ITV

Category: Social Media

  • Twitter introduces new features for more interactive Cricket Season

    Twitter introduces new features for more interactive Cricket Season

    KOLKATA: Microblogging site Twitter has added a couple of new features to create a more interactive experience for the platform’s users this cricket season for. Among the new features, Spaces, the social media giant’s new Clubhouse like feature, has generated a great deal of buzz among Tweeple.

    With cricket being such a huge passion point on Twitter, teams have already started making the most of Spaces to connect with and engage fans on the service. Mumbai Indians (@mipaltan) recently hosted a Twitter Space with Zaheer Khan (@ImZaheer) – #TwitterSpaceWithZak – becoming the first sports club in the country to do so. The Space had Zaheer interacting with fans and sharing plans for the upcoming season.

    Twitter has launched eight new jersey emojis for all the teams in English and six Indic languages. Fans can simply tweet with the team hashtags to unlock these emojis and participate in live conversations. Here are some of the hashtags that will unlock the team emojis: #IPL2021, #MumbaiIndians, #OneFamily, #WhistlePodu, #விசில்போடு, #WeAreChallengers, #HallaBol, #RoyalsFamily, #PunjabKings, #SaddaPunjab, #KKRHaiTaiyaar, #KorboLorboJeetbo, #YehHaiNayiDilli, #OrangeArmy, and more.

    Topics allow people to follow conversations on specific subjects. Using machine learning, Topics pull out related tweets on a subject, letting people follow numerous interest categories. When you follow a Topic, you will see tweets from a number of accounts – whether you follow them or not – on the shared interest. Last year, Twitter introduced several Topics for cricket – one for the series and several others for all of the teams – so people can stay up-to-date with all conversations around cricket.

    Additionally, there are Twitter Lists – a compilation of Twitter accounts, which lets people put together their favourite accounts to follow for tweets on a specific subject and populate a separate timeline for the List.

    Mumbai Indians and Delhi Capitals will be hosting live shows to bring fans closer together. The shows will involve commentary and watching the game virtually along with a select group of fans every match day. Whereas, ESPN Cricinfo (@CricinfoHindi) will be sharing Hindi videos this season from their new Hindi handle.

  • Twitter to spotlight the best cricket campaigns with League of Brands

    Twitter to spotlight the best cricket campaigns with League of Brands

    KOLKATA: With the commencement of the Indian Premier League (IPL 2021), microblogging site Twitter is kick-starting League of Brands on 9 April. It will highlight outstanding cricket campaigns by brands on the service throughout the upcoming season. Powered by Twitter data, League of Brands will recognise six star campaigns by brands as they take to Twitter to keep their audiences engaged in the midst of the cricket-fueled adrenaline.

    League of Brands, utilising Twitter’s Branded Notifications feature, will also let people opt-in for alerts on the latest cricket ads across the season, simply by liking the tweet from @TwitterMktgIN.

    Every cricket season, Twitter turns into a virtual playground with fans starting and joining conversations around their favourite match moments. With the service’s ability to amplify moments in real-time and create ripples across timelines, brands across the spectrum take to the service, utilising the package of its conversational nature, a range of customisable ad-offerings, as well as, its receptive audience to deliver some noteworthy engagement campaigns.

    For League of Brands, Twitter Next – the brand strategy team at Twitter, and Twitter marketing India (@TwitterMktgIN) will screen through campaigns and place the spotlight on the brands that stand out of the crowd. Brands and campaigns will be recognised across six categories –

    ●       The All-Star: The brand to drive the highest volume of conversations on Twitter throughout the season.

    ●       The Sixer: The brand to garner the most Retweets on a single campaign Tweet from the brand’s handle.

    ●       The Doosra: The brand without a national TV spot to drive the largest overall conversation.

    ●       The Most Creative Play: The brand that makes the best use of Twitter to break through the clutter, beyond promoted Tweets and video.

    ●       The Fan Favourite: The brand to drive strongest positive sentiment for a campaign.

    ●       The (re)Play of the Game: The brand with the most engagements on a single video Tweet from the brand’s handle. 

    This time the most-talked about brands on the service would be the real game-winners.

  • HC dismisses Bytedance’s plea, directs it to deposit $11 million in dues

    HC dismisses Bytedance’s plea, directs it to deposit $11 million in dues

    NEW DELHI: In a major setback for TikTok developer ByteDance's India operations, the Bombay high court has dismissed its plea to unblock its bank accounts frozen by Indian authorities in an alleged case of tax evasion.

    The bench of justices SP Deshmukh and Abhay Ahuja, however, granted Bytedance the leeway to operate its bank accounts in HSBC and Citibank after depositing the dues allegedly owed by the company to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) authorities.

