05 April 2018

5 Reasons to Upgrade to Malwarebytes Premium: Yes, It’s Worth It


malwarebytes-premium-worth

Though I’ve been a loyal Malwarebytes user since 2008, I have to admit that most of that time was spent as a free user. Upgrading to a premium account never crossed my mind because I never thought I needed it. You’ve probably thought the same. Truth is, the free version of Malwarebytes is fantastic. It scans and removes malware and rootkits, and the company deserves kudos for respecting its users enough to not cripple the free version into an unusable mess as companies are prone to do. But having recently tried the premium version (on my own initiative and not...

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3 tests show Facebook is determined to make Stories the default


Facebook isn’t backing down from Stories despite criticism that it copied Snapchat and that Instagram Stories is enough. Instead, it’s committed to figuring out how to adapt the slideshow format into the successor to the status update. That’s why today the company is launching three significant tests that make Facebook Stories a default way to share.

“The way people share and connect is changing; it’s quickly becoming more real-time and visual. We’re testing new creative tools to bring pictures and videos to life, and introducing easier ways to find and share stories” a Facebook spokesperson told me.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been fixing the biggest problems with its Stories: redundancy between Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. Now you can set your Instagram Stories to automatically be reposted to your Facebook Story, and Stories on Facebook and Messenger sync with each other. That means you can just post to Instagram and have your Story show up on all three apps. That way if you want extra views or to include friends who aren’t Insta-addicts, you can show them your Story with no extra uploads.

It was a year ago that Facebook rolled out Stories. But Facebook has so many features that it has to make tough decisions about which to promote and which to bury. It often launches features with extra visibility at first, but forces them to grow popular on their own before giving them any additional attention.

Facebook is vulnerable to competitors if it doesn’t make Stories work, and users may eventually grow tired of the News Feed full of text updates from distant acquaintances. But Instagram Stories and WhatsApp’s version Status have both grown to over 250 million daily users, showing there’s obviously demand for this product if Facebook can figure out how Stories fit in its app.

Hence, these tests:

  1. The Facebook status composer on mobile will immediately show an open camera window and the most recent images in your camera roll to spur Stories sharing. Given that Facebook has as many as 17 choices for status updates from checkins to recommendations to GIFs, the new camera and camera roll previews make Stories a much more prominent option. Facebook isn’t going so far as to launch with the camera as the home screen like Snapchat, or half the screen like it once tried, but it clearly believes it will be able to ride the trend and people will get more out of sharing if they choose Stories. This starts testing today to a small subset of users around the world.
  2. When you shoot something with the augmented reality-equipped Facebook Camera feature, the sharing page will now default to having Stories selected. Previously, users had to choose if they wanted to post to Stories, News Feed, or send their creation to someone through Messenger. Facebook is now nudging users to go with Stories, seemingly confident of its existing dominance over the ranked feed and messaging spaces. This will test will all users in the Dominican Republic.
  3. Above the News Feed, Facebook Stories will show up with big preview tiles behind the smaller profile pictures of the people who created them. Teasing what’s inside a Story could make users a lot more likely to click to watch them. Facebook uses a similar format but with smaller preview circles on Messenger. And while Instagram leaves more room for the main feed by just showing profile pic bubbles for Stories, if you keep scrolling you might see a call out in the feed for Stories you haven’t watched using a big preview tile format similar to what Facebook Stories is trying. More views could encourage users to share more Stories, helping to dismantle the ghost town perception of Facebook Stories. This will also tests to a small percentage of users around the world.

    One of Facebook’s new Stories tests shows big preview tiles behind people’s profile bubbles.

If Facebook finds these tests prove popular, they could roll out everywhere and make Stories a much more central part of the app’s experience. Facebook will have to avoid users feeling like Stories are getting crammed down their throats. But seeing the camera option, defaulting camera content to Stories, and seeing bigger preview all disappear with a quick tap or swipe.

