C ute Crisis, Facebook Holiday Cards and A Vision of Mixed Reality
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there. For those looking to dig in, click on the links for the full story.
In 2011, Facebook’s big crisis was about photo tagging. Today, that almost seems cute
By David Pierson From LA Times
- “Armed with enormous power, the nation’s fifth-largest company by market capitalization has to take into account both the needs of shareholders and the communities it serves. How Facebook navigates its journey toward its next billion users could portend not just the financial health of the company but also the health of the societies increasingly influenced by its products.”
- “Now Zuckerberg is more openly contemplative. He’s even been acting like he’s campaigning for office, attending a rodeo, planting a community garden and thanking police during a visit to Dallas. He’s had to deny rumors that he’s interested in running for president.”
- “At some point, Kirkpatrick said, Facebook may struggle to balance competing interests to keep its platform safe and grow users at the same time. And because Facebook is a publicly traded company, Zuckerberg will be under continual pressure to favor the latter.”
Facebook kicks off Mother’s Day weekend with flower reactions, cards, stickers, masks and more
By Sarah Perez From TechCrunch
- “The purple flower was introduced last year around Mother’s Day – only a few months after Facebook expanded the Like button to include a further range of reactions, such as love, haha, wow, sad, and angry.”
- “Facebook had first introduced a program in December that places these sorts of informational greetings at the top of the News Feed, alerting you to holidays and other historical or cultural events. The program kicked off with a set of holiday cards aimed at those who celebrated Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or just the winter season in general.”
- “Facebook said users should expect to see the option to send cards for other holidays in the future, too, and made good on that promise with Valentine’s cards in February. The new Mother’s Day cards will also go live on Sunday, and some can be personalized with your own photos.”
I finally believe in Microsoft’s mixed reality vision
By Devindra Hardawar From Engadget
- “For years, Microsoft has been talking about its dream of mixed reality — the idea that AR and VR headsets can work together in harmony across virtual and physical environments. But until now, it really has just been talk.”
- “The centerpiece of this year’s demo was a puzzle-filled island, which featured a beach, a small forest and a large volcano. Like all-seeing gods, the HoloLens users could see the VR headset wearers’ tiny avatars running through the island. Everyone wearing an Acer headset, meanwhile, had an on-the-ground view, with the HoloLens viewers appearing as menacing clouds in the horizon. The demo is basically an example of how these different types of devices could be used to observe a single environment.”
- “The big takeaway, at this point, is that there’s plenty of potential for AR and VR headsets to work together. And compared to others dabbling in these fields, Microsoft is in a unique place. It’s the only company with a single platform that can support both AR and VR, and it also has plenty of hardware experience that others don’t.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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