/ By Brisbane Hosting / Social Media/ • • • • / 0 Comments

Facebook Challenges LinkedIn With New Job Openings Feature

New feature in testing allows business page admins to post job openings and accept applications.

While helping you keep in touch with friends from your past, Facebook might also help you find a job in the future.

The online social network confirmed Monday it is testing a feature that will allow administrators of business pages to promote job openings on their pages and receive applications from job candidates. TechCrunch, which first spotted the new feature, noted that the feature could help Facebook “muscle in” on LinkedIn, which derives much of its revenue from companies paying to search for new recruits.

“Based on behavior we’ve seen on Facebook, where many small businesses post about their job openings on their Page, we’re running a test for Page admins to create job postings and receive applications from candidates,” a Facebook spokesman said in a statement.

Facebook is no stranger to new endeavors in sectors already dominated by one company. In October 2015, the social network challenged Craigslist with the launch of Marketplace, a new section of its mobile app that lets people list their furniture, cars and clothes for sale to any Facebook users in their area. Last week, Facebook launched Gameroom, a PC gaming platform that takes aim at Steam.

By: Steven Musil

Posted on: https://www.cnet.com/au/news/facebook-challenges-linkedin-with-new-job-openings-feature

 

Brisbane Hosting & Website Hosting’s products and services include Website Hosting, Domain Names, DNS Services, Website Development, Website Design, Website Revamps, Website Maintenance, Social Media Campaigns and more.

Contact Brisbane Hosting on (07) 3889 2977 or via email info@brisbanehosting.com.au

/ By Brisbane Hosting / Social Media/ • • • / 0 Comments

Twitter appoints Facebook veteran Bret Taylor to its board

Twitter has appointed a former senior Facebook executive and Silicon Valley veteran, to its board, as it continues to makeover of its leadership group as it struggles to rev up growth.

Bret Taylor, who joins Twitter’s board as its 10th member, served as Facebook’s chief technical officer from 2009 to 2012 before leaving the company to help found Quip, a workplace productivity startup. Before Facebook, Taylor was a product manager for Google.

“Twitter is the fastest way to find out what’s happening, and beneath its simplicity lies a very sophisticated set of technology,” Mr Taylor said.

“I hope to bring my knowledge and experiences to bear to help Jack and the board push Twitter and its services forward.”

Twitter’s board has been in flux since last year, when co-founder Jack Dorsey returned to the company to take over again as its chief executive.

Since Mr Dorsey’s reinstatement, Twitter has made a series of changes to its board, including recruiting people like Omid Kordestani, a former high-ranking Google executive, and Debra Lee, chairman and chief executive of BET. Other long-standing directors, like Peter Chernin and Peter Currie, left the board voluntarily this year.

Twitter has long faced criticism for its board’s composition, largely over its lack of female and minority members. That has slowly shifted with the appointments of Lee and Martha Lane Fox, a British digital entrepreneur and Mr Kordestani, Twitter’s chairman, is of Iranian-American heritage.

Taylor’s success at Facebook may give Twitter some cover from critics who have voiced concerns about the company’s strategy. Twitter has been struggling with how to increase its audience growth, which has stalled even as other social media properties like Instagram continue to pull in new members.

In a statement on Tuesday, Kordestani said Twitter had added Taylor because of his experience in consumer products and technologies, which would complement the finance and media skills of other board members.

As a Google product manager, Taylor was a co-creator of Google Maps and the Maps application programming interface, used by many companies. He also served on Facebook’s leadership team through its tumultuous initial public offering in 2012.

By: Mike Isaac
Posted On: http://www.afr.com/technology/twitter-appoints-facebook-veteran-bret-taylor-to-its-board-20160706-gpzgvr#ixzz4EFNZwpZQ

 

Brisbane Hosting & Website Hosting’s products and services include Website Hosting, Domain Names, DNS Services, Website Development, Website Design, Website Revamps, Website Maintenance, Social Media Campaigns and more.

