Apple puts Google and Facebook on notice over user’s privacy A pple has been pointing their finger at Google and Facebook for years now over how both companies handle and protect user privacy. At its recent annual developer’s conference, Apple maker of the iPhone brought the rivalry to the product level. Apple will offer a new service called “Sign In with Apple” that will allow its users to sign onto their various online services with their Apple ID, keeping them from having to use Facebook or Google credentials so frequently. The selling point for Apple is that it claims to protect privacy better than Google or Facebook, which use data from sign-in services to sell ads around the internet. The launch underscores Apple’s multi-year effort to organize its marketing and engineering efforts around user privacy as it pushes beyond the iPhone into software and subscription services, where it’s taking on companies that have different business models and have, in many cases had much longer periods of time to build their products.
The end of an era no more BBM B BM, the once-popular app that helped propel the company formerly known as Research In Motion’s BlackBerry smartphone into one of the world’s most sought-after devices, is no more. The app was shut down on Friday, May 31st, 2019 by Emtek, the Indonesian media conglomerate which acquired the BBM business in 2016. Emtek had planned to halt the BBM which was one of the first mobile messaging apps to become enormously popular, however more popular apps such as iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger took over BBM’s market share causing BlackBerry’s former messaging service to shut down for good. •
Technology and Innovation gives restaurant chain an edge over competitors C harles Morrison, CEO of Wingstop Inc. which is a chain of nostalgic, aviation-themed restaurants specializing in chicken wings, to CNBC that they are investing in technology to boost sales and mitigate high labor costs. In an interview with Jim Cramer, Morrison said, “Every time somebody accesses us, we want the opportunity to digitize that transaction, because a digital transaction tends to have almost a $5 higher average ticket, it’s more profitable for our franchisees, which means better return on investment.” “We do believe through digital technologies and further digitization of our business we can create efficiencies that create capacity that help us to grow.” Morrison said. Wingstop has also partnered with delivery app DoorDash with plans to offer delivery services at 80% of its 1,200-plus locations by the end of 2019.
Exact cause of YouTube, Gmail and Snapchat outage unknown U sers of services such as YouTube, Gmail and Snapchat which use Google’s technology lost the ability to use their favorite apps for several hours in parts of the United States. Google had said itwas experiencinghigh levels of network congestion in eastern U.S., which affected multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube. Apple, which uses Google Cloud for some of its services, was also reporting issues with applications ranging from iMessage to iCloud. The exact cause of the outage is not immediately known; however, Google has said that they will provide more information on the incident once they have had the opportunity to complete an internal investigation.
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • JULY 2019
83 JULY 2019 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
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