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Facebook will restructure its advertising platform into campaigns, ad sets, and ads on March 4

Feb26
by on February 26, 2014 at 10:07 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Social Media

79493977 1 520x245 Facebook will restructure its advertising platform into campaigns, ad sets, and ads on March 4

Facebook today announced it will launch a new campaign structure on March 4 with the goal of making it easier for advertisers of every size to organize, optimize, and measure their ads. The company will go from two levels (campaigns and ads) to three (campaigns, ad sets, and ads).

Facebook plans to push the new structure worldwide across all ad interfaces, including the Ads Create Tool, Ads Manager and Power Editor, as well as third-party ad interfaces built by Preferred Marketing Developers. When it arrives on your ad account, all your campaigns will be migrated automatically to the new structure, but the migration will not impact delivery, spend, or performance of your existing ads (historical data for existing ads and campaigns will also remain available).

Here is a breakdown of the new trio:

  • Campaigns correspond to each of your advertising objectives, like building brand awareness or driving web traffic. They’re designed to help you optimize and measure your results for each objective across multiple ad sets and ads.
  • Ad sets with their own budget and schedule are found in each campaign. You can also organize each ad set to represent audience segments, like people who live near your store, to control the amount you spend on each audience, decide when they will see your ads, and measure their response. The ad delivery system will optimize delivery for the best-performing ad in an ad set.
  • Ads feature different images, links, video, or text and are found in ad sets. You can still control the creative, targeting and bidding at the ad level.

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Overall, this change seems like it will result in more work for marketers. The upside is, however, they will learn which ads are resonating with each audience and, in turn, be able to create better-optimized campaigns. At least, that’s what Facebook is hoping.

Top Image Credit: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

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Connected car device Automatic gets IFTTT support

Feb26
by on February 26, 2014 at 10:00 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider

automatic 520x245 Connected car device Automatic gets IFTTT support

Automatic, a smart hardware plugin for your car, has announced integration with Internet automation service IFTTT.

IFTTT works by allowing users to create “recipes” that combine a trigger with an action. Automatic’s triggers include turning the ignition on or off, location, the check engine light and completion of a trip. While the service is bound to have some overlap with IFTTT’s new Location channel, it does add lots of potential for some neat interactions.

Sample recipes include emailing your mechanic when your check engine light comes on, automatically logging work trip mileage in a Google spreadsheet and notifying friends when you leave or arrive.

Connected car device Automatic gets IFTTT support
The $100 Automatic device plugs into the port on your car that mechanics use to monitor the vehicle’s status and perform smog checks. It then syncs with your phone in order to show you the data and offer suggestions on how to improve your driving efficiency.

“Originally, we started out with this idea that connectivity would change the way we use our cars,” Automatic Chief Product Officer Ljuba Miljkovic said in an interview. “Our cars are the most powerful computers that we have and yet they’re not connected to the internet.”

The IFTTT integration fits with Automatic’s goal to open up the driving experience to other connected services and products that we use.

“Your car is just another piece of technology that you can hook up with anything else that you do online,” Miljkovic added.

With IFTTT, you can also create a link between your car actions and connected home products. For instance, you could have lights turn on when you get home, or have the light in your garage change colors depending on the health of your car.

For now, Automatic’s IFTTT channel only provides triggers, so you won’t be able to start your car every time someone tweets at you, but maybe someday you can have your car come pick you as soon as you lock your door.

Image credit: Automatic

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Google+ for Android gets photo editing across devices, one view for all photos, new filters and creative tools

Feb26
by on February 26, 2014 at 9:33 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Google, Mobile

googleplus2 786x305 520x245 Google+ for Android gets photo editing across devices, one view for all photos, new filters and creative tools

Google today updated Google+ for Android with a slew of new features focused just on photos. You can download the new version now from Google Play.

First and foremost, the app now features non-destructive photo editing across devices. In other words, you can now start editing a photo on one device and continue on another. Here’s a scenario where this is useful: you can now back up full-resolution photos from your desktop, make some basic edits on your phone, and then add some finishing touches on your tablet.

This is possible because Google is saving all your edits in the cloud. You can, of course, revert to the original version at any time.

06 filters Google+ for Android gets photo editing across devices, one view for all photos, new filters and creative tools

Next up, Google+ for Android has gained new filters and creative tools. The company explains users now have “a powerful set of tools (like crop and rotate), 1-touch filters, and Snapseed-inspired enhancements (like Drama, Retrolux, and HDR Scape).”

Last but not least, Google has added a single view for all your photos. It shows your entire photo library, regardless of whether your pictures are on your current device or backed up in the cloud. You can now also browse your photos by date: just swipe through your photos in the new All view and look for the scroll bar on the right (drag up or down to move forwards or backwards in time).

For very large photo libraries (tens of thousands of photos), the app won’t show all your photos initially. Google, however, does say it plans to support larger and larger libraries “over the next few weeks.” We’ll let you know when we find out more about the new upper limit.

See also – Google+ for Android gets unified search, better notification controls, view content by category, and more and Google Play gets Google+ integration to show content you’ve rated and recommendations from your friends

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Google holding its Project Ara developer event in April to help you build modular smartphone parts

Feb26
by on February 26, 2014 at 9:27 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Google, google developer conference, Insider, project ara developer conference

ara.mosiac 482x245 Google holding its Project Ara developer event in April to help you build modular smartphone parts

Google announced today that it is organizing the first-ever Ara Developers Conference, aimed at helping developers better understand the inner workings of a smartphone and to build one themselves. The event will be held April 15 and 16 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It’s also part of a series of conferences that Google is putting on to help support Project Ara, an initiative started from Motorola Mobility to promote free, open hardware.

There’s no word on when the next conference is scheduled, but it will be in 2014. Google intends to focus the April event on the alpha release of the Ara Module Developers Kit (MDK), an “open platform specification and reference implementation” that will help developers create their own module:

The Developers’ Conference will consist of a detailed walk-through of existing and planned features of the Ara platform, a briefing and community feedback sessions on the alpha MDK, and an announcement of a series of prize challenges for module developers.

While Project Ara is an initiative run by Google, it’s one of the things that the company kept after it sold Motorola to Lenovo in January for $2.91 billion. The project made its debut in October with the intent of doing for hardware what “the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.”

Tickets will be limited for the event, with priority placed on bringing in developers. If you can’t make the event, Google says that it will be available via a live webstream.

Photo credit: Google

Hat-tip The Verge.

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Following developer requests, Google delays blocking extensions not in the Chrome Web Store until May 1

Feb26
by on February 26, 2014 at 8:59 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, Google

Google today announced it won’t be blocking local Chrome for Windows extensions until May 1. The timing change is being made after some developers requested more time to get their extensions in the Chrome Web Store. As a result, Windows users have about two more months to use extensions for the company’s browser that Google hasn’t approved into its store.

The new policy does not affect off-store extensions on the Dev and Canary channels for Windows, nor all channels for Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS. The FAQ gives more details:

Google originally announced the change in November, saying they would go into effect in January. While it already went into effect for Chrome 33 beta, the stable version won’t be affected until version 34 or 35.

Image Credit: Miguel Saavedra

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