YouTube has never been one to shy away from trends, as we’ve seen by it copying Instagram with YouTube Stories. Now, it’s going after TikTok with YouTube Shorts, vertical videos up to 60 seconds of length that loop by default.
Originally, the length was restricted to 15 seconds when Shorts was in testing, but now with the official rollout of the “Shorts camera,” the limit has been increased to 60 seconds to better compete against Tiktok. Some other key features of YouTube Shorts include, adding music, text, auto-generated captions, filters, and more.
Music & sound: Add a song or use other audio to create your own Short.
Text: Add text after recording a Short and use Timeline to control when it appears and disappears.
Speed: Choose to accelerate or slow down recording.
Timer: Set the countdown to record hands-free and choose when to automatically stop recording.
Shorts filters: You can add different filters to your Shorts in the recording and editing screens to color correct your Short, and we’ll continue to bring more filters and effects over the coming year.
The “Shorts camera” is now available in the U.S. and India, it can be found by pressing the plus button at the bottom of the YouTube app. Once created, Shorts will be present in the Explore and carousel sections of the app, and the latest YouTube UI even has a button in the bottom bar dedicated to them. As a result, the Explore button has now been moved to the upper left-hand corner.
If you’re not in the U.S. or India, don’t worry, you’ve not been left out. Simply take a vertical video up to 60 seconds and include #Shorts in the title or description of the video. This will help YouTube recommend your video along with all the other Shorts present on the platform.
Instagram is looking to grow its user base with a version of the app made specifically for children under the age of 13. However, these plans for expansion are not rolling out unchallenged. On Monday, 44 attorneys general signed a letter urging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to terminate the project.
It appears that Facebook is not responding to a need, but instead creating one, as this platform appeals primarily to children who otherwise do not or would not have an Instagram account.
As we all know, social media can be a toxic place, even if you take out the risks of bullying, users still face issues over mental health or fall victim to oversharing. The letter from the state attorneys general also brings up concerns over grooming by sexual predators on the app.
Furthermore, Instagram’s parent company Facebook doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to privacy. Many are concerned about how Facebook will use the information gathered, as brought up by Florida GOP Congressman, Gus Bilirakis, during a Congressional hearing in March with Zuckerberg.
I find that very concerning, targeting this particular age bracket, 13 and under, given the free services, how exactly will you be making money? Or, are you trying to monetize our children, too, and get them addicted early?
Facebook states that it doesn’t plan to show any ads in the version of the app for kids, however, the mental health concerns and getting children hooked on the app are still very valid.
Officially, Instagram doesn’t allow for users under the age of 13, but without any sort of age verification, many underaged users already exist. Facebook argues that the new Instagram for kids app would allow for parents to have greater “visibility and control over what their kids are doing.”
If you’ve spent any time at all on Twitter, then I’m sure you’ve seen people posting their Venmo or Cash App asking for money. Even if you haven’t, you’ve most likely seen the hashtags trending on Cash App Fridays.
Whether it’s someone needing money for an emergency, a creator asking for support from their fans, or just someone looking for a little birthday cash–there’s no shortage of people asking for money on Twitter.
Now, Twitter is making it easier than ever to send money to people on the platform with its new Tip Jar feature that’s currently available via the Twitter app on Android and iOS. Additionally, Android users can also send money through Twitter Spaces.
show your love, leave a tip
now testing Tip Jar, a new way to give and receive money on Twitter 💸
While you may be using Tip Jar to initiate the money transfer, Twitter itself is not handling the transaction, and it will get no cut from the transfer.
Instead, Tip Jar allows users to add an existing payment service to their profile. Services currently supported include, Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal, and Venmo.
Once a user adds one or more of these services to their account, an icon will appear to the left of the follow button when viewing their profile. Tapping on the button will display a menu allowing you to choose which service you want to use to send money, at which point you’ll be forwarded to the app to complete the transaction.
Tip Jar is now available worldwide for English speakers, and it’s starting with a limited number of people, including creators, journalists, experts, and nonprofits. However, Twitter has plans to expand Tip Jar in the future to more users and languages.
Huge heads up on PayPal Twitter Tip Jar. If you send a person a tip using PayPal, when the receiver opens up the receipt from the tip you sent, they get your *address*. Just tested to confirm by tipping @yashar on Twitter w/ PayPal and he did in fact get my address I tipped him. https://t.co/R4NvaXRdlZpic.twitter.com/r8UyJpNCxu
Just a heads up though, it was soon discovered that sending money using PayPal would reveal your address to the person you are tipping. Something that was brought to attention by security expert Rachel Tobac.