    The court has directed Bytedance to deposit around $11 million that tax authorities believe the tech company owes. The company would need to keep that amount blocked in a state-run bank and cannot use it for any other purpose.

    ByteDance has submitted that it does not owe the tax demanded by the Indian government and does not agree with the tax authority's decision to freeze its accounts. It further appealed that it needed access to the bank account in order to disburse salaries to its employees in India.

    Counsel for the Union government opposed the plea, stating that no interference was warranted from the court at this stage. Following the ban on its top moneymaker, TikTok, in India, tax authorities were apprehensive that due to failing business, Bytedance will "run away". Hence, the freezing of the firm's bank accounts was undertaken to safeguard the interests of the tax authorities.

    In mid-March, GST authorities had ordered HSBC Bank and Citibank in Mumbai to freeze accounts of ByteDance India as it probed some of the firm's financial dealings. The Chinese software developer challenged the move in court, saying the freeze amounts to harassment and was done illegally.

  • Personal data of 53.3 crore Facebook users leaked online

    Personal data of 53.3 crore Facebook users leaked online

    KOLKATA: Social media giant Facebook has become embroiled in yet another privacy breach controversy, as the personal data of around 53.3 crore users has been allegedly leaked. The breach includes data of 60 lakh users in India as well.

    According to reports, phone numbers, Facebook IDs and bios, full names, birth dates, locations, even email addresses in some cases have been exposed. “A database of that size containing the private information such as phone numbers of a lot of Facebook’s users would certainly lead to bad actors taking advantage of the data to perform social engineering attacks [or] hacking attempts,” said cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock CTO Alon Gal, who spotted the leak on Saturday.

    Facebook claimed in an email statement that this is old data that was previously reported on in 2019 and the issue has already been fixed. However, the company has not taken any steps yet to notify users if their data has been compromised. Even if the data is outdated, it could provide valuable information to cybercriminals. Moreover, a lot of old data may remain relevant given that many of the phone numbers or email ids associated with the account could be the same as earlier.

    In January, a user in a hacking forum advertised an automated bot that sold phone numbers of millions of Facebook users. Now the entire dataset has been posted online for free on low level hacking forums making users more vulnerable to cybercrimes.

    Facebook has been grappling with data security issues for years. In 2018, the platform disabled a feature that allowed users to search for one another via phone number following revelations that the political firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed information on up to 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent.

    In December 2019, a Ukrainian security researcher reported finding a database with the names, phone numbers and unique user IDs of more than 267 million Facebook users — nearly all US-based — on the open internet. It is unclear if the current data dump is related to this database.

  • Meesho raises $300 million in fresh funding

    Meesho raises $300 million in fresh funding

    KOLKATA: Social commerce platform Meesho has raised $300 million in a new round of funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The latest investment values Meesho at $2.1 billion.

    The start-up will use the new fund raise to strengthen its talent pool across verticals — tech, product, and business, among others. It saw participation from existing investors — Prosus Ventures, Facebook, Shunwei Capital, Venture Highway and Knollwood Investment.

    SoftBank Investment Advisers managing partners Munish Varma said, “Globally, SoftBank has always been excited to back founders that provide unique solutions for the local market. By using the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Meesho has created a platform for many small business owners to sell to the next cohort of internet users.  We look forward to being a part of this journey.”

    Meesho aims to simplify e-commerce for all small businesses in India. It will help the company to build a platform which is pro-small businesses with policies and tools to help even the smallest of sellers to list and do business on Meesho. This will empower small business owners to reach customers through all online channels.

    In the past year, the platform has seen tremendous growth across small businesses and entrepreneurs seeking to move their businesses online, Meesho founder and CEO Vidit Aatrey said.

    “With the new round of funding, we are extremely thrilled to have SoftBank onboard. We are focused on expanding our vision — from helping aspiring women entrepreneurs to creating Meesho as a single ecosystem that will enable all small businesses in India to succeed online,” he added.

    Over the last six years, Meesho has successfully enabled over 13 million individual entrepreneurs to start their own online businesses with zero investment, bringing the benefits of e-commerce to more than 45 million customers in the country. Till date the company has delivered orders from 100K+ registered suppliers to over 26,000 pin codes in more than 4,800 cities, generating over 500 crore in income for individual entrepreneurs and serving customers in more than 4,500 tier-2 cities and beyond.

  • India’s freeze on bank accounts is harassment, ByteDance tells court

    India’s freeze on bank accounts is harassment, ByteDance tells court

    New Delhi: Video sharing app TikTok's parent company,ByteDance has told the Bombay high court that the government's decision to freeze its bank accounts in a probe of possible tax evasion amounts to harassment and was done illegally, Reuters reported on Sunday.

