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Today, Facebook Messenger has 800 million monthly active users – more than 100 times the number of iPhone owners when Apple launched the App Store. Messenger’s current active user base exceeds even the total number of iPhones ever sold. Messaging apps now have more active users than social networks.

If and when Facebook announces a Bot Store, it will mark the “end of the beginning” of a new era: messaging as a platform. Conversational user interfaces are about to change the way billions of users interact with the world around them.

Pavel Durov announced the expansion of the Telegram Bot Store and Ted Livingston staked out Kik’s claim to be the WeChat of the West. By the end of the year, Slack had announced the Slack App Directory, supported by an $80 million fund to fuel the growth of the ecosystem, and Google was rumored to be developing its own chatbots.

“will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure.

There are all these different kinds of utilities for basically all the different things that you would want to do with everyone you know. And we basically built this whole platform around the town square

If you want to message someone on Instagram, you have to use Direct, if you want to message someone on WhatsApp you have to use WhatsApp. But I think people tend to have one of the messaging apps that they prefer the most. So giving people the choice to say, “Hey, I want to use WhatsApp because I prefer that as my service where I can not only message people on WhatsApp but I can message people on Facebook or Instagram as well and have those services connect …” I think that that will unlock a lot more convenient and seamless experiences. So connecting the services in that way I think will be valuable.

users of the messaging app WeChat can order food, call a taxi, check their bank balance and even shop flash sales of limited-edition goods. And for the user, the experience is just like texting a friend.

Brands like Disney have worked with tech firms like Disney-backed Imperson to create chat bots on Facebook's Messenger service so people can have conversations with computerized versions of characters like ABC's "The Muppets" star Miss Piggy without needing to staff an actual human on the other side of the conversation.

it creates a new kind of engagement, which is around messaging person-to-person like most messaging platforms but also person-to-business or person-to-brand or person-to-publisher

It expands the platform beyond just personal communication

the decline in popularity of the iconic Barbie doll, sales of which fell 12% — the fourth quarter in a row that Barbie turnover declined year-over-year.

One possible explanation is body image

“There was a sense that you wanted to expose little girls to role models that were a little more diverse and not so stereotypical, so they tried to make Barbie active and gave her all kinds of activities to do and tried to make her more interesting than a beauty queen.”

. The future of identity lies in digitizing the physical world, and the context in which we collect data about identity needs to become transparent.

Will consumers understand that better identity data equals higher-quality messaging to them throughout their lives? Context will allow us to exchange value better and build deeper networks in physical world data collection.

We need better systems to understand and provide access to individuals’ identity by service and by object

This new, mobilized — and mobile-ized — electorate is a force to be reckoned with. As we head into the primaries, the sturdiness of these digital grassroots will be tested to their limit. Some of the most vocal campaigners in this race have never attended a rally, or even voted before. They’ve contributed every piece of their support — from fundraising to partisan point-scoring — via a screen. The significant change since 2012 is the size of that screen.

Snap Counsellors, an account on the messaging app, is helping teens speak up about relationship abuse

Snapchat’s self-destruct feature makes it ideal for a helpline. All messages get deleted within 10 seconds.

It also allows the Stories feature to be used to send out images and videos to encourage victims to come forward.

These T-Shirts Have Customizable Digital Animations When on Camera

The animated t-shirts work by first having the user choose a graphically themed shirt to start the process. Through the 'Drawsta' app, the user can then see which animated designs come with the shirt of their choice and take videos of the animation. The videos can be used on any and all platforms that are compatible with videos -- they can be texted, put on Instagram, tweeted, vlogged and messaged. Each week a new design option appears on the app for the animated shirts -- making them fun and creative. These animated t-shirt apps are a playful way to reinterpret the t-shirt and its uses by combining GIF-like technology with this classically casual clothing.

There’s dissonance between the cultural and psychological associations I have about technology and the associations I have about reading. The popular mythology tells me that words are good while tech is scary.

Bottom line: the eReader makes my son read more. And my son is not unique. According to PlayScience and Digital Book World study, the Kids eBook market “has basically tripled from 2011 to 2012, that is 500% growth.”  What’s more, “A staggering number of kids  (85%) e-read at least once a week.”