Employers always feel employees need bigger compensation or a raise for higher job satisfaction. Unfortunately, that’s not the entire truth. Sure, receiving a big bonus helps employees fulfill their desires and a bigger paycheck will allow them to invest in their future. But that’s not all that an employee needs.
Listed below are 8 essential employee needs that employers must serve to ensure employees stay happy and motivated:
Autonomy:
Often managers micromanage their employees and take all their decisions for them. The lack of freedom to take their own calls is frustrating for employees. It makes them feel that they are not trusted to do their job well.
Employers and managers need to show faith in their employees and allow them to function independently. Allowing employees to make their own decisions helps them become more confident.
Flexibility:
As an employer, you need to understand an employee’s need to work at their own pace from a location of their convenience. This allows them to focus better as they know their most productive time slots.
Flexible working conditions allow employees to build a better work-life balance. It enhances their work efficiency and leads to better work results.
Positive work environment:
Strict working hours, horrible bosses, conflicts with coworkers, etc are a few reasons employees find a workplace toxic. No employee can thrive in such an environment.
Employees need a positive work environment as it encourages them to contribute in their full capacity. It makes them feel stress-free and allows them to work more efficiently.
Growth opportunities:
Learning new skills allows employees to grow in their career and perform their jobs in a better way. Companies that invest in employee career and personal growth enjoy high employee retention rates.
With the best online learning platforms available today at affordable rates, it is now easier than ever to provide growth opportunities to employees to help them learn digitally.
Clear targets:
Employees need clear direction in order to perform well and deliver their best. Unstructured information and unclear goals can create chaos and lead to misunderstanding.
Working with clear targets can get confusing for employees and hamper their progress. Managers need to use project management tools to plan and allocate work in a way that keeps everyone the same page.
Value:
Each employee is different and thinks in a unique way. Employers need to value their thoughts and encourage them to contribute their opinions.
Employers need to recognize employee talent and make it easy for them to share their suggestions. This leads to innovative ideas being brought forward and boosts employee morale.
Appreciation:
Appreciation is a fundamental human need and is known to uplift spirits. When employees are recognised for their efforts and publicly appreciated for them, it makes them feel better about themselves and boosts their confidence.
Employers need to make sure good employee performances are acknowledged as it encourages employees to keep performing better.
Inclusivity:
Remote working employees often feel disconnected from the company culture. Especially in today’s time and age where we are dealing with a pandemic and working in isolation, employees are bound to feel depressed if they don’t feel they are a part of the company.
It is crucial for remote employee managers to stay connected with employees so they are ensured they are an important part of the organization. A workplace culture that fosters inclusivity is highly desired by talented job seekers.
Conclusion:
Employers who take care of employees’ needs enjoy the benefits of a workforce that is ready to go the extra mile to achieve company goals. If you take care of them, they will most definitely take care of your company.
Almost anyone can create a Twitter account and send out a tweet, but you need a strategy to use Twitter to grow a business. With over 7,000 tweets sent out into the world every single second, it takes a certain kind of spark for one of those tweets to fulfill an intention. Plus, the average lifespan of one tweet is only about eighteen minutes, meaning that you could be putting too much thought into content with little impact.Â
It is not easy to run a successful Twitter account for your business, but it is still a great place to grow your brand and get recognized by potential customers. If you are up to the challenge—and you should be—then keep reading for some Twitter marketing strategies that work.Â
What you tweet cannot be divorced from its profile.
Before you start to brainstorm tweets to post from your organization’s account, you instead want to focus on your profile. Make sure that your Twitter handle is easy to remember. It should be short enough for other Twitter users to easily tag you and recognize you in posts that you may want to reply to or retweet. People are also less likely to mention Twitter accounts with longer handles.
Having a recognizable Twitter handle is especially critical for running a solo business. When a Twitter user searches for your profile, they will likely see a slew of different accounts. Make your profile stand out by having a handle for users to draw an obvious parallel to your brand. You do not want users to have to guess which profile belongs to you. By keeping all of your social media handles the same, there leaves no room for mystery.
Aside from your handle, your Twitter profile is filled with places to promote your brand. Be sure to use your brand’s logo as your profile photo. If you have been pushing off brainstorming a new logo with your graphic designer, now is the perfect time to put that task at the top of your to-do list. Once you have selected the perfect logo image for your profile picture, the next step is to create a witty profile. Again, conciseness is vital, mainly since your bio is limited to 160 characters. Keep it accurate and tell people exactly what you are on Twitter to do. Sprinkle in some personality or humor to make the description all the more original and engaging.