The fact is that the modern world of computing affords a very different type of social media than when Facebook launched 14 years ago. Then, you’d update your status with a line of text from your desktop computer because your phone didn’t have a good camera or maybe even the internet, screens were small, mobile networks were slow, and it was tough to compute on the go. Now with every phone equipped with a great camera, a nice screen, increasingly fast mobile networks, and everyone else staring at them all the time, it makes sense to share through photos and videos you post throughout the day.

This isn’t a shift driven by Facebook, or even really Snapchat. Visual communication is an inevitable evolution. For Facebook, Stories aren’t an “if”, just a “how”.


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Google pay discrimination lawsuit is moving forward


A class-action lawsuit alleging pay discrimination at Google based on gender is moving forward, California Superior Court Judge Mary E. Wiss recently ordered.

The original suit was dismissed in December due to the fact that plaintiffs defined the class of affected workers too broadly. In January, the plaintiffs filed a revised lawsuit, which added Heidi Lamar, a former teacher at Google’s Children Center in Palo Alto. The revised January lawsuit focuses on those who hold engineer, manager, sales or early childhood education positions, which comes out to 30 covered positions. The suit also alleges Google has a history of improperly asking about prior salaries and assigning women to lower job levels with lower salaries.

In court, Google objected to the class-action designation pertaining to “Engineer Covered Positions” and “Program Manager Covered Positions,” saying the plaintiffs did not allege specific violations. But Judge Wiss has since said the court was not persuaded by Google’s argument.

“It is enough for Plaintiff’s to allege a numerous and ascertainable class with a well-defined community of interest, as well as a pattern or practice of gender discrimination across all Covered Positions in Google,” Wiss wrote in her order.

I’ve reached out to Google and will update this story if I hear back.


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3 tests show Facebook is determined to make Stories the default


Facebook isn’t backing down from Stories despite criticism that it copied Snapchat and that Instagram Stories is enough. Instead, it’s committed to figuring out how to adapt the slideshow format into the successor to the status update. That’s why today the company is launching three significant tests that make Facebook Stories a default way to share.

“The way people share and connect is changing; it’s quickly becoming more real-time and visual. We’re testing new creative tools to bring pictures and videos to life, and introducing easier ways to find and share stories” a Facebook spokesperson told me.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been fixing the biggest problems with its Stories: redundancy between Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. Now you can set your Instagram Stories to automatically be reposted to your Facebook Story, and Stories on Facebook and Messenger sync with each other. That means you can just post to Instagram and have your Story show up on all three apps. That way if you want extra views or to include friends who aren’t Insta-addicts, you can show them your Story with no extra uploads.

It was a year ago that Facebook rolled out Stories. But Facebook has so many features that it has to make tough decisions about which to promote and which to bury. It often launches features with extra visibility at first, but forces them to grow popular on their own before giving them any additional attention.

Facebook is vulnerable to competitors if it doesn’t make Stories work, and users may eventually grow tired of the News Feed full of text updates from distant acquaintances. But Instagram Stories and WhatsApp’s version Status have both grown to over 250 million daily users, showing there’s obviously demand for this product if Facebook can figure out how Stories fit in its app.

Hence, these tests:

  1. The Facebook status composer on mobile will immediately show an open camera window and the most recent images in your camera roll to spur Stories sharing. Given that Facebook has as many as 17 choices for status updates from checkins to recommendations to GIFs, the new camera and camera roll previews make Stories a much more prominent option. Facebook isn’t going so far as to launch with the camera as the home screen like Snapchat, or half the screen like it once tried, but it clearly believes it will be able to ride the trend and people will get more out of sharing if they choose Stories. This starts testing today to a small subset of users around the world.
  2. When you shoot something with the augmented reality-equipped Facebook Camera feature, the sharing page will now default to having Stories selected. Previously, users had to choose if they wanted to post to Stories, News Feed, or send their creation to someone through Messenger. Facebook is now nudging users to go with Stories, seemingly confident of its existing dominance over the ranked feed and messaging spaces. This will test will all users in the Dominican Republic.
  3. Above the News Feed, Facebook Stories will show up with big preview tiles behind the smaller profile pictures of the people who created them. Teasing what’s inside a Story could make users a lot more likely to click to watch them. Facebook uses a similar format but with smaller preview circles on Messenger. And while Instagram leaves more room for the main feed by just showing profile pic bubbles for Stories, if you keep scrolling you might see a call out in the feed for Stories you haven’t watched using a big preview tile format similar to what Facebook Stories is trying. More views could encourage users to share more Stories, helping to dismantle the ghost town perception of Facebook Stories. This will also tests to a small percentage of users around the world.

