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n addition to Merchandise, community groups and Premieres. Speaking at VidCon 2018, Youtube's Chief Product Officer announced they'll be rolling out three new features: the first, being paid memberships available to channels with over 100k subscribers.
Memberships are $4.99 per month and viewers will receive access to special badges, emojis, exclusive streams, and a community post section.
This comes as fellow technology giant Facebook announced a new subscription feature for Group Admins, letting them charge up to $30 per month for their subscribers to access exclusive posts in sub-groups kind of like a virtual VIP room.
So it's clear that the big social community platforms are getting serious about keeping their creators on-side and helping them make money.
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Youtube creators will get to keep 70% of the profits that come from the membership, which give creators another revenue stream, other than ads.
The second feature is a merchandise shelf that allows users to sell their swag underneath every video. Up to now, creators had to link to their personal storefronts in the description of every video. Now they have a section on their channel where they can show off prices and pictures of each item.
Youtube is partnering with Teespring (who will be taking a cut of the revenue), allowing creators to sell hoodies . t-shirts, pillows, hats and more.
Effectively, the way this works is that there’s a flat price per item sold that goes back to Teespring,but the creator can mark up the item to whatever price they want, then keep the upside.
In addition to memberships and merchandise, YouTube announced “Premieres,” which lets creators build hype for upcoming videos,with dedicated landing pages that go live at a certain time.
Once the video is live, viewers can chat with each other in real time, and creators can use Super Chat for the first time on regular YouTube videos.
As Instagram and Facebook continue to roll out new features like Facebook Gaming and IGTV, YouTube is looking for more ways to incentivize creators to stay on their platform, and help generate even more revenue.
YouTube says testing out memberships allowed some creators to triple the amount they were earning every month from the platform.
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oogle is pretty much the biggest name in the artificial intelligence market right now, and it would seem we hear more about AI from the company these days than anything else.
One thing it hasn’t advertised widely is its work in the field of healthcare when it comes to AI. As reported by Bloomberg, Google’s AI systems are able to predict with scary accuracy the short-term life expectancy of patients.
According to the video story, A woman with late-stage breast cancer came to a city hospital, with fluids already flooding her lungs. The hospital’s computers read her vital signs and the system estimated a 9.3 percent chance she would die during her stay. However, Google’s new algorithm analyzed a total of 175,639 data points and delivered a more accurate assessment of her death risk: 19.9 percent. As fate would have it, she passed away in a matter of days to prove that the AI had the more accurate reading. As such, Google’s AI was able to predict the death with a higher percentile as opposed to the standard hospital’s computers.
In this case, Google’s AI uses neural networks, which has proven effective in gathering data and then using it to learn and improve analysis. As per the report, Google’s tech can “forecast a host of patient outcomes, including how long people may stay in hospitals, the odds of their readmission and chances they will soon die.” Additionally, Google’s algorithm can retrieve “notes buried in PDFs or scribbled on old charts” to make predictions, and determine “the problems with solving,” Bloomberg wrote. All this could help doctors make better diagnosis.
Google’s system employs essentially the same kind of analysis performed by doctors, but it does so more efficiently and precisely. According to the report, the findings so far is that Google’s system is faster, and more accurate than other techniques.
Eventually, Google states that it would like to take “a slew of new AI tools” that can accurately predict symptoms and disease into clinics.
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an Francisco: Google has made "App Maker", its low-code tool for building business apps, generally available and open to all developers, after a year and a half since the launch of its beta version.
"Today, we're making App Maker generally available to help you rethink how your teams operate," Geva Rechav, Product Manager, App Maker, wrote in a blog post late on Thursday.
"App Maker is G Suite's low-code application development environment that makes it easy for teams to build custom apps to speed up workflows and make processes better," Rechav added.
Google first launched the App Maker in November, 2016 and made it available through its "Early Adopter Program for G Suite Business" at that time.