    The Chinese technology company had reduced its Indian workforce in January amid uncertainty over its future business in the country and its short-lived foray into one of the biggest markets. The decision came months after the government announced a ban on its popular video app TikTok which had amassed hundreds of millions of users in India. The ban was announced following a border clash between India and China.

    Reuters had reported that an Indian tax intelligence unit had ordered HSBC and Citibank in Mumbai to freeze bank accounts of ByteDance India in March, as part of its probe of the company’s financial dealings. The Chinese firm challenged the freeze in Bombay high court. The court declined to grant ByteDance immediate relief last Wednesday and listed the case for next hearing on 6 April.

    ByteDance India also told the court it has a 1,335-strong workforce, including outsourced personnel, and the account freeze has impacted the release of their March salaries. In the 209-page court filing lodged on 25 March accessed by Reuters, the Chinese company told the court that the "authorities acted against the company without any material evidence and gave no prior notice, as required by Indian law, before such drastic action". It further added, that “blocking accounts during the process of investigation amounts (to) applying undue coercion. It is intended, improperly, to harass the petitioner.”

    The Beijing-headquartered company is also facing global scrutiny over TikTok’s data collection practices.

  • Instagram follows TikTok, launches ‘Remix’ on Reels

    Instagram follows TikTok, launches ‘Remix’ on Reels

    NEW DELHI: In a bid to overpower short-video platform TikTok, image sharing app Instagram has rolled out a new feature called Remix. The Remix feature allows users to remix reels which means they can upload a video next to another user's, building on top of the original clip.

    To launch the Remix feature, users should click on the three dots that show up on the top right corner of the Reel, and choose Remix This Reel option. While using this feature, the screen will split into two parts; one part will carry the original reel, while the second will be your new reel. After recording, users can control the volume for the original audio, your recorded audio, and can even add a voiceover. 

    A similar feature is already popular in TikTok under the duet, and is being widely used for dance challenges. As TikTok is banned in India, Instagram believes that its new feature will garner huge popularity in the country. 

    "Remix lets you create your own Reel, along-side an existing reel. Interactive tools like Live Rooms, polls and questions in Stories, and AR effects have always been a huge part of how people connect on Instagram," said Instagram in a recent statement. 

    Facebook-owned Instagram had launched Reels last year, and since then, several features have been added to it. Some of these new specs include an extension of recording time to 30 seconds, and extending the countdown timer to 10 seconds while recording. It is also possible to trim and delete audio clips from the timeline. 

    It is to be noted that the Remix option will be enabled only in newly uploaded reels. If you want older reels to be remixed by others, the feature should be enabled manually. If you do not want people remixing your reels, you should go to settings, tap on reels, and disable the option. 

  • CCI orders probe on WhatsApp’s new privacy policy

    CCI orders probe on WhatsApp’s new privacy policy

    NEW DELHI: The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has launched an investigation into WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, amid the raging debate over users’ privacy on social media platforms.

    The antitrust body has taken a prima facie view that the messaging app’s new policy is in contravention of India’s Competition Act. "…the Commission is of the considered opinion that WhatsApp has prima facie contravened the provisions of Section 4 of the Act through its exploitative and exclusionary conduct, in the garb of policy update,” said the order passed by the CCI, as reported by legal website LiveLaw.

    The development comes days after the Centre urged the Delhi high court to restrain the Facebook-owned platform from implementing its controversial new privacy terms, stating that the terms are not in alignment with 2011 IT rules.

    The controversial policy was initially expected to come into effect on 8 February but was later deferred to 15 May amid severe backlash from users. The app plans to make it mandatory for users to agree to its new data-sharing norms, a key point of which is allegedly sharing data from WhatsApp business chats with Facebook. Since there was no opt-out option, there were apprehensions about privacy which led people to migrate to alternate messaging apps, like Signal and Telegram.

    On 19 January, the CCI took a suo motu cognisance of the potential impact of the policy and terms for WhatsApp’s users and the market. In its statement, WhatsApp had stated that it “remains committed to protecting people’s personal communications with end-to-end encryption and providing transparency about how these new optional business features work.”

    According to media reports, CCI has pinpointed several other concerns with the new privacy policy, including aspects such as the “opacity, vagueness, open-endedness and incomplete disclosures” hiding the actual data cost that a user incurs for availing WhatsApp services.

    India is also the messaging app's biggest user base, with over 400 million users across the country. Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had also asserted that any digital platform must maintain the sanctity of personal communication and not infringe upon the rights of Indians who operate it.