Zone’s Ross Basham handpicks and shares the five best stories on digital trends, experiences and technologies…
1. Teams not slacking in chat app contest
Here at Zone we use Slack as our workplace chat app, and I had assumed that it was the main (if not only) player in the market. So it came as quite a shock to discover that Microsoft’s rival app, Teams, has reported it has reached more than 20 million daily active users — well ahead of Slack’s reported 12 million.
Teams was launched in 2016, two years after Slack, and part of its attraction for companies may be that it comes as part of some Office 365 business packages. For its part, Slack has questioned the way Microsoft counts active users, but it seems clear that Slack’s path to world domination is much rockier than I had realised.
2. England boss turns to data for Euro 2020
Having qualified so impressively, hopes are high for England at next year’s European Championships. But if they do come up short it won’t be due to a lack of data analysis. Speaking at a Google Cloud Next event, England manager Gareth Southgate has revealed how he uses data to manage and train his squad.
With players in action all over Europe, Southgate can’t watch all his squad play, but he can access data on all their performances: how far they’ve run, passing and shooting stats, and so on. He has also analysed thousands of penalty shootouts, so fingers crossed there won’t be a repeat of Southgate’s spot-kick woe from Euro 96…
3. Brave new world for privacy-first browser
Google’s Chrome is by far the world’s most popular web browser, used by more than 70% of desktop users and increasing by 13% in the past three years. But for people who value their data privacy — or simply dislike Google — there are a growing number of alternatives, including Brave, which has just launched its first full version.
Brave has several selling points: it natively blocks ads and cross-site trackers (minimising data collection), it’s really fast (due to not loading ads with trackers) and has an opt-in private ads platform that allows the user to reward ‘creators’ of their choice. Eight million people are using it already, so it’s off to a good start.
4. Mean robots put gamers off their stride
This week’s “er, OK then” news comes from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, who found that video-game players perform worse when being insulted — by robots. Gamers played better when ‘Pepper’ encouraged them but made less rational decisions when the robot gave them grief.
The point of the study (yes, there was one) was to look at human interactions with uncooperative robots. And it turns out that being called ‘a terrible player’ isn’t good for your confidence, even if it comes from a non-sentient being. Oh well.
5. AI advert combines genius and gibberish
Advertising copywriters, beware: AI has created the perfect Nike commercial after being trained on seven years’ worth of the company’s adverts. OK, so it’s not perfect — and doesn’t exactly make sense — but that could be said for a lot of the adverts created by humans too.
And the tagline “Legend that thing” could really catch on — hats off to the neural network which came up with that. You can see the whole (unofficial) advert here.
