Google Is Apparently Working On A New RSS Feed Reader For Desktops, Effectively Bringing Back Google Reader

After the discontinuation of Google Reader, and bringing in a new RSS feed reader for iOS and Android, Google’s planning on developing one for desktops as well.

The Google Graveyard’s chock-full of actually useful features, but were consigned to oblivion for either not garnering a strong enough audience, or the tech giant allocating resources elsewhere. The reader was an RSS reader which could curate articles for users with exceeding efficiency. For those individuals unaware, an RSS reader is essentially just suggestions feed for online articles and the like. With Google Reader, for example, users could enter specific keywords that related to their topics of interest, and would in return be provided with relevant and recent content on the subject matter. The reader was also very accommodating of other RSS feeds; pasting any online website’s RSS feed link into the Reader would then lead to those articles being recommended in the future. Or, should I perhaps consider typing “did lead to”, as Google pulled the plug on Reader almost a decade past? However, people continue to consume online media at accelerating rates, and therefore the companies decided to give this entire RSS feed gimmick a second chance.

Honestly, all of this might just be conjecture; Google has made no statements of the sort, and we’re making this assumption of RSS feeds returning to desktops based on other evidence. For starters, there’s the fact that Google’s added RSS feeds to Android and iOS, thus clearly affirming its inclination towards taking them more seriously. Furthermore, we have AboutChromebooks helping us out, as the online Chromebook-oriented journal uncovered a bit of code. The early-stage data strings reveal a work-in-progress UI that’s supposedly related to feeding readers for desktop clients. The code even comes with a UI, but it’s unfinished and allows for no interaction.

Adrienne Porter Felt, a Chrome engineer, was reached out to for comment with this evidence. While she revealed no such plans in progress, Ms. Felt did reveal that further progress would be made on the smartphone OS RSS feed readers before we’d see or hear of the development of a desktop version.

Read next: Here Are 5 of the Biggest Privacy Trends Among Consumer
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

The State Of Food Manufacturing And Digital Trends For The Year Ahead

The food manufacturing industry is facing new challenges and changes. Supply chain issues are affecting manufacturers in every industry due to the rise of eCommerce and online shopping.

Food manufacturers must now adopt digital trends to adjust to the modern supply chain climate. Here are the tools, technologies, and trends that are helping food manufacturing businesses not only keep abreast, but thrive.

Photo: Arno Senoner/unsplash

Food Manufacturing Industry Supply Chain Challenges

The pandemic forced consumers to look for new ways to shop, bringing on the immense eCommerce and online retail boom that we see today. Online retail has caused supply chain challenges, affecting the food manufacturing industry in many ways.

Where consumers would usually eat at a restaurant, they are eating at home. This means that food manufacturers are receiving a lower quantity of bulk orders for essential ingredients like potatoes. Food manufacturers had to implement smaller packaging to compensate for this decrease in bulk orders.

In addition to the changing consumer demands, food manufacturers are also contending with a low supply of raw materials. For instance, vegetable processors in the US have struggled to import enough vegetables to process.

The food manufacturing industry faces many challenges ahead, and, likely, online shopping and grocery shopping is here to stay. So, what are food manufacturing businesses doing to adapt to the changes in demand and supply chain issues?

Digital Trends For Food Manufacturing

Let’s discuss some of the latest digital trends for food manufacturing that have emerged with the changing supply chain climate.

Blockchain In The Food Industry

Blockchain technologies continue increasing in popularity, and food manufacturers are catching wind of this trend. With blockchain, food manufacturers can confirm transactions in their peer-to-peer network without a central clearing authority. Food manufacturers leverage blockchain to implement technological advancements and utilize a decentralized and distributed record-keeping system.

Increased Adoption Of Automation And IoT

With the climate crisis, consumers seek more sustainable food manufacturing practices. One of the best ways for food manufacturers to implement more sustainable processes is to adopt IoT for increased visibility. IoT can indicate where food manufacturers can streamline processes to reduce energy wastage, improving their ROI regarding monthly energy bills.