Timing is everything.
Have you thought of the perfect tweet for your business’s account? Are you all the more excited to post it now that you have revamped the profile? Unfortunately, you may have to hold off on sharing that tweet for now. Holding off on sharing a tweet during peak hours will maximize its opportunity to be seen, liked, and retweeted. Tweets shared on the weekends, including Friday, typically have a higher click-through rate (CTR) than tweets shared during the week. If you are planning to be offline during the weekends, explore content-scheduling apps and tools for you to schedule a tweet.
Be mindful about what to include and not to include in your tweets.
Hashtags help attract prospective customers. Of course, too much of a good thing is not always so good. Although tweets with hashtags receive twice as much engagement as those that do not, tweets with more than two hashtags drop in engagement by 17%. Since you may have multiple hashtags to choose from, research what people are saying, or are not saying, about your brand. Using an advanced search to comb through industry-specific terms is an excellent way of deciding which hashtags to use and which to save for another tweet.
Another tried-and-true Twitter marketing strategy to increase retweets is to use images. Adding images to your tweets is proven to get more share and clicks on your Twitter content. Research shows that tweets with images received 89% more favorites than tweets without one. While images work, you should not feel compelled to throw in a picture for the sake of having one. Tools like Canva can help you generate vibrant graphics to add to your Twitter content.
About Krishen Sauble Iyer
Krishen Sauble Iyer is a successful entrepreneur active in the consulting and real estate industries. A San Diego native, Iyer has invested in commercial and residential property throughout California, including in the cities of Reedley and Visalia. He is also the founder of MAIS Consulting, a consulting firm that helps companies develop their client relationships and marketing strategies to grow their business.
There is no way around it — sleep is incredibly important. It’s not just about how much time you spend doing it, or how long you were in R.E.M. sleep. There are many other factors, including when you sleep, the overall quality, and what you’re doing before nodding off at night. Also important are the temperature and lighting in your sleep environment.
The older we get the more we take sleep seriously. Waste too much of your life getting poor or little sleep and you could end up with any number of potential side effects. Diabetes, heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, poor skin, weight gain, low sex drive, and memory problems are just some of the more common ones.
Sleep tracking is one of the most popular features built into wearables, activity bands, and smart watches. Moreover, it’s also a key component in the new Nest Hub from Google. More and more we’re finding that companies are taking steps to enable and empower people with the knowledge and tools for better sleep.
A wearable device is nice because it can track your heart rate, length of time sleeping, and time that you slept. But, it cannot tell you if your room is too bright or if the air quality is less than ideal. On the other side of the coin is something like the Nest Hub (2nd Gen) which remotely captures a whole array of sleep-related data. Awesome yes, but it won’t do any good if you fall asleep on the couch for three hours before heading to bed.
When it comes to sleep tracking there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Fortunately, things get better all the time and new players continue to enter the space.
Tempur-Pedic, a name who should be familiar to many, has been in the sleep game for more than thirty years. Having cut its teeth on mattresses and pillows, it has evolved its product line to include new things such as its Sleeptracker.
Offered as a bundle, it includes a sensor for each side of the bed, a processing unit, a smart cable, and a power adapter.
Using the companion app you can track your sleep on a minute-by-minute basis, getting insights into the overall length and quality. What’s more, it can tell you whether or not your sleeping environment is ideal.Â
Allergy sufferers know how much of a nuisance it is to wake up with a stuffy nose or find themselve sneezing. That stuff can impact your sleep. So can CO2 levels, temperature, humidity, and overall air purity.Â
The data from the app may ultimately lead you to setting the thermostat a little lower at night, or running a dehumidifier.Â
There’s an AI-based sleep coach inside the app that will help you get better, more restful sleep based off of your individual behavior and sleep settings. Between goals and recommendations alone you’ll find small changes in behavior can have meaningful impact.
You may have your alarm set to wake you at 7AM each day but perhaps you’d do better waking at 6:43AM instead. Indeed, the sensors can help the app understand when you are at your lightest part of the sleep cycle, making it easier for you to wake up feeling refreshed.
There’s something strangely powerful in having data and then actually using it. The simple notion of a sleep score, to us, turned sleep time into a game of sorts as we try to get a better number each day. Factor in being able to understand that your bedroom setting could be optimized a bit, and you’re on the fast track to better sleep.Â
For all of these great features, we need to tell you that you actually get two sets of sleep data. Share a bed with a partner? The Tempur-Pedic Sleeptracker is smart enough to detect the individual users and offer separate scores and insights.
