Germany but if there's an actual law it's probably EU-wide. I haven't found one but I have found rumors that PSD2 banned minimum charges. I guess everyone is complying to a phantom law.
What this highlights is that it is damn simple to be a poor developer yet achieve a particular goal. You can brute force your way towards that goal, ignoring any sort of costly 'useless' security, usability or user privacy aspects. Even more so if you're a criminal. GDPR|CCPA < INTERPOL!
This is never going to end. This is true for criminal orgs but also legit businesses that despite regulations will mostly prioritize features to their customers over less tangible/monetizable value like hardened infrastructure and updated software.
Maybe I'm wrong and this cluster was left exposed for another reason, though.
This article is brushing a lot of stuff very fast. In reality there is much more to it:
1. You don't need to visit Facebook properties for them to link your activity to you. Unless you're a brand new user and they have never finger printed you...
2. Referrer might be in the pixel tracker, but there is way more to that, including product IDs, product costs, your stage in the funnel (have you Added to Cart but not Purchased?), product category, etc.
3. Everytime a Facebook owned property (or piece of: Like button, FB connect) is 'used' by a device you use, then you can be sure the relation between you and that Pixel call is made (ahem, improved).
Install the Chrome Extension Facebook Pixel Helper, and check what happens when you use an ecom site. You'll be amazed to see what is shared with Facebook (no PII though).
For anyone marketing something, installing browser add-ons to cleanly parse tracking params, event calls and adtech/martech used on sites can yield some valuable competitive business insights.
You'd be surprised at how many businesses do things like label things identifying their high value audiences, creative or products just to have it human readable in other reporting with zero obfuscation. Likewise, you can see if they are using any interesting tech you are not.
In particular it would be interesting to go into why and how these 3rd party trackers get included on a page. I mean, the answer to both is obviously "money", but how does it work in practice? Old Navy agrees to implement a facebook tracking pixel in every page? Or it comes "for free" with a like button? etc.
It's part of the onboarding of any Facebook Ads user (i.e., advertiser) to implement the Facebook Pixel on their site.
Without it you're not going to achieve much on Facebook as you need to feedback their system when a particular ad had an impact so that they can model the ad delivery accordingly and get you more converting users. Whatever your conversion is (viewing a page, registering, purchasing).
The Like button primarily allows Facebook to monitor your presence across the internet. Tracking pixels can be deployed on a page by page or site-wide level (included like analytics scripts) to enable remarketing or retargeting.
The site-wide implementation will, for example, enable URLs that meet %string% to be grouped into a "segment". And then you can serve specific ads to that segment while excluding others
Related. The next big change for privacy and ad targeting is the removal of the IDFA by Apple and the GAID by Google. Removal or aggressive randomization, but there is no way those IDs remain as persistent as currently.
It's a matter of months, maybe a couple of years.
When this happens, what is happening with Safari now will look like a minor issue.
Yes indeed. And reset your GAID when you want and know how to do it. But my point is that such a behavior will be forced by the OS rather than offered as a choice.
It's what is happening with Safari (and the other browsers). First, knowledgeable users are empowered to make a decision, then, that decision is rolled out automatically to the masses. E.g., https.
This is way overblown. They have at least a Hololens equivalent, and if you value occlusion, they're ahead. And that's without Microsoft's reach. Equating them to vaporware isn't fair at all.
I can't see how you would really take their implementation of occlusion seriously, what's it useful for? it's so laggy that it's not even tech-demo worthy.
It seemed fine for static object geometry. Throw a virtual ball behind a couch and its gone. AR toys can fall behind tables. It does add to the experience. I don't have the most up to date view but has the Hololens significantly improved over that?
Mind that the advertised technology relied on Fiber Scanning Displays and extensive computing power – and I'm not aware of this having been refined to a producible and marketable item.
A prototype is not enough to stop something from being vaporware.
Edit, to people that disagree: Did they have an even half-finished form? Did they offer it for sale?
Was it "announced to the general public but never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled"?
Vaporware doesn't always mean it's a scam. Sometimes it means there were intractable tech problems. Coming out with a fundamentally different product doesn't negate the missing product.
The real question is who invested, and why? Even though being an investor doesn't mean being smart at it, it's still a signal that those guys are/were onto something and needed the cash to accelerate/deploy. $3.5M for such a small remote team though... I'm not running the numbers but they were cash burning big time, for a long time.
I don't think it's that bad a cash-burn. That's less than $100k per month for a team of 8. Even full remote, salaries and overhead don't seem recklessly out of alignment.
This always baffles me the most. Who gives money to a startup without a business model? I guess they just have funds to throw at the wall and hope something sticks.
Startups with scalable, repeatable business models are basically not startups anymore, since the whole point of a startup is to search for scalable, repeatable business model. And valuations match that: once the startup has actually found a scalable business model and is in its growth phase, expect to pay $100M or more for it, sometimes into the billions.
People aren't necessarily asking for a business. They're asking for a business model: a way, maybe untested, maybe lightly tested, that you might earn more than you spend. Just needs to be semi-plausible, doesn't need to be bulletproof.
If you don't care about whether it's tested this startup had a plausible business model: by coming up with an algorithm to identify fashion taste, fashion e-commerce sites could show more relevant recommendations, which leads to more sales, which leads to more revenue. Then they pay this company some fraction of that additional revenue, and both win.
This is such a good news for tumblr. It's sad that key internet services like del.icio.us, tumblr, and I'm sure others got destroyed be Yahoo! But, it's good to see that some managed to stay alive and might have another life after having been Yahoo!'d
Jira is the primary target of the article when it probably should be how people run agile projects, and how organizations tend to struggle findind the most efficient (software development) processes to reach their business goals.
This article could have been written for any similar Jira direct / indirect competitors like you mentioned, and the like of Asana, Trello (Atlassian), Aha, plain old Word, Excel and so many others.
But it wasn't, because it's just easier to pick the elephant in the room and have a go at what remains a great tool when used wisely. Kind of like pen and paper, after all.
In the UK I sometimes pay for a single Banana by card, 50p (0.6€).
When I do, I wonder if the highest carbon footprint was from the payment processing or the banana processing!