Food manufacturers can also achieve more efficiency by implementing automation. Creating automated workflows for production based on their bill of materials allows food manufacturers to reduce manual data entry tasks and provide employees with a clearer picture of their responsibilities.

Adopting Future-Proof Building Security

During this turbulent time, food manufacturers must improve building security to prevent data leaks, shrinkage, and incidents that could inhibit production. Cloud-based technologies are dominating the security sphere and allowing for more responsive security.

Cloud-based security technology provides security teams with automated mobile alerts when a potential security event is detected, allowing for a more immediate response. Food manufacturers are shifting towards cloud-based technology to prevent data breaches and losses for more stringent security without increased manual effort.

Implementing Food Manufacturing Software

Food manufacturing software is helping manufacturing businesses to migrate to the cloud and automate processes in every facet of the manufacturing process. By implementing food manufacturing software, food manufacturers can streamline processes and gain a more competitive edge in the industry during the eCommerce boom.

Some of the best features of food manufacturing software include:

• Live inventory management - with food manufacturing software, you can track your inventory to ensure you have all the necessary components for your products and avoid production delays due to low stock. Food manufacturing software also tracks the expiry dates of your perishable items to ensure compliance with food health and safety standards.

• Forecasting - real-time master planning allows you to gain forecasting insights and improve business intelligence, equipping your teams to make better decisions.

• Costing - costing features of food manufacturing software allow you to gain more insight into how cost-effective the manufacturing process is and avoid overspending that could affect your profit margins, switching to better sources for procurement.

• Integrations - food manufacturing tools allow you to keep up with the rise in eCommerce by offering integrations with popular eCommerce websites for improved inventory management based on your sales orders and projected sales.

• Warehouse management features - some food manufacturing software helps your teams to manage warehouse processes better and ensure quality control down to small tasks.

• Accounting integration - you can integrate food manufacturing software with your existing accounting software to improve financial management based on production insights.

With the supply chain issues and changing demands of the food industry, food manufacturers need access to tools that give them more control over spending, inventory management, and quality assurance processes. Food manufacturing software provides the efficiency and increased business intelligence that food manufacturers require.

Photo: Mark Stebnicki/pexels

Summary

eCommerce and online shopping have become increasingly popular since the pandemic began, affecting the supply chain and availability of raw materials. These changes affect the food manufacturing industry, increasing the need for improved efficiency. With new trends and technologies, food manufacturers can prevent losses, improve efficiency, and meet the demands of this new consumer climate.
by Web Desk via Digital Information World

4 Signs Your Digital Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working

Digital marketing promotes a brand through online channels to connect with prospective consumers so they can introduce their products and services. This activity is vital in businesses because these platforms allow them to reach a wider audience with cost-effective promotional strategies. Instead of investing in costly and ineffective paid advertisements on traditional channels, they can create compelling content that will help them receive more qualified leads and higher sales revenue.

Photo: AdobeStock

Because digital marketing can help companies reach more online users, they must represent a reputable brand that their clients can trust. Thus, they have to put more effort and time into planning their digital marketing strategies to ensure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Without doing so, they might create poor tactics that send the wrong messages to their customers and ruin the organization’s overall reputation.

This article provides you with the four signs to determine your digital marketing strategy is ineffective.

1. Attracting The Wrong Audience

Marketing can only be effective when companies are targeting the right audience. If they focus on promoting their products and services to the wrong online users, their content strategies will fall into uninterested eyes and not receive engagement. Because they don’t need to purchase their offerings, they will have no interest in engaging with them online.

If you’re starting to attract the wrong audience, you must analyze your existing digital marketing strategies to determine your ideal customers. Thus, seeking the professional assistance of a digital marketing agency to help you run in-depth market research is essential. This team of experts will conduct a thorough keyword analysis so you’ll know the actual terms your prospects use as they search for information within your niche.