It was created with the idea of enabling line-of-business teams to create bigger apps, revamp company processes, resolve help desk tickets and more.
The new features include a built-in support for Cloud Structured Query Language (SQL), responsive templates, a drag-and-drop user interface design and declarative data modelling.
It would also come with "Expanded OAuth Whitelisting" controls to let administrators prevent apps from running without their approval.
In addition, the app building tool would allow developers access to 40 Google services including Gmail, Google Calendar, Sheets and other data sources, Rechav said.
The App Maker is now available to all G Suite Business and Enterprise customers, as well as G Suite for Education customers.
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| Google's AI based translations |
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oogle has rolled out offline downloads for its AI-powered translator. So if you don’t have unlimited data or you have a plan that doesn’t work internationally, you can now download neural machine translation from Google’s Android and iOS apps.
Previously, you could download Google Translate’s offline dictionary on the go. But whether you were figuring your way through a foreign menu or deciphering cool storefronts, you may have discovered that the dictionary’s quite literal translations don’t fully grasp the nuances of a foreign language, even if the language is Spanish or French, which are quite similar to English. The plight doubles when you’re trying to decipher a language with a different alphabet and roots, like Russian or Chinese, where even the AI-based translator makes mistakes.
Google Translate’s offline AI translations will first be available in 59 languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, German, and Hindi, to name a few. They’ll take about 35MB per language, so they won’t use up too much of your device’s storage. Lower-specced phones should also be able to support the new update, as Google says it wants users in all markets to have access to the feature.
It’s a gradual rollout; about 1 percent of Google Translate users will get the update today. By the 13th, 99 percent of users should get the update, and by the 15th, it should be fully available. No more strange literal dictionary definitions while traveling, for the most part.
Here’s a full list of the 59 available languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jannada, Korean, Lavtian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
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oogle already announced this at I/O 2018, but the new Multiple Actions feature has just started rolling out to Google Home users across the United States. Now, you can stack commands — like asking about your commute, the weather, and telling Assistant to start playing music — by only saying “OK Google” or “Hey Google” once.
It’s great news for frequent users of Assistant on Home speakers or on smartphones. Queries are natural, so instead of asking, “Hey Google, what’s the weather in Paris and what’s the weather in New York,” you can ask a more straightforward, “OK Google, what’s the weather in New York and Paris?”
All of this currently applies to US English only, but Multiple Actions and triple commands are planned for other languages. If you pair this with the fact that you can have three separate commands, plus what are essentially compound questions, using your Google Home, Home Mini, or Home Max experience just improved noticeably. Just keep in mind the feature might not be available immediately; it’s rolling out over the next couple days to users in the US.
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fter continuing to build out its podcasting presence over the past few months, Google finally looks ready to roll out an app dedicated solely to podcasts.
According to a snippet of code spotted by 9to5Google, the latest version of the Google app has a hidden prompt asking users to “Get the Google Podcasts app.” Google built out a full podcast interface several months ago inside the app, which will likely be accessible via a home screen and app launcher shortcut. Longtime Android users might remember that Google used to have an app called Listen, its first attempt at a podcasts player. But the company shut down Listen in 2012. That same year, Apple debuted its own Podcasts app for iOS, which has proven to be hugely popular.
Google has already unveiled similar home screen shortcuts for other services like the Google Assistant or Google Lens in recent months. While these services technically live inside the Google app, the shortcuts turn them into services that essentially work like standalone products. The app should give Android owners a less cumbersome option to listen to podcasts on the go.
Right now, users can track their subscriptions and browse through trending podcasts using the Google search engine on mobile, but slogging through the site can feel unintuitive and clunky. Still, a “surprising” number of users turn to the feature daily, Google’s podcasts product manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen told Pacific Content in April. It looks like the forthcoming app will be an extension of this current service with a similar interface — just spun out so it’s more prominent.
