Author Archives: Matt Kapko

Facebook plans to expand the capabilities of Workplace, its social network for business, with an app platform that lets enterprises integrate third-party apps. These “custom integrations,” which allow organizations to personalize their versions of Workplace with familiar productivity apps and other services, was announced at a TechCrunch conference yesterday. Facebook later confirmed the news. 

When Workplace launched in October, Facebook emphasized its core strengths that draw 1.71 billion people to the site every month. In Workplace, the company built a separate business communication service on the same foundational features. The new custom integrations bolsters Facebook’s pursuit in the enterprise by offering a more comprehensive platform for integrating SaaS services. 

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Google this week announced a new service for businesses, called App Maker, that’s designed to take some of the heavy lifting out of application development. The company says it wants to lower the barrier to entry for enterprise apps with a low-code development framework that can be used to build custom apps for business. 

Enterprises that use G Suite, Google’s set of productivity apps, can now request early beta access to the service. You simply drag-and-drop modules into a visual editor with built-in templates and customize their apps using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Google’s own material design visual framework, according to the company.

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Apple this week signed on another large business customer through its partnership with IBM. The deal will see Finland’s largest airline use iOS apps for technical operations and customer experience. Finnair says it carries more than 10 million customers each year between 70 cities in Europe, 17 in Asia and three cities in North America. 

Finnair has a team in place at IBM’s “MobileFirst for iOS Garage,” which operates as a collaborative development hub for iOS enterprise apps. IBM says its MobileFirst for iOS customers have direct access to the world’s largest concentration of developers that use Swift (Apple’s programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS), designers, integration experts and enterprise iOS consultants. 

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The mobile advertising game, which has been a bit like a match of Whac-a-mole in the past, finally turned to favor the house. Marketers today reach their intended audiences in the United States with more than half of all mobile ads, according to a new report from Nielsen. 

[ Related: 1 in 4 desktop owners use ad blockers ]

During the second quarter of 2016, people of the age and gender marketers targeted viewed 60 percent of mobile ads, according to Nielsen. Marketers reached their intended audiences 49 percent of the time on mobile devices during the same period in 2015, the company says. Nielsen’s report is based on 40,000 U.S. mobile campaigns across sites, apps and services.

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Apple’s Mac and Apple II computers have been used in classrooms for more than 30 years, but cheaper hardware from rival Google is putting the squeeze on Apple’s dominant position in education. The two companies target education from very different perspectives that play to their respective strengths. Google’s objective is also slightly different than Apple’s, because it primarily focuses on selling hardware for students that promotes its software services, while Apple pursues a more hardware-specific approach along with tools for teachers, according to a set of analysts who follow the education tech market.

“The momentum is definitely swinging in Google’s favor,” says Van Baker, research vice president, Gartner. “Chromebooks are doing quite well in the education sector.” 

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For the second time in as many months, Facebook admitted it misreported the metrics it provides to publishers and marketers to measure reach and engagement on their posts. The world’s largest social network again blamed “bugs” for the discrepancies that resulted in undercounting or over-reporting of metrics related to marketers’ posts and video views, as well as the time spent on publishers’ Instant Articles. In late September, Facebook told its marketer customers that it had over-reported video metrics for two years. 

[ Related: Facebook wants to sway your purchases — but not your politics ]

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SAN FRANCISCO — The pressing issue of modern technology’s negative impact on jobs was largely ignored during the 2016 presidential election, according to California’s Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who spoke this week at the Code Enterprise conference. Today’s society has deficiencies in education and regulation, and it lacks the collective mindset necessary to transform tech challenges into opportunities, Newsom said. 

The roles large technology companies play in eliminating jobs, and the responsibilities they should bear to fight this problem, are rarely discussed. However, senior executives at Google and LinkedIn addressed the issue on stage at Code Enterprise, telling the audience of business leaders that it is paramount for tech titans to minimize job losses by creating new opportunities.

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