2. Receiving Poor Bounce Rates

Bounce rate is a measurement that indicates the number of visitors who enter a page and exit without browsing other pages within the website. This indicator is crucial in digital marketing because it shows a campaign’s or web design’s effectiveness and helps us understand why these elements confuse online visitors. Therefore, generating a poor bounce rate is alarming because users only view a home page alone and do nothing before clicking away.

Your current digital marketing tactic isn’t practical if your website receives poor bounce rates. To avoid this mistake, you have to examine the performance of your pages by paying attention to page load time and providing smooth navigation. In addition, you need to enable a mobile-responsive web design to create a solid experience for the users and urge them to continue browsing other pages.

3. Having Zero Engagement

Customer engagement is essential because businesses can receive more opportunities to nurture relationships with their audience. As they actively publish engaging content through various online platforms, they allow their customers to ask relevant questions or share their reviews about the products. In turn, they can enhance the experience of these users with their brand and encourage brand loyalty.

Another common sign that your digital marketing strategy is ineffective is when you don’t receive any engagement from your online audience. This poor performance may result from low-quality images within your website, or your customer service agents fail to deliver in their real-time communication with prospective clients. Fortunately, you can boost your online engagement by responding to all comments, selecting content that can receive a positive reaction from your audience, and running contests.

4. Not Getting Traffic

Website traffic is the volume of online users who visit a page and often indicates a company’s success in attracting its ideal audience. This metric shows a business’s opportunities for developing qualified leads and establishing relationships with their prospects. When a company receives the right traffic into its pages, it can fill up the top of its sales funnel and generate more customers.

One of the most prevalent signs a digital marketing strategy isn’t working is its inability to produce website traffic. This low-performing metric may come from plagiarized and low-quality content that limits a website’s ability to reach a higher rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). Hence, produce unique blogs, use compelling headlines to gain readers’ attention, and share your web links on various social media channels to increase web traffic.

Another way to gain more traffic is by sending email newsletters to qualified prospects and loyal customers to drive more clicks. Moreover, you may consider collaborating with a credible influencer within your niche and ask them to share your blogs on their platforms to receive more website visits and rank higher on SERPs.

Key Takeaway

As an entrepreneur in this modern age, you have to use online channels to promote your brand and communicate with your customers. With that, you should evaluate your digital marketing strategy to assess its effectiveness using these four signs. After a successful assessment and following necessary changes in your campaigns, you can attract the right audience and ensure the success of your online advertising initiatives.

by Web Desk via Digital Information World

WhatsApp is rolling out 2 features that will let admins delete posts and android users create communities

WhatsApp is one of the most used messaging apps in the world with millions of users using it each day for multiple purposes. Whether it is keeping up with family or having work group chats, WhatsApp provides a platform for both.

On the app, it falls upon the group admin to control and regulate the content that is being posted over there, but sometimes people don’t follow the guidelines set by the Admins and post offensive content in the group chat. When that happens the admin must take charge either by asking the user to delete the message or remove them from the group. But even after asking nicely, the user does not comply, and here is when this feature comes into the picture. This feature gives admins the ability to delete messages sent by anyone in a group for everyone present in that particular group, so not even the sender can see what they sent.

This feature has started rolling out and has been given to some lucky Beta users. One thing that we know for sure as of now is that this feature will be available to Beta users soon and the ones that want to use it must have the WhatsApp Beta for iOS 22.18.0.70. One thing that has to be noted is that this feature is only for iOS Beta users as of now. Whether this will be coming to Android in the future is still unclear.

Moving on, WhatsApp has been working on another feature that is still under development as of now. WhatsApp recently introduced Communities, a place where a person could find all the groups related to a specific topic, now it is working on an update that will allow users to create their Community.