Contact Brisbane Hosting on (07) 3889 2977 or via email info@brisbanehosting.com.au for further information and quote today.

/ By Brisbane Hosting / Social Media/ • • • • / 0 Comments

Facebook launches ‘Reactions’ worldwide to track user behaviour and deliver ads

Facebook has now officially added a select group of emoticons to allow users to react to posts – without having to use anything as old fashioned as, you know, actual words.

The social network rolled out “Reactions” – an extension of the “Like” button – worldwide on Wednesday, allowing people to display quick reactions such as sadness, anger and love.

In a video accompanying a blog post, the five new buttons appear as animated emoticons that pop up when the “Like” button is held down on mobile devices. The buttons appear on desktops when users hover over the “Like” button.

Facebook launched a pilot of “Reactions” – which allowed users to select from seven emotions including “Angry”, “Sad”, “Wow” and “Like” – in Ireland and Spain in October.

The “Yay” emoticon, which was present in the pilot launch, was not seen in Wednesday’s video.

The company will also use “Reactions” to track user behaviour and for ad delivery.

“We will initially use any Reaction similar to a Like to infer that you want to see more of that type of content,” Facebook said in separate blog post.

Facebook said that over time it hoped to learn how different “Reactions” should be weighted differently by the Facebook News Feed to customise it for individual users. Facebook said “Reactions” would have the same impact on ad delivery as “Likes”.

The feature received mixed reviews from users on social networking sites.

Many complained that they could not see the new emoticons, while some were unhappy that Facebook did not launch a “dislike” button. Others expressed concern that the feature would lead to diminished use of language and less interaction.

“Great, now you don’t even have to offer actual words, just a freaking emoji. What’s the point in learning a language at all then?,” Candice Johnson wrote on the social network.

Comments by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in September that many took to mean that the social network was working on a “dislike” button set off a debate over whether it would cause cyberbullying.

Twitter replaced its star-shaped “favourite” icon with a heart-shaped icon called “like” in November in an attempt to make its website more engaging, but many users scorned the change.

 

By: Mary Altaffer
Posted on: http://www.afr.com/technology/social-media/facebook/facebook-launches-reactions-worldwide-to-track-user-behaviour-and-deliver-ads-20160224-gn2yto#ixzz41c9urpOc

/ By Brisbane Hosting / Brisbane Hosting • Social Media/ • • / 0 Comments

Facebook the biggest new advertiser on British television

Facebook, the technology giant disrupting the traditional media world, is the biggest new spender on television advertising in the United Kingdom.

As a wave of disruption hits publishers and television broadcasters alike, Facebook contributed  £10.8 million ($20.9 million) in ad revenue – the most of the 877 new advertisers or those returning to TV after not spending for at least five years.

The social media network launched a number of TV advertisements in the UK in 2015, including this spot called Friend Request.

Along with fellow disruptors Google and Netflix, Facebook helped lift the total UK advertising market above £5 billion for the first time. According to Nielsen data provided to Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV in the UK, Google, Facebook and Netflix spend more than 60 per cent of their marketing budgets on TV advertising.

Total UK television advertising revenue hit £5.27 billion, up 7.4 per cent, in 2015 – the sixth consecutive year of growth, according to Thinkbox. The spend was driven by a 14 per cent increase in ad revenue from online businesses in television to more than £500 million, which is now the second-largest spending category on TV. The £5 billion figure includes linear TV ads, sponsorships, broadcaster video on-demand and product placement.

“Advertisers of all sizes, from global technology companies to local businesses, know this and have voted with their investment,” Thinkbox chief executive Lindsey Clay said.

“Online businesses in particular recognise the impact TV advertising has and have significantly increased their investment recently. This is something we expect to continue in 2016.”

MCN chief sales and marketing officer Mark Frain said the UK television market was benefiting for a number of reasons.

“One of the fundamental reasons, which continues to underpin their growth, is they all work on a similar trading platform to what MCN has incorporated in Landmark and that’s across subscription TV and free-to-air broadcasters in that market. They’re all aligned from a systems perspective,” Mr Frain told Fairfax Media.

