Monthly Archives: April 2018

Cravate bleu Facebook assortie à la couleur de ses cernes, visage fermé... Mark Zuckerberg s'est voulu grave lors de son audition au Sénat. Crispé, il a d'abord fait face aux dizaines de photographes qui s'étaient massés dans l'une des salles d'audition du Sénat. Il a ensuite écouté les présidents des commissions de la Justice, du Commerce, de la science et des transports, rappeler les faits. Comme lorsque l'un d'eux, le sénateur John Thune, lui a rappelé : « Ce que vous avez créé représente le rêve américain, vous êtes une source d'inspiration pour beaucoup. Vous avez l'obligation de faire en sorte que ça ne se transforme pas en cauchemar sur les données. » En guise de réponse, Mark Zuckerberg a commencé par présenter ses excuses . Lors de son discours, publié avant son audition , il a reconnu plusieurs erreurs. Et il en endosse l'entière responsabilité. « C'est mon erreur, et j'en suis désolé. J'ai fondé Facebook et je l'ai développé, je prends la responsabilité de ce qui est en train de se passer. » Zuckerberg mis en difficulté Il a ensuite expliqué les mesures prises depuis les affaires de l'ingérence russe dans l'élection présidentielle américaine et de Cambridge Analytica : l'entreprise a augmenté le nombre de salariés dédiés à la vérification des contenus (15.000 puis 20.000 en fin d'année), a lancé un processus de révision de « dizaines de milliers d'applications », qui seront bannies de la plate-forme si Facebook trouve des activités malveillantes... Mais les premières difficultés sont apparues pour Mark Zuckerberg au moment des questions des sénateurs. Comme lorsque Bill Nelson joue le faux candide en citant des explications de Sheryl Sandberg (la directrice d'exploitation de Facebook) et demande : « donc pour ne pas voir des publicités que je n'ai pas demandé à voir, je vais devoir payer, c'est bien cela ? » Le jeune patron ne répond pas clairement mais finit par reconnaître que si certains utilisateurs désactivent la publicité ciblée, il faut penser à d'autres sources de revenus. Avant de laisser clairement la porte ouverte à une version payante de Facebook, en répondant à une autre question : « Il y aura toujours une version gratuite de Facebook. »

Mark Zuckerberg emerged unscathed from Tuesday's Senate committee hearing, and he did so in large part because most of the senators who asked him questions had no clue how Facebook worked, what the solutions to its problems are, or even what they were trying to achieve by calling its CEO to testify, other than getting some good soundbites in. What the first day of the Zuckerberg hearings made clear is that many American lawmakers are illiterate when it comes to 21st century technology. As a result, the issue that was supposed to be the focus of the hearing -- "social media privacy and the use and abuse of data," as Sen. Chuck Grassley put it -- was but one among many. And at the moment when the country needed a smart conversation about privacy, what it got was meandering questions and misfires. There were exceptions to the rule: Most notably, California Sen. Kamala Harris, who pressed Zuckerberg on his failure to explain how extensively Facebook tracked user activity beyond Facebook-owned platforms and why the company did not inform users in 2015 that their data had been shared with Cambridge Analytica.

Tesco has hinted at more changes to its Clubcard loyalty scheme as it looks to build on work it has done to improve consumer perceptions of the brand through a focus on loyalty, as well as its own-brand offering and marketing. CEO Dave Lewis said the relaunch of Clubcard last year with contactless technology had “reinvigorated engagement” and given the company “more capability going forward”. In particular, he highlighted synergies between Clubcard and Pay+, Tesco’s mobile payments app, which now has more than 500,000 users across the Tesco business. “Clubcard has always been a big part of Tesco. It’s fair to say we hadn’t invested as much in that in the right ways historically. We’ve gone through a process which is taking it away from just being a promotional tool and getting back to being a reward for loyalty,” he tells Marketing Week, speaking at a press conference this morning (11 April). “A very important part of enabling the plans was ‘re-carding’ and getting contactless so the utility becomes a little bit more modern. And then there is an awful lot of things we can do – if you take Clubcard and put it together with Pay+ you have the only loyalty and payment device in the marketplace. There is an awful lot we can do. I won’t tell you what but you should expect more.” Lewis sees Clubcard as key to rebuilding Tesco’s brand health, which sank following the accounting scandal that hit the brand just weeks after he joined. Since then, Tesco has seen consumer perceptions of the brand triple across a number of metrics. In particular, Tesco highlights a 15-point increase in its NPS score to 53.7 and growth in its quality perception, which was up by 12.2 points between January 2014 and February 2018, and value perception, which tripled to 18.8, according to YouGov BrandIndex.