“Which do you like better,” I sent him a message with gChat, “eBooks or paper books?” “ebook” “Why?” “Its a elictrak devise” I forgive the bad spelling. But I should probably correct him. Or, even better, respond with sentences that use the words and model correct spellings. “What have you been reading?” “All the Horrid Henrys” “Cool. Are they good books?” “Ya.”

Screen Addiction Is Taking a Toll on Children

“The average 8- to 10-year-old spends nearly eight hours a day with a variety of different media, and older children and teenagers spend more than 11 hours per day.”

Before age 2, children should not be exposed to any electronic media, the pediatrics academy maintains, because “a child’s brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.”

what’s called “deep learning”—a form of artificial intelligence that’s rapidly reinventing a wide range of online services—the company is beefing up its Inbox by Gmail app so that it can analyze the contents of an email and then suggest a few (very brief) responses

The idea is that you can rapidly respond to someone while on the go—without having to manually tap a fresh message into your smartphone keyboard.

system learns to generate appropriate replies by analyzing scads of email conversations from across Google’s Gmail service

Realeyes last year received a near £3m grant from the The European Commission help develop its technology, which claims to track the ‘likability’ of brand’s marketing efforts by measuring people’s emotions via standard webcams as they watch video content.

Tools such as Realeyes allow us to get behavioural information upfront, so we can optimise and measure content before launch.

This enables us to deliver more effective video and more efficient distribution, making the message more impactful and delivering increased business advantage for our clients

Microsoft’s own virtual assistant Cortana, aim to help pave the way for the future of communication, productivity, and interactions with businesses and brands.

In Skype, the company showed off rich Cortana integration which put the assistant directly into the app where she could help users do things like identify the persons, places and things in your messages, underline them, and then display more info in a card-like interface when clicked.

She is also able to help you perform a variety of tasks, like adding items to your calendar, booking travel or hotel rooms, or even pre-populating conversations to friends with text.

the connection between fan and celebrity is minimal

Bkstg is looking to change all that, not only for fans but for artists.

Bkstg is its own platform, created by Ran Harnevo, that lets artists own the entire experience of connecting with their fans, from posting videos and photos, selling tickets, and selling merchandise.

Britain is proposing sweeping new government powers to combat the spread of violent and extremist content, false information and harmful material aimed at children.CreditHenry Nicholls/Reuters

Australia passed a law last week that threatens fines for social media companies and jail for their executives if they fail to rapidly remove “abhorrent violent material” from their platforms. New Zealand is also considering new restrictions.

In Singapore, draft legislation was introduced last week that supporters said would restrict the spread of false and misleading information.

we have a literal interpretation of free will now in the context of algorithms, which is: Are you making the final choice?

a third of your choices on Amazon are driven by recommendations. Eighty percent of viewing activities on Netflix are driven by algorithmic recommendations. Seventy percent of the time people spend on YouTube is driven by algorithmic recommendations

We might see less than 0.01% of any search results, because rarely do we even cross page one. The algorithm has decided which pages we look at. So yes, they’re making a lot of choices for us.

“We plan to build this [platform] the way we’ve developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case—messaging

WeChat Pay and Tenpay (Tencent’s business-oriented payment platform) accounted for 38.8% of the total amount spent via mobile payments in China during Q3 2018

games were the most popular category of miniprograms, used by 42% of WeChat miniprogram users in China

McDonald’s recently announced that it is acquiring personalization software vendor Dynamic Yield, for a reported $300 million or more. This “supersized” deal took many of us who pay attention to the personalization space by surprise. But the underlying message behind the deal shouldn’t surprise anyone: personalization matters. It’s undoubtedly worth investing in.

This is what McDonald’s is planning to do with its latest acquisition. It is planning to understand what each person is interested in ordering based on a number of factors such as the weather or what he has started to order, decide in the moment what menu options are relevant to that person, and respond with those options in a seamless way.

McDonald’s acquisition shows us that forward-looking companies are prioritizing personalization and putting it at the very center of their CX strategy — even those you might not expect. It shows us that personalization is not just about a single digital channel like a company’s website or email campaigns. It can truly be integrated anywhere.