“Secondly, within that market, they’ve also got a trading hub that sits in the middle of the industry. In terms of automation and alignment, everything is coming through in similar formats, delivery is automated at a network end. The UK market has been like that for probably over 10 years.”

Mr Frain said the figures from the UK showed television remained an effective medium for advertisers.

“There’s been plenty of alleged discussion about Facebook and YouTube’s ambition to become part of television. I think, by all in large now, if you look at the ways the agencies are trading, they are becoming part of television,” he said.

“But, I think it’s fascinating that they are investing heavily into linear television to drive their businesses.”

Television in Australia is expected to have another lean year in 2016, but the industry’s investment in digital platforms, such as Plus7, 9Now and tenplay are leading advertisers to forecast up to double-digit growth in ad revenue in 2018, according to Starcom Mediavest’s media futures.

“The announcements and the launches that have happened this year, the announcements last year in terms of Seven and Nine’s move into more automation or greater data capabilities through the digital platforms they’re building – there is no doubt that will pay off for the TV sector moving forward,” Mr Frain.

GroupM chief investment officer Sebastian Rennie said while it was hard to draw comparisons with the UK market, the local television industry was looking to put the right infrastructure in place, such as digital streaming platforms, and hoping the ad revenue would follow.

“I don’t think there’s any questions overall about TV being a powerful medium, it’s just going through some structural shifts at moment,” Mr Rennie said.

“Most of the networks in their upfronts [an event where broadcasters showcased their shows and strategy for the coming year to media buyers and advertisers] talked about investing in their digital platforms as a way of future proofing them.”

By: Max Mason
Posted on: http://www.afr.com/business/media-and-marketing/facebook-the-biggest-new-advertiser-on-british-television-20160224-gn2zds#ixzz41c7maEzP

/ By Brisbane Hosting / Social Media/ • • / 0 Comments

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says its time for video, so forget text and photos

Forget sending text messages, instant messages or even photos, says Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, the world’s largest social media company.

Pretty soon videos will be the main way we will share our lives with each other online, and soon after that it will be 360-degree videos of “whole scenes” so our family and friends can be completely immersed in our lives, from afar.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress, the mobile phone industry’s annual trade show, Mr Zuckerberg said that faster mobile networks and new virtual-reality technology were driving radical changes in social media that Facebook was beginning to witness.

“Ten or 15 years ago most of what we shared and consumed online was text. Then it was photos, especially since we got smartphones with cameras. And now it’s really becoming video. The mobile networks are fast enough that most people can upload video and have it not be a terrible experience. As the networks get better and better that’s going to be more and more of what you share.

“Over the next few years videos is going to be a huge thing. But that’s not the end of the line. There’s always a more immersive way that you want to share and experience the moments in your life.

“What I think we’re going to get to next, and I think this will happen sooner than we think, is the ability to share whole scenes, not just a little 2D video of something that you care about,” said Mr Zuckerberg, speaking at a keynote address on the first day of the Congress.

Of course, he would say that.

His company spent $US2 billion in 2014, buying the virtual-reality headset company Oculus, which had already partnered with the Korean electronics giant Samsung to make the Gear VR, an attachment for mobile phones that let people watch completely immersive videos.

Here at Mobile World Congress, Samsung just announced a camera for ordinary consumers, the Gear 360, that shoots videos that capture footage in every direction at once, that can be watched in the Gear VR. LG, too, announced a 360-degree camera and a headset capable of watching them.

“Even with just the Gear VR, there have been a million hours of 360 (degree) video that have been watched. On Facebook there are more than a million people who watch 360 videos everyday. So that’s happening,” Mr Zuckerberg said.

John Davidson is attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as a guest of Samsung

 

By John Davidson
Posted on: http://www.afr.com/technology/facebook-to-make-a-360degree-turn-says-zuckerberg-20160223-gn1h2w#ixzz41c6uJJ2G

/ By Brisbane Hosting / Brisbane Hosting • Social Media/ • • • • / 0 Comments

Facebook to build fifth data centre

Will be powered by adjacent wind farm.