Of course, listeners can also tune in on their phone using Google Play Music or via third-party apps like PocketCasts. For those curious about Google’s podcast project, 9to5Google suspects the app should appear in the Play Store at this link when it goes live, though the release date is still unclear.
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oogle is announcing some changes to the way it handles extensions in its Chrome browser. Starting today, newly published extensions will only be available in the Chrome Web Store. For years, web developers have been able to trigger installations of Chrome extensions from their own websites, or inline installation as Google calls it, but Google is phasing this method out.
“We continue to receive large volumes of complaints from users about unwanted extensions causing their Chrome experience to change unexpectedly,” explains James Wagner, Google’s extensions platform product manager. “The majority of these complaints are attributed to confusing or deceptive uses of inline installation on websites.”
While Google has attempted to address these misleading extensions, the Chrome Web Store displays a lot more information about extensions. Google says extensions installed from the Chrome Web Store directly are “significantly less likely” to be uninstalled compared to inline ones. Google is planning to remove inline installation from Chrome for existing extensions starting on September 12th, and Chrome users will be redirected to the Web Store. With Chrome 71 in early December, Google is also planning to remove the inline install API method entirely.
“We’re confident this change will improve transparency for all users about their extension choices in Chrome,” says Wagner. The changes mean that you’ll only be able to install Chrome extensions from the Web Store, and developers will need to update their install buttons to link to the Chrome Web Store page instead. These new changes should also prevent Chrome users from installing extensions they don’t need or simply stop them from being misled into installing an extension.
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ix months after their original launch, the Google Pixel 2’s AR Stickers are making it onto a phone from a different company: the LG G7 ThinQ. It’s the first time that Google has allowed the AR Stickers app to exist on a device that wasn’t part of its own flagship line, signaling a potential move to expand access to the feature.
These AR stickers are 3D images and text that you can add to your photos. This new feature will be available with the phone’s next software update and will function similarly to how they do on the Pixel. According to LG’s release, the feature will be accessible through the phone’s native camera application.
These stickers take advantage of Google’s ARCore platform, which in the past, Google has used to create sets of stickers involving Star Wars and Stranger Things characters. It is uncertain whether those will be arriving on the new device.
The blog post making the announcement made no note of the update arriving to phones outside of Korea, so it’s up in the air whether LG G7 ThinQ owners elsewhere will be receiving the feature.
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he new Google College search feature aggregates data on colleges like admission rates, student demographics, majors available at the college, notable alumni and more, and displays them as a search result.
After rolling out job search feature on Search, Google now aims to make it easier for students to find the college of their choice. The company is rolling out a new feature to Search, which will enable users to simply search for a college and get information like admissions, cost, student life and more, directly as a search result. To provide an idea of how much a college will cost, Search will also display information about the average cost after applying student aid, including breakdowns by household income.
The feature is currently available only in the US and Google says that it displays the results based on data sourced from public information from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which is a comprehensive data set available for 4-year colleges. We have reached out to Google for comments on whether or not this feature be made available for Indian users looking to study in the US or for those looking at colleges within India. The story will be updated once we receive a response.
Google has also worked with education researchers and non-profit organisations, high school counsellors, and admissions professionals to “build an experience to meet your college search needs.” When one searches for a college or a university, alongside the above-mentioned cost breakdown, there are also some other tabs that provide additional information about enrollment rates, majors available at the college, student demographics, notable alumni and more. There is also an ‘Outcome’ tab where one will find the percentage of students graduating from colleges or universities, along with the typical annual income of a graduate. In case you are interested in exploring other options, there is also ‘Similar Colleges’ tab.
Google states in its blog, “Information is scattered across the internet, and it’s not always clear what factors to consider and which pieces of information will be most useful for your decision. In fact, 63 percent of recently-enrolled and prospective students say they have often felt lost when researching college or financial aid options.” The new feature is now rolling out on mobile and some of the features will also be available on desktops.
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