IT'S BEEN ABOUT six months since cryptojacking exploded, and in that short time the approach has evolved and adapted to initiate illicit cryptocurrency mining in all different ways. Now, Google's taking a stand, announcing Monday that it would begin blocking any Chrome extension submitted to the Web Store that mines cryptocurrency. In July, it will remove existing extensions that currently contain mining functionality. In theory, cryptojacking can be used for legitimate purposes, like raising revenue for a publishing platform or collecting funds for charitable causes. But in practice, the technology has largely been implemented maliciously, or at least secretly, consuming processing resources on victim devices and potentially interfering with and damaging these targets. Bad actors can use locally installed malware to steal a victim device's computing power, embed miners directly into websites to target casual web users without needing to install anything, or hide miners in the most innocuous applets and tools. Cryptojacking has even found its way into critical infrastructure systems.

Whether you see the world of cryptocurrencies as a volatile speculator’s market or the new model for a decentralised economy, brands from Kodak and Burger King to startups in the loyalty and betting categories are all exploring the possibilities they offer. Cryptocurrencies and the technology that enables them to exist, blockchain, are described at one extreme as gimmicks that simply make good fodder for PR stunts, and at the other as a new economic paradigm. So which is it? Bitcoin has been hitting headlines since December, when its value surged to $18,700 (£13,386) per coin following the opening of the first Bitcoin futures market on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. To put this into context, Bitcoin was valued at just $966 (£619) at the start of 2017. The price has now slipped back to $6,602 (£4, 714), leaving the market open to accusations of dangerous volatility. Cryptocurrencies plug into the power of blockchain, which enables organisations and supply chains to record data in a highly secure and fully verifiable fashion, without any one party being in control. Blockchain tech is based on the concept of an open ledger, which allows anyone in a community to validate the transactions taking place within it, explains Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO at internet company Mozilla. It also has many more – and potentially much more useful – applications than just cryptocurrency, which is the one gaining most attention. “If we built an ad network that used blockchain as the tool that could validate that the ads were shown to people, you could effectively try to eliminate ad fraud.”

In a survey of US internet users by Kantar Millward Brown, 71% of respondents said that ads are more intrusive now than they were three years ago. A similar number indicated they’re seeing more ads overall, and even more agreed that ads are now appearing in more places. Part of the reason people may feel like they’re seeing more ads is because they’re spending more time consuming media. eMarketer forecasts that US adults will spend an average of 12 hours, 5 minutes with major media this year, up from 11 hours, 52 minutes in 2015. And not only are people spending more time with media, but the usage of second screens is increasing. We predict that 186 million US adults will, at least once per month, watch traditional TV while simultaneously using a digital device to browse the web in 2018. In 2015, by contrast, there were just 159 million simultaneous internet and TV users. Consumers who feel ads are becoming too invasive are taking actions that advertisers should take seriously. eMarketer projects that three in 10 US internet users will use an an ad blocker this year. And according to a survey of over 39,400 ad blocking users worldwide by GlobalWebIndex, respondents were most likely to block because they find ads annoying, too numerous and too invasive.

