Posts Tagged: "Social Networking"

Facebook users continue to be shocked at the amount and kind of data being collected by the social media platform, including recent reports about call and SMS text messaging data which Facebook has been collecting from Android mobile users. Along with the political heat Zuckerberg continues to take, Facebook itself could be on the hook for a record fine from the Federal Trade Commission if it’s found that the company’s data practices violate terms of a 2011 consent decree between Facebook and the FTC. With all of this focus on Facebook’s data collection practices, we decided to take a look at some of the social media technologies patented by Facebook at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which may give readers a better idea of just how this American social media giant leverages user data.

On January 19th, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company would increase its efforts against “fake news” by asking its users to rate the trustworthiness of news sources being posted to the social media platform. Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook will utilize ongoing quality surveys to ask users if they are familiar with a particular news source. Using this data, Facebook will then rate each publication based on the user ratings and prioritize those that are most trusted to surface on news feeds. “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Social media enables people to spread information faster than ever before, and if we don’t specifically tackle these problems, then we end up amplifying them.”

While there are a lot of irreplaceable benefits to leveraging social media and cloud collaboration platforms for business, there are also risks that, if not managed properly, leave organizations vulnerable to business and legal risk… According to Osterman, sometimes takes a significant event to drive decision makers to action in the context of good information governance. For instance, a lawsuit in which an organization is not able to adequately respond to an eDiscovery order, or a regulator’s request for information that cannot be properly satisfied, will often move information governance from the back burner to a properly funded and executed initiative.

Your business name is how people will identify with your goods and services, so you want to have one identity that is all your own. Simple enough really, at least in concept, but making a mistake at the selection stage will prove costly… It would seem virtually impossible to operate in the modern world without a website for your business, and soon it will be equally incomprehensible not to be using social media platforms in one way or another. The power of social media is only growing, and smart businesses are trying to position themselves to take advantage of the phenomenon. If you are serious about your business endeavors you too need to get in the social media game, and if you don’t already have a website for goodness sake get moving!

Although it seems likely that Snap will seek to secure around $25 billion during its IPO, the company itself doesn’t engage in a great deal of patent filing activity compared to other tech companies. According to analysis of Snap’s patenting activities published last November by CB Insights, a total of 46 U.S. patent applications filed by Snap between 2012 and 2016 were identified; this total is likely short of actual Snap patent application filing numbers during those four years because of the 18-month period it takes before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office publishes filed patent applications. Snap filed a total of 18 U.S. patent applications during both 2014 and 2015. 22 of Snap’s patent applications identified by CB Insights were directed at user interface and user experience inventions but other areas covered by Snap patent applications include automated content curation, network, spectacles as well as object, facial and audio recognition.

On June 13th, the Redmond, WA-based multinational tech company Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced that it had agree to acquire LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) in a $26.2 billion cash transaction which values LinkedIn stock at $196 per share. According to news reports, this is Microsoft’s largest corporate acquisition ever. It greatly outpaces the company’s $8.5 billion Skype acquisition and the $7.6 Nokia purchase, both of which happened prior to the tenure of current CEO Satya Nadella. With Microsoft’s acquiring LinkedIn at such a high premium, there has been talks that mergers and acquisitions may increase in the social network sector.

News that Facebook engaged in suppressing content from conservative groups was first reported by Gizmodo in early May. The online publication reported comments from former Facebook workers who said they were instructed to prevent stories on conservative figures and major conservative events like CPAC from appearing in the website’s Trending News section. Since that news hit, individual Facebook users and organizations alike have come out saying that they had posts banned for no better reason than the fact that they expressed a conservative point of view.

Facebook’s mobile advertising numbers were so good that its entire advertising revenue stream surged ahead 57 percent when compared with 2015’s first quarter, up from $3.31 billion to $5.2 billion. Advertising is the major chunk of Facebook’s revenues and the company’s $5.38 billion first quarter revenues were 50 percent greater than its revenues during 2015’s first quarter. It’s also interesting to note that Facebook has increased quarterly research and development expenditures to $1.34 billion in 2016’s first quarter, up from $1.06 billion during last year’s first quarter. Since the beginning of this year, Facebook has received 13 patent grants from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office related to advertising; the company has also had another 32 patent applications related to ads published so far this year. A look at the text cluster, made available through Innography’s patent portfolio analysis tools, shows readers that Facebook is designing ad services incorporating social graphs, targeting criteria and media content.

The administration of the 44th President of the United States will be remembered for many reasons, but one theme which has been playing out since the earliest days of Barack Obama’s presidency is a predilection towards using popular and developing technologies. In his first few months in office, President Obama created the position of U.S. Chief Technology Officer, an official adviser to the President on tech policy and a role currently served by Megan Smith, a former executive at Google. Obama’s techie status is cemented by media reports of his long-time adherence to BlackBerry phones as well as his warm attitude and close relationship with major Silicon Valley players.

The social aspects of video gaming have been a recent focus of Activision research and development activity, as is reflected by the issue of U.S. Patent No. 8911296, entitled Social Network System and Method for Use With and Integration Into a Video Game. It protects a system configured to provide a social network integrated into one or more video games, the system having a video game platform executing computer software to generate visual and audio stimulus associated with a video game and a server executing computer software to provide a social network to a plurality of players available outside of the video game and with which virtual artificial intelligence characters from the game may also interact. This system enables interactions between players and virtual characters on a social network to have an impact in actual video game play. The social aspects of video gaming are also the focus of player socializationU.S. Patent No. 9076292, titled Encouraging Player Socialization Using a Nemesis and Avenger System.

Anyone who already feels like social networks collect too much personal data may not be happy to find out about the invention protected by U.S. Patent No. 9118725, issued under the title User Activity Tracking System. The method claimed here involves receiving sensor signals from a client device which correspond to motions of the client device, determining an activity of the user by associating sensor signals with activity periods comprising a geographic location and selecting activity types corresponding to each activity period. This invention is designed to better determine the exact sports activity in which a user is engaged.

The big winner among social media e-businesses in the 2015 consumer index is Pinterest, the personal web cataloguing service headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Its consumer satisfaction index score rose by about 3 percent since last year to a score of 78, tied for the best 2015 index score of any e-business. Most people think of Pinterest as a fun website for getting party ideas or tips on how to style a home, but there have been some interesting aspects of Pinterest’s business developing. Recently, the Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC) announced that Pinterest, which manages about 1.3 billion pins related to money management, is driving about 30 percent of the company’s social media traffic. A police department in Dover, DE, recently became one of a small but growing contingent of departments who have launched Pinterest accounts to advertise a public lost & found service. Pinterest users who have ever found themselves frustrated at an inability to purchase imaginative items they find on the site may be happy to note that the site is rolling out buyable pins.

Between July 2011 and July 2014, Yahoo! had expenditures of 17.8 as a percent of sales on R&D while experiencing a stock growth of 85 percent over the same time period. Areas of research focus at Yahoo! Labs include computational advertising, machine learning and web mining innovations. Our research using the Innography patent analytics search tools shows a total of 303 U.S. patent grants during 2014; the text cluster diagram (shown right) gives us a quick glimpse into those patents, not surprisingly showing that much of Yahoo!’s patent activity was focused on search engine services, especially in selected searches and search result pages. User devices, user interfaces and social networking also represented an important focus for Yahoo! in 2014.