The iPod’s swan song
Don’t be sad over the end of an era. Instead, be thankful that it happened. At least, that was the vibe Apple wanted to give off in its late May announcement that after its introduction over 20 years ago, the iPod would no longer be produced.
“Music has always been part of our core at Apple, and bringing it to hundreds of millions of users in the way iPod did impacted more than just the music industry – it also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Today, the spirit of iPod lives on. We’ve integrated an incredible music experience across all of our products, from the iPhone to the Apple Watch to HomePod mini, and across Mac, iPad, and Apple TV. And Apple Music delivers industry-leading sound quality with support for spatial audio – there’s no better way to enjoy, discover, and experience music.”
The iPod helped transform Apple from a struggling computer manufacturer to the world’s biggest company, CNET reported. “After its release in 2001, the iPod, helped along by the iTunes music store, became one of the most iconic gadgets of all time, spawning a host of imitators and legitimizing the market of MP3 players that it dominated.”
The company did say that customers could still purchase iPod touch through apple.com, Apple Store locations, and Apple Authorized Resellers while supplies last.
Facebook cracking down on fake feedback
According to The Verge, Facebook is cracking down on user reviews to prevent people from leaving fake feedback on businesses’ pages. The company has updated its Community Feedback policy to address this widespread issue.
“As more people and businesses rely on valuable feedback from customers – such as ratings, reviews, recommendations and questions & answers – we’re dedicated to keeping that information relevant and authentic,” the company said in a release. The new policy was created to ensure that reviews are based on real purchasing experiences, and to keep irrelevant, fraudulent and offensive feedback off of our platforms. More than 200 million businesses connect with their customers through Facebook apps and technologies, according to the social media giant.
Facebook’s new guidelines “protect against people who leave fake bad reviews as a way to get refunds or other freebies out of a business that wants to please its customers, and they’re also supposed to tackle incentivized reviews,” The Verge reported. “This addresses the overly positive (and usually very vague) reviews businesses pay random users to leave on their pages. I’m guessing that this applies to any (actually real) bad reviews businesses pay users to change as well.”
Standards for the Metaverse
The metaverse is gaining momentum. And with that comes a need for some sort of standards, according to leading tech organizations.
Announced in June, The Metaverse Standards Forum brings together leading standards organizations and companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability standards needed to build the open metaverse. The Forum will explore where the lack of interoperability is holding back metaverse deployment and how the work of Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) defining and evolving needed standards may be coordinated and accelerated.
Open to any organization at no cost, the Forum will focus on pragmatic, action-based projects such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open-source tooling to accelerate the testing and adoption of metaverse standards, while also developing consistent terminology and deployment guidelines.
The metaverse is motivating the novel integration and deployment of diverse technologies for collaborative spatial computing, such as interactive 3D graphics, augmented and virtual reality, photorealistic content authoring, geospatial systems, end-user content tooling, digital twins, real-time collaboration, physical simulation, online economies, multi-user gaming, and more – at new levels of scale and immersiveness.
Multiple industry leaders have stated that the potential of the metaverse will be best realized if it is built on a foundation of open standards. Building an open and inclusive metaverse at pervasive scale will demand a constellation of open interoperability standards created by SDOs such as The Khronos Group, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Open Geospatial Consortium, the Open AR Cloud, the Spatial Web Foundation, and many others. The Metaverse Standards Forum aims to foster consensus-based cooperation between diverse SDOs and companies to define and align requirements and priorities for metaverse standards – accelerating their availability and reducing duplication of effort across the industry.
“The metaverse will bring together diverse technologies, requiring a constellation of interoperability standards, created and maintained by many standards organizations,” said Neil Trevett, Khronos president. “The Metaverse Standards Forum is a unique venue for coordination between standards organizations and industry, with a mission to foster the pragmatic and timely standardization that will be essential to an open and inclusive metaverse.”