We tend to have a dog or two jump in and out bed at night, sometimes cuddling up as close as possible. How does the Sleeptracker handle this? It does a decent job of omitting the unwanted movement or weight but it will occasionally view it as you being restless.
Conclusion
When it comes to tracking our sleep, we prefer things that are non-invasive, and that’s what the Tempuer-Pedic Sleeptracker is. It fits any bed size, installs in minutes, and gives users actionable data and insight.
via Tempur-Pedic
Whether alone or with a spouse, you’ll appreciate being able to score your sleep time and learn more about what can be done for a better night’s rest.
If taking better care of yourself is important, and it should be, you’d be wise to start with better, more peaceful sleep. You’d also be smart to look into your sleeping arrangements, be it room temperature, air purity, and humidity levels.
The Tempur-Pedic Sleeptracker is able to provide all of this, plus more, in a friendly and intuitive mobile experience. Learn more about this, and other Tempur-Pedic products at the brand’s website where you can purchase the Sleeptracker for $299.
Windows 10X is was Microsoft’s competitor to Chrome OS that had a planned launch this year. However, the project has apparently been scrapped. It had the advantage of better
New reports from Windows Central suggests that Microsoft’s Sun Valley efforts towards a UI refresh in October has exhausted resources that would go towards Windows 10X.
However, as we were nearing a final version of Windows 10X, Microsoft plans not to waste those innovations and are planning to bring them to the full version of Windows 10 as part of Sun Valley.
It will be interesting to see if Windows 10X or a similar project will be revamped, but if Microsoft continues to innovate on the full version of Windows 10 with initiatives like Sun Valley, the necessity of Windows 10X seems quite low.
Nokia released an update schedule back in October of 2020 indicating when it’s devices would be updated to Android 11. Since then, however, this schedule has been completely revised.
Original Update Schedule vs New Update Schedule
Essentially, most devices had their updates pushed back by a quarter, regardless of budget, mid-ranger or flagship status.
This is quite disappointing as HMD Global used to be one of the biggest faces of the Android One lineup and now have continued to slip in respect to having quick updates and long-lasting support. Nokia phones are also very solid, with great battery life, cameras, and design.
Hopefully the company will stick to this update schedule and will recover the confidence of their highly disappointed consumers and keep great software on this amazing hardware.
OnePlus’s OxygenOS is a beautiful, near-stock Android skin. Now, they are planning some changes to further expand the skin.
On a forum post last week, OnePlus announced the topic for an upcoming Open Ears Forum, an event OnePlus conducts where users can talk directly to OnePlus concerning their thoughts on a predetermined topic.
The topic this time around: a theme store. In the forum post, OnePlus said:
The OxygenOS team is exploring a Theme Store feature idea to be brought to the OS in a future update. However, before we do it, we want to discuss it with some of our users, to hear your feedback about this upcoming feature with you, and to get your insights about it.
Samsung is probably the most notable manufacturer to include a theme store, and I have my own qualms about how it’s implemented, but I am hopeful that the aforementioned simplicity of OxygenOS translates into a smoother experience if and when they decide to include themes.
If you’re interested in hearing the discussion or participating yourself on May 18, check out the forum post for more information. You can also check out our OnePlus 9 Pro review here.
No one looks forward to shopping for car insurance. Because the process can feel complicated, many people don’t shop around for the best rate available. The result? Americans overpay on car insurance to the tune of $37 billion per year.
Getting the best rate for car insurance should not be such a to-do. That is where The Zebra earns its stripes. The company makes it easy to compare and shop for car insurance plans across more than 100 trusted providers, all in one place. That means no clicking around on dozens of websites looking for relevant plan information, spending hours taking notes and trying to see how each plan stacks up.
It also means that you won’t have to enter your information into forms over and over again, knowing that each time, you’re likely to start getting marketing emails that you didn’t ask for. The Zebra promises that when you provide your information, it will never sell it to other companies who will try to follow up with annoying calls and emails.
The Zebra does not buy or sell leads, nor does it collect personally identifying information just to monetize it. Instead, it just offers you the information you need to know. It has the largest network of insurance providers and it lets you compare all offerings directly on its website.
There is no guarantee that you will find a lower rate on your insurance, but there is absolutely no downside in taking a look — especially when you know that your information will be protected. When people do find a better deal through The Zebra, they save an average of $368 per year. You can surely find something that you’d rather do with your time and money than spend it on car insurance. The Zebra gives you the opportunity to do just that.
No hassle, no spam, no downside. The Zebra makes shopping for car insurance actually feel productive instead of frustrating.