C'était l'un des fleurons de la French Tech. En 2016, lorsque Nokia rachète Withings pour 170 millions d'euros , l'écosystème tricolore célèbre l'une de ses plus belles « exits ». Moins de deux ans plus tard, l'entreprise devrait à nouveau changer de mains mais sa valeur s'est effondrée (Nokia a admis dans ses comptes l'avoir surévaluée de 141 millions ). Dans la dernière ligne droite d'un processus de cession, les quelques repreneurs qui se sont déclarés ont déjà fait savoir qu'ils débourseraient une somme bien loin du prix d'acquisition acquitté par le groupe de télécommunications. Sur les rangs, quatre candidatures, selon nos informations. Deux portées par des repreneurs français et deux autres par des non-européens, dont un des cinq Gafam. « Dans la guerre qu'ils se livrent, l'intérêt que les Gafam portent pour les produits hardware devrait nous aiguiller sur le potentiel de cette marque », assure l'un des proches du dossier. Google avec le rachat de Nest, et plus récemment Amazon avec celui de Ring, prouvent la valeur qu'ils accordent aux objets connectés capables de collecter des données. Ces rachats mettent en lumière les erreurs stratégiques dont la marque française a souffert depuis son intégration à Nokia.

Carrefour a annoncé ce vendredi 23 mars 2018 s'associer à Google pour proposer un assistant vocal connecté, "Léa", dans le cadre du renforcement de son offre digitale. Le groupe de distribution avait annoncé en janvier qu'il investirait 2,8 milliards d'euros d'ici 2022 dans le numérique, à l'heure où Amazon se lance dans l'alimentaire en France. L'assistant vocal Alexa — dont Amazon est propriétaire — est le grand rival du Home Assistant de Google avec Apple HomePod. "Léa a été conçue pour simplifier le quotidien de nos clients afin qu’ils puissent gérer leurs listes de courses sur les sites et applications Drive et Ooshop (site de e-commerce alimentaire du groupe, NDLR), uniquement à l'aide de la voix", précise Carrefour dans un communiqué. "L'assistant vocal est aussi capable d'ajouter les ingrédients au panier à partir d'une recette de cuisine et de donner des informations sur les magasins aux alentours comme l'adresse, les horaires ou l'itinéraire." Les termes financiers de l'accord n'ont pas été divulgués. Carrefour se montre offensif dans le numérique: le groupe vient de prendre une participation majoritaire dans la société Quitoque, startup spécialisée dans les paniers-repas livrés à domicile.

SenseTime Group Ltd. has raised $600 million from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and other investors at a valuation of more than $3 billion, becoming the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup. The company, which specializes in systems that analyze faces and images on an enormous scale, said it closed a Series C round in recent months in which Singaporean state investment firm Temasek Holdings Pte and retailer Suning.com Co. also participated. SenseTime didn’t outline individual investments, but Alibaba was said to have sought the biggest stake in the three-year-old startup. With the deal, SenseTime has doubled its valuation in a few months. Backed by Qualcomm Inc., it underscores its status as one of a crop of homegrown firms spearheading Beijing’s ambition to become the leader in AI by 2030. And it’s a contributor to the world’s biggest system of surveillance: if you’ve ever been photographed with a Chinese-made phone or walked the streets of a Chinese city, chances are your face has been digitally crunched by SenseTime software built into more than 100 million mobile devices. The latest financing will bankroll investments in parallel fields such as autonomous driving and augmented reality, cover the growing cost of AI talent and shore up its computing power. It’s developing a service code-named “Viper” to parse data from thousands of live camera feeds -- a platform it hopes will prove invaluable in mass surveillance. And it’s already in talks to raise another round of funds and targeting a valuation of more than $4.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

À ce sujet, Musk s’est souvent illustré par quelques phrases chocs concernant ses inquiétudes pour le futur, notamment à propos des robots militaires. Il avait par exemple signé une lettre ouverte en 2015 avec Stephen Hawking et des dizaines d'autres chercheurs pour l’interdiction des "systèmes d’armes létales autonomes". Quelques mois plus tard, Elon Musk avait mis sur pied, avec l’homme d’affaires Sam Altman, l’organisation à but non lucratif OpenAI, qui cherche à réfléchir sur les évolutions de l’intelligence artificielle pour qu’elle "bénéficie au plus grand nombre". Puis, à la fin du mois de mars 2017, le patron de SpaceX révélait sa nouvelle création : Neuralink, une entreprise qui veut connecter le cerveau humain aux machines.