Now, this feature has long been overdue as it should have been released with the Communities feature when it came out first. Well, the feature wasn’t non-existent, it just wasn’t available for Beta Android users. But now it is finally here.

According to the screenshot posted by WABetainfo, it is very easy to check if the feature is available on your version of WhatsApp, just look to the upper left corner where the camera tab usually is, if you see 3 small people over there then it means that your version of WhatsApp is compatible and as for the people you see, by clicking on them you will be directed to the community tab.

If the tab is available on your phone you can start by adding 10 groups into a community, they are called subgroups and one community can support up to 512 participants.

Read next: WhatsApp allows status updates visibility within the chat list, just like Instagram stories, but it is now available for some beta users
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Instagram Rumored To Be Following In BeReal’s Footsteps With The Launch Of Its Upcoming Feature ‘Candid Challenges’

It’s only recently that we saw Instagram receive plenty of criticism for copying TikTok’s layout. But now, we’re hearing some more news that the app is taking inspiration from BeReal for an upcoming launch.

At the moment, the company is busy testing out a new feature that comes under the heading, Candid Challenges. And yes, in case you didn’t already notice by now, it’s quite similar to the BeReal app.

BeReal is now trending as a leading photo-sharing app that younger audiences can’t get enough of. And by looking at the way that the stats are rolling in, it’s definitely a major archrival for several other platforms out there.

While the launch of Instagram’s feature is yet to be talked about in public, the news was first unveiled by a developer named Alessandro Paluzzi. Famous for a lot of reverse engineering, he is quite quick when it comes to spotting early versions for any new updates. And this one is no exception.

Now, one spokesperson has confirmed the feature and labeled it as one of the app’s internal prototypes. However, they are being very hush about the whole matter, failing to delineate any more details.

Paluzzi mentioned that soon, after the launch, users of the app will begin to see alerts pop up during various times of the day. Obviously, this is restricted to all of those who opt to take part in the Candid Challenge.

The notification will ask the user if they’d like to click a snap of their surrounding at a certain time in the day. And when the prompt is received, well, the app’s front and rear cameras will be available to shoot in the form of windows to click the perfect snap.

You can see all the content arise across the app’s Stories, right after the user selects to share the challenge. And yes, that’s as close as it gets to BeReal who seems to be offering the exact same thing to users too.

The famous selfie-based app is all about sharing clicks with those that matter most, at various points in the day. It’s just a great way of staying connected with candid glimpses of a person’s life.

BeReal was first seen in the year 2019, and it works in the same manner as we’ve mentioned above about Instagram’s latest feature. The notifications or prompts get expired after just two minutes, and right after that, users can take out the time to see others’ clicks.

At the moment, we’re not quite sure when or even if the app is keen on making such a launch. Moreover, we just know that there’s some internal testing taking place right now, not even external.

Still, the fact that Instagram is actually even thinking about testing it out is a clear indication that things are going in the right direction.

Copying BeReal seems sensible for Instagram because it is, after all, rising in popularity with Gen Z in these past couple of months. And for those that don’t know, it’s even reached the top spot on the App Store.

Read next: Instagram Is Working On A New Quiet Mode To Help Users With Sleeping Through The Night Without Distractions
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Here Are 5 of the Biggest Privacy Trends Among Consumer

Third party tracking cookies are quickly falling out of favor, with Firefox’s 2019 discontinuation of certain tracking cookies coupled with Apple’s widespread blocking of all third party tracking playing a role in that. Google is also planning to discontinue the use of third party tracking cookies by 2023, but what does the consumer think about all this? The Global Web Index recently published some data that sheds some light on this situation.

There are five basic trends that this report, with the first of these trends being that privacy desires have remained quite consistent over time. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that older consumers tend to be more focused on privacy than those that belong to the younger demographics. Only 22% of Baby Boomers said that they felt like they had control over their online data, but 27% of Gen Z respondents said the same with all things having been considered and taken into account.