Facebook will invest more than US$500 million (A$675 million) to build a new data centre in Fort Worth, Texas, which will become its fourth in the United States and fifth overall.

The facility will employ at least 40 full-time employees and will be powered entirely by renewable energy, Tom Furlong, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, wrote in a blog post.

The deal will see Facebook bring 200 megawatts of new wind energy to the Texas grid thanks to partnerships with Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power Corporation, and Starwood Energy Group.

Facebook won’t own the wind farm once construction is complete – it will buy energy to power its data centre.

“200 MW is more energy than we will need for the foreseeable future, and we’re proud to have played a role in bringing this project to Texas,”  Ken Patchett, Facebook’s west region director of data centre operations wrote.

Construction of the wind farm is already under way on a 17,000 acre site 90 miles from the data centre, and Facebook expects it to begin delivering clean energy to the grid by 2016.

The company opened its first data centre in Prineville, Oregon, in 2011. It has other facilities in Altoona, Iowa, Forest City, North Carolina and Lulea, Sweden.

“We put a lot of effort into choosing where to locate a facility like this,” Patchett wrote.

“Our Fort Worth facility will be one of the most advanced, efficient, and sustainable data centers in the world.

“It will feature the latest in our Open Compute Project hardware designs — including Yosemite, Wedge, and 6-pack — and it will be cooled using outdoor air instead of energy-intensive air conditioners. (Yes, we can make that work even in the middle of the kinds of summers we have here in Texas.)”

The company said its infrastructure efficiency efforts had helped it save more than US$2 billion in infrastructure costs over the last three years.

With Reuters

By Allie Coyne
Published on: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/406298,facebook-to-build-fifth-data-centre.aspx#ixzz3fM5lRBNQ

/ By Brisbane Hosting / Apps & Software • Brisbane Hosting • Social Media/ • • • / 0 Comments

Facebook can recognize you without looking at your face

Think you can stop Facebook from automatically tagging photos of you by covering your face? Think again.

The New Scientist reports that Facebook is developing a new facial recognition algorithm so powerful that it can identify individuals even when their faces are hidden or blocked off. Instead the experimental algorithm gathers information based on other unique characteristics like hair style, body shape, and body language. It can even identify individuals based on what types of clothing they typically wear.

“There are a lot of cues we use. People have characteristic aspects, even if you look at them from the back,” Yann LeCun, head of artificial intelligence at Facebook, told the New Scientist. “For example, you can recognize Mark Zuckerberg very easily because he always wears a gray T-shirt.”

Facebook’s A.I. research team tested its new facial recognition algorithm using 40,000 public photos from Flickr. Some of the photos had people’s faces clearly visible and some had people’s faces turned away from the camera. The algorithm was able to identify people with 83 percent accuracy.

Facebook is hoping to incorporate this algorithm into its recently launched Moments feature. Moments automatically creates collections of photos using certain data like where and when each photo was taken, tagging all recognizable Facebook friends along the way. If this algorithm ends up giving Moments another data set, pretty soon Facebook could also be able to surface all the photos of you taken with a certain friend, even photos where that friend was wearing a Halloween mask.

The impact on you: Social networks relying on facial recognition to create better products is nothing new. The new Google Photos app can even recognize your pets. But even though facial recognition is getting impressively accurate, it doesn’t mean that most people have gotten comfortable with the idea of being scanned, identified, and recognized by every tech company.

LeCun argues that the Facebook algorithm can be used to alert people whenever a photo of them surfaces on the web. But the flipside has raised serious privacy concerns. Even Tim Cook has expressed his concern. “You might like these so-called free services [from Facebook and Google], but we don’t think they’re worth having your email or your search history or now even your family photos data-mined and sold off for God knows what advertising purpose,” the Apple CEO said at a recent event.

By Oscar Raymundo
Published in: http://www.itnews.com/social-media/94276/facebook-can-recognize-you-without-looking-your-face