If Facebook finds these tests prove popular, they could roll out everywhere and make Stories a much more central part of the app’s experience. Facebook will have to avoid users feeling like Stories are getting crammed down their throats. But seeing the camera option, defaulting camera content to Stories, and seeing bigger preview all disappear with a quick tap or swipe.

The fact is that the modern world of computing affords a very different type of social media than when Facebook launched 14 years ago. Then, you’d update your status with a line of text from your desktop computer because your phone didn’t have a good camera or maybe even the internet, screens were small, mobile networks were slow, and it was tough to compute on the go. Now with every phone equipped with a great camera, a nice screen, increasingly fast mobile networks, and everyone else staring at them all the time, it makes sense to share through photos and videos you post throughout the day.

This isn’t a shift driven by Facebook, or even really Snapchat. Visual communication is an inevitable evolution. For Facebook, Stories aren’t an “if”, just a “how”.


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Tips for Working With Text and Text Functions in Excel


excel-text-tips

When you think of Excel (our most important Excel tips), you probably think of numbers, calculations, and formulas. But, you also add text to spreadsheets, like headings, descriptions, or people’s names. Today we’ll cover various ways of working with text in Excel spreadsheets. We discuss several different functions for working with text. Whenever you use a function, always start it with an equals sign (=). Wrap Text in a Cell When you enter text in a cell that’s wider than the cell, the text goes past the right border of the cell by default. But it’s easy to have the...

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Twitter claims more progress on squeezing terrorist content


Twitter has put out its latest Transparency Report providing an update on how many terrorist accounts it has suspended on its platform — with a cumulative 1.2 million+ suspensions since August 2015.

During the reporting period of July 1, 2017 through December 31, 2017 — for this, Twitter’s 12th Transparency Report — the company says a total of 274,460 accounts were permanently suspended for violations related to the promotion of terrorism.

“This is down 8.4% from the volume shared in the previous reporting period and is the second consecutive reporting period in which we’ve seen a drop in the number of accounts being suspended for this reason,” it writes. “We continue to see the positive, significant impact of years of hard work making our site an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism, resulting in this type of activity increasingly shifting away from Twitter.”

Six months ago the company claimed big wins in squashing terrorist activity on its platform — attributing drops in reports of pro-terrorism accounts then to the success of in-house tech tools in driving terrorist activity off its platform (and perhaps inevitably rerouting it towards alternative platforms — Telegram being chief among them, according to experts on online extremism).

At that time Twitter reported a total of 299,649 pro-terrorism accounts had been suspended — which it said was a 20 per cent drop on figures reported for July through December 2016.

So the size of the drops are also shrinking. Though it’s suggesting that’s because it’s winning the battle to discourage terrorists from trying in the first place.

For its latest reporting period, ending December 2017, Twitter says 93% of the accounts were flagged by its internal tech tools — with 74% of those also suspended before their first tweet, i.e. before they’d been able to spread any terrorist propaganda.

Which means that around a quarter of the pro-terrorist accounts did manage to get out at least one terror tweet.

This proportion is essentially unchanged since the last report period (when Twitter reported suspending 75% before their first tweet) — so whatever tools it’s using to automate terror account identification and blocking appear to be in a steady state, rather than gaining in ability to pre-filter terrorist content.

Twitter also specifies that government reports of violations related to the promotion of terrorism represent less than 0.2% of all suspensions in the most recent reporting period — or 597 to be exact.