Another trend that can be seen in this report is that quite a few consumers are opting for privacy oriented alternatives to their favorite products. Many of these consumers are switching to DuckDuckGo because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up allowing them to use a search engine that would automatically block any tracking attempts from third parties. DuckDuckGo has seen its US based usership increase by as much as 69% since the second quarter of 2020.

Also, while privacy behaviors are consistent across most demographics, the reasons for implementing a particular privacy conscious methodology can vary based on the demographic that the consumer in question belongs to. For example, baby boomers use ad blockers due to the lack of representation that they see in ads that are shown to them. Gen Z, on the other hand, is more likely to use ad blockers so that they can avoid seeing any kind of inappropriate content online. Hence, the reasoning for each demographic differs based on a few pertinent factors.

As for the reactions that people show to cookie consent prompts, there are three basic reactions that have emerged based on the trends included in this report. Around half of the users across 9 markets stated that they automatically accept any cookies that a website asks consent for. In spite of the fact that this is the case, around one third of respondents stated that they change the settings to better suit their preferences, and approximately 6% get turned off by the prompt and decide to abandon their visit to that particular website.

The three biggest reasons for disliking these pop-ups, each of which were selected by 26% of respondents, were as follows: reduction of online experience enjoyment, difficulty in making the right choice and an overabundance of information included in these popups. Unclear information or the presence of excessive jargon was also included as a major reason by a quarter of respondents or 25% to be precise.

By far the biggest trend that can be analyzed through this data set is that transparency has started to matter more than ever before. 46% of respondents in the US stated that they wanted to know more about why their data was being asked for as well as what would be done with the data once they consent to a website using it. This indicates that a lot more consumers would be willing to consent to first party tracking if a bit more transparency is given to them about such matters

All of these factors need to be recognized by websites and brands, especially now that third party tracking is fast becoming a thing of the past.

Read next: 45% of Consumers Downsized Their Lifestyles Due to Inflation
by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

Excitement For Fans As Reports Of A Split Screen Mode On YouTube TV And YouTube Shorts For TV Screens Emerge

This past month, we heard about a report that outlined how Google TV was going to include support from Nest Audio very soon. This would also entail Fitbit/Wear OS with some additions linked to the smart home.

And if that wasn’t exciting enough, well, fans, there’s more to celebrate. And this time around, it has to do with some innovative updates in the world of YouTube.

Reports of YouTube TV launching a new split-screen mode are taking center stage. At the same time, we’re hearing reports of YouTube Shorts arising on big screens too.

This news comes to us thanks to Protocol which unveiled how Google informed its partners in July that it would be introducing some changes for its clients. This includes those on Android as well as Google TV.

Just recently, we saw YouTube TV celebrating its 5 million subscriber mark and now, we’re hearing about a Mosaic Mode. This allows fans of the apps to simultaneously witness nearly four different live feeds at once. Thanks to the screen getting divided equally into four, viewers can see their favorite shows at once.

We see this as an ideal chance for all those sports enthusiasts who find it hard to pick between their favorites. But now, there’s no need as the company has fulfilled your wish.

As of now, we’ve got no other details as nothing else was disclosed publicly today in regards to live feeds. We just hope this is not only applicable for selective programs to get multiple views but to all.

It’s also been suggested that the app wouldn’t aggressively chop up video content and provide audio streams to one source only at any single time.

If that has gotten you excited, well, how about something else that’s a little more happening? YouTube Shorts will soon be available on TV screens, accompanied by letterboxing and plenty of controls. These will be located on the right side of the vertical videos.

The new features were first seen being introduced to the app’s partners in regards to Android/Google Television.

Soon, we’ll be seeing it arise everywhere on large screens where you can easily access the YouTube app with ease.

If you ask our point of view, the split screen feature would look fantastic across both iPads and Android tablets, or even on the web.

Read next: YouTube Offers Users A More Optimized Experience With An ‘Explore’ Page For Its Podcasts
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World