Welcome to This Week in Digital – a week in which Facebook is building its own version of Instagram Close Friends; Snapchat offers AR tips; and PayPal could now help customers at the start of their shopping experience as well as the end.
HEADLINES
- Facebook explores Favourites for ‘micro-sharing’, paying for Viewpoints, and adding additional brand safety whitelisting features.
- In a mergers and acquisition flurry, PayPal has bought browser deal plug-in honey (here’s why) and eBay has offloaded StubHub to Viagogo.
- UK’s data regulator has turned up the heat on ad tech over GDPR.
- Verizon and Snap have partnered on 5G.
INSIGHTS
- Average daily active users interact with AR nearly 30 times per day. Snapchat offers tips to brands on how to get the most out of AR.
- Top 1% of app publishers drive 80% of downloads.
- Here’s how TikTok is attracting influencers (by paying them).
- Hip sneaker maker Allbirds has called Amazon out for selling ‘similar looking’ footwear at one-third the price but without the eco-creds.
COOL
- Tesla’s truck launch was a big hit on social media.
- The role of robots in Amazon’s 30-minute delivery goal.
DEEP READS
- Inventor of the web, Tim Berner-Lee unveiled a plan to save it.
- AI is being unleashed on AI to combat deepfakes.
- Google is looking to shed light on machine learning with Explainable AI.
