services such as  Facebook  and  Gmail  among others, will be facing a huge challenge in terms of their business strategies on their users free membership current status, if the new EU data protection law is implemented. This is the view of some legal experts. The new law, enforces new restrictions on how companies process, store and manage personal data, the draft legislation can be seen on  European Data Protection Regulation . The new proposed law presents many difficulties for third party web services to present terms and conditions that force users to pass their consent and ownership automatically to the third party service to take advantage of a users data on their data processing mechanisms. Eduardo Ustaran , at Field Fisher Waterhouse stated: services which use information gleaned from user data to generate ad revenue, would have to abandon their ad-supported models if the proposals became law unchanged. If they weren't able to use you...

Facebook now has a new app , named  “Poke” , the main features of this new mobile app is that allows users to send photos, videos, pokes, or even text Facebook messages to existing Facebook friends. The main attractiveness of this mobile app is that the content shared, poked and notified with friends does expire shortly after a few seconds with settings duration predefined as options. This new app follows, since when it was first reported on AllThingsD  around a few weeks ago. Other existing mobile app such as Snapchat on  iOS and Android  is quite popular with young users, thus Facebook trying to attract this type of users with its own version. Currently around 50 million photos are shared on the competitor Snapchat mobile app on a daily basis, with a total of 1 billion so far. As a result, Facebook clearly noted as sees it as the next big thing that could perhaps disrupt their own mobile app service popularity in the future. Reports also indicate that Facebo...

A new interactive feature currently being tested by Facebook for its users to allow them to have a status update that is more engaging. The way it works is that when users log in they will see a question addressed to them personally asking them how a user is feeling or doing. Nevertheless, the question is part of the status update feature and is seen on a light background within the status update box where it does not interfere or disturb visually for the user experience, simply gives the user a suggestion for a status update. It appears that Facebook is trying to become more interactive with its users so that it suggest to its users for them to post more engaging content and less professional promotional updates. However, with all recent developments, many users have the perception that the social network has become less social and much more market driven by marketing and its business strategy constant strive for revenue increase particularly after the market listing went less succ...

Facebook  is continuing to venture into new profitability ways, the latest is quite on a discovery delicate path for its users because it is trying to appease its investors, financial market expectations, strategic value and increase on its revenue possibilities. It then follows that in a quite similar existing services to that of Linkedin with its inMail , Facebook is now  testing a new messaging charge option . Currently the testing is outside the US and includes a charge to Facebook users of $1 to those that wish to send messages to non-friends, nevertheless users can only send one paid message a week, with a limit of three a month, to any user that is not already a "friend" on their existing network. The way it works is that paid messages are delivered straight to the actual inbox instead of the “other” folder. The "other" folder is only shown when "view all messages" option is clicked by the user. If this plan does go ahead there is a possibility ...

Facebook  has announced on a post a  Year In Review for 2012 , an interesting feature where its users can see a visual representation with content highlights of their popular events, movies, technology and locations throughout the year of 2012. Furthermore, Facebook is providing to its users access to data analysis, which includes a customized Year In Review which can be posted on everyone’s individual timeline. This is similar to a recent Twitter development when it offered a  Similar version to the Year In Review . The way it works for a facebook user, is by simply visiting  Year in Review  where it will be shown the top 20 moments of the year for the individual user and the highlights moments can also be shared for anyone to see and note. Feel Free to add your comments to this post, thank you.

Facebook is now improving security following an infrastructure upgrade and moving  all its users to HTTPS , the transition period will start this week and it was announced that will “slow down connections only slightly.” Nevertheless, users will still be able to opt-out of HTTPS for maximum speed. Following this development to include all users as a standard setting, the context is where HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure)   was already available to all users, nevertheless most users did not change or selected their account settings to use this secure connection. Following a  Facebook Developer Blog post , the security manager Frederic Wolens  stated: “It is far from a simple task to build out this capability for the more than a billion people that use the site and retain the stability & speed we expect, but we are making progress daily towards this end. This may slow down connections only slightly, but we have deployed significant performance enhance...

Facebook is now improving security and moving all its users to HTTPS, the transition period will start this week and it was announced that will “slow down connections only slightly.” Nevertheless, users will still be able to opt-out of HTTPS for maximum speed. Following this development to include all users as a standard setting, the context is where HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) was already available to all users, nevertheless most users did not change or selected their account settings to use this secure connection. Following a Facebook Developer Blog post, the security manager Frederic Wolens stated: “ It is far from a simple task to build out this capability for the more than a billion people that use the site and retain the stability & speed we expect, but we are making progress daily towards this end. This may slow down connections only slightly, but we have deployed significant performance enhancements to our load balancing infrastructure to mitigate ...

Facebook is expanding its social activities capabilities, as a result will soon permit users to send each other real alcohol as gifts. This new development may fit into the company's strategy to become more profitable via marketing and e-commerce enhancements thus becoming less of a virtual social perception, and more business lead resembling to real world expectations and engagement. In this context, users in the UK are already allowed to gamble real money. The announcement was Thursday . Users will have the possibility to send bottles of wine via the gifts Facebook new feature. The first two winemakers and Facebook partners are  Robert Mondavi Winery and Chandon .   The way it works, is for each transaction, a third-party service must verify that both buyer and seller are legally compliant including the location of the users, before the transaction takes place.  Further to this new development, other new partners for the gifts Facebook feature no...

It was announced today by Facebook , a few  developer updates to its API on the graph application programming interface, so that developers can have access to more efficient data from users's social graph, and thus improve their applications with less requests and coding. The way facebook developers create applications is by using feeds in a combination with data from the open graph. This new development by Facebook is quite coincidental with Twitter announced restrictions to its API  rules . As a result, it may be a way to attract more app developers to its platform, as many are unhappy Twitter proposed API changes. Feel Free to add your comments to this post, thank you.

It has been noted that Facebook keeps innovating almost on a weekly basis, as a result it can be quite time consuming to become a savvy user and embracing all the constant changes that Facebook presents to its users and developers. The new  settings for Facebook apps  developers , is another example, it then follows that in most cases simplification is welcomed as it can be seen on the new  app dashboard , which was announced recently on a post of the Facebook developer blog . As a summary to the changes for Facebook app developers, it can be noted below: Consolidation on basic settings for canvas. The Auth dialog is now permissions, to configure  app center and auth referrals. Simpler Android integration. Contact info available on app details consolidated promotional and review settings. Feel Free to add your comments to this post, thank you.

Facebook receives approval from UK  Office of Fair Trading  for its purchase of Instagram. The news were published on a  RNS regulatory statement . It was stated: “We examined this in light of them both offering social networking services, looking at potential competition in social networking services, and in the supply of photo apps and whether the merger might result in the merging parties limiting people from others using other apps or other sites,” he said. “In brief we concluded that there are several relatively strong competitors to Instgram which appear to pose a stronger constraint to Instagram than Facebook does.” This news is quite relevant to Facebook business strategy as the main purpose of this requested approval and review, provides independent information and conclusions in terms of competition  concerns to anyone. Feel Free to add your comments to this post, thank you.