As with its prior transparency report, a far larger number of Twitter accounts are being reported by governments for “abusive behavior” — which refers to long-standing problems on Twitter’s platform such as hate speech, racism, misogyny and trolling.

And in December a Twitter policy staffer was roasted by UK MPs during a select committee session after the company was again shown failing to remove violent, threatening and racist tweets — which committee staffers had reported months earlier in that case.

Twitter’s latest Transparency Report specifies that governments reported 6,254 Twitter accounts for abusive behavior — yet the company only actioned a quarter of these reports.

That’s still up on the prior reporting period, though, when it reported actioning a paltry 12% of these type of reports.

The issue of abuse and hate speech on online platforms generally has rocketed up the political agenda in recent years, especially in Europe — where Germany now has a tough new law to regulate takedowns.

Platforms’ content moderation policies certainly remain a bone of contention for governments and lawmakers.

Last month the European Commission set out a new rule of thumb for social media platforms — saying it wants them to take down illegal content within an hour of it being reported.

This is not legislation yet, but the threat of EU-wide laws being drafted to regulate content takedowns remains a discussion topic — to encourage platforms to improve performance voluntarily.

Where terrorist content specifically is concerned, the Commission has also been pushing for increased used by tech firms of what it calls “proactive measures”, including “automated detection”.

And in February the UK government also revealed it had commissioned a local AI firm to build an extremist content blocking tool — saying it could decide to force companies to use it.

So political pressure remains especially high on that front.

Returning to abusive content, Twitter’s report specifies that the majority of the tweets and accounts reported to it by governments which it did remove violated its rules in the following areas: impersonation (66%), harassment (16%), and hateful conduct (12%).

This is an interesting shift on the mix from the last reported period when Twitter said content was removed for: harassment (37%), hateful conduct (35%), and impersonation (13%).

It’s difficult to interpret exactly what that development might mean. One possibility is that impersonation could cover disinformation agents, such as Kremlin bots, which Twitter has being suspending in recent months as part of investigations into election interference — an issue that’s been shown to be a problem across social media, from Facebook to Tumblr.

Governments may also have become more focused on reporting accounts to Twitter that they believe are wrappers for foreign agents to spread false information to try to meddle with democratic processes.

In January, for example, the UK government announced it would be setting up a civil service unit to combat state-led disinformation campaigns.

And removing an account that’s been identified as a fake — with the help of government intelligence — is perhaps easier for Twitter than judging whether a particular piece of robust speech might have crossed the line into harassment or hate speech.

Judging the health of conversations on its platform is also something the company recently asked outsiders to help it with. So it doesn’t appear overly confident in making those kind of judgement calls.


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Virgin Galactic successfully tested its rocket-powered spacecraft today for the first time since 2014


Virgin Galactic took to the skies today for the first test of its rocket-powered spacecraft in over three years. The SpaceShipTwo launch platform deployed the USS Unity at a set altitude where the space craft will fire its engines for as long as 30 seconds bringing the craft to 1 1/2 the speed of sound. This was the first powered test of the Unity since the SpaceShipTwo Enterprise broke up during a test flight in late 2014.

After the accident Richard Branson’s space program reworked a lot of components but as of late ramped up testing including releasing the Unity for glide testing.

For today’s test two pilots — Mark “Forger” Stucky and Dave Mackay — were at the controls of the VSS Unity as its dropped from its mothership. Unlike the original SpaceCraftTwo vehicle, the Unity is built by The Spaceship Company, a subsidiary of Virgin Group, which is also building two more spaceships for the space company.

Virgin Galactic has yet to announce target altitude or speed for this test. This is a big test for the company and it has been relatively quiet about its existence — a stark difference from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Virgin Galactic was founded and so far existed to provide a reusable platform to reach sub-orbital altitudes of about 68 miles above the Earth. It’s capable of carrying passengers who are expected to pay around $250,000 for the trip and today’s showed that the company is back on the track to be a viable space delivery system. It’s unlikely the company could have survived another fatal disaster.


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GitLab gets a native integration with Google’s Kubernetes Engine


GitLab