Top 5 Digital, Social Media & Web3 News: Apple, ChatGPT, WhatsApp, YouTube, Meta, OpenAI
Welcome to Connected Church News!
Top 5 latest Digital & Social Media News in 5 minutes, to help your ministry stay on top of industry trends.
This week, we have news about Apple, ChatGPT, WhatsApp, YouTube, Meta, OpenAI.
🗞️ News 1: Apple to Unveil its Metaverse Plans with a Mixed-Reality Headset in 2023
An exciting news update about Apple. Bloomberg reports that Apple will be ready in 2023 to get into the Metaverse space with the launch of its mixed-reality headset. This is a piece of much-awaited news by the community because they’ve been talking about this since 2017. Mixed reality, if you’re wondering what it is, is a combination of the physical world and the digital world. When you wear a headset, you will see what you regularly see in the physical world, but on top of it, you can superimpose digital information, visual stuff-images, videos, etc. There’s a lot of exciting possibilities. And a company like Apple coming into the space will only increase innovation with its app developers, and it will also bring in a lot more users, heating up the competition in the space. Look forward to it. And I think there will be a lot of implications to the nonprofit, church and the ministry space for this. So watch out for more updates as we go along. It’s reported that the operating system might be called xrOS.
🗞️ News 2: WhatsApp shares Ways to Message without Internet or During a Shutdown
WhatsApp has released an important information about how people can stay connected using WhatsApp even when there is an internet shutdown in a particular country or in a location. As ministries and nonprofits serving people in different parts of the world, you know that this can happen due to various reasons. It could be geopolitical or various other reasons. And this is possible using a technology called Proxy. WhatsApp has written a full article on their blog showing how technically organizations and volunteers can set up a ‘Proxy’ if this situation arises. The announcement says “A Proxy enables you to connect to WhatsApp through servers set up by volunteers and organizations around the world dedicated to helping people communicate freely”. And they have given all the technical details. We will link to all of that in the show notes. Pass it on to your technical team if this is something that you want to learn about, in case there’s a situation where there is an internet shutdown, and you want to keep the communication flowing using a Proxy.
🗞️ News 3: YouTube Updates 2023 Contract Terms & Upgrades Analytics on Studio
YouTube has announced that they have made changes to the contract terms of the YouTube partner program. So if you are part of the program then there is a deadline to accept these contract terms which is July the 10th. If you do not accept these by that deadline then you will be removed from the partner program and but if you accept them before that time then the changes start taking effect as soon as the 1February 2020. So do check out these dates and take a look at these new contract terms. YouTube has also announced that they are making changes or adding new features to the analytics inside both web and the mobile. Some of them are interesting and useful. One is Filter by format which allows you to see the content that your audience are Natchi inside YouTube analytics could be very useful and they also added thumbnail and content length to the YouTube Analytics advanced mode. So far you’re only able to see the title but now you can see the thumbnails and you will be able to filter out which video is performing well.
🗞️ News 4: Meta Enables Fitness Stats & Heart Rate Monitoring on Quest 2 VR
Meta has Announced that they are Bringing in new features and integrations to Help You Track Your Fitness statistics when you are using Your VR headset. Meta quest two headset for Your Fitness programs and Your games and So on. The announcement says we are introducing a new heart rate tracking feature and Health Connect by Android Integration on meta quest so you can keep track of all your fitness stats. So helping people track their heart rate even when they are playing a game or having their exercise regimen inside a VR app is going to be something that people will find useful. And also during this time of the year, it’s a good announcement to come because early Jan is when people are thinking about fitness and healthy lifestyle and so on. So good timing, Meta. You.
🗞️ News 5: ChatGPT Pro Version Coming Soon & Microsoft’s $10 Billion investment
Open AI, the organization behind the very popular viral chatbot tool called Chat GPT, which is a chatbot that is powered by AI, has announced that they will soon begin piloting a premium paid version of Chat GPT called Chat GPT Professional. If you haven’t heard of this tool yet, you can Google it. Almost everybody in the digital and social media space are talking about how amazing this chatbot tool is and it generates content for you and so on. Everything about the tool now is currently free. I’ve been playing around with it for a while and now they are starting to think about monetizing it naturally and they are coming up with this new professional version which will have additional features and hopefully robust servers behind them and so on. And the other news is Microsoft, which is already behind Open AI in many ways, has announced that they are interested to invest further $10 billion into the company to make it part of everything they do. LinkedIn and all of it.
Originally published at https://www.natchilazarus.com on January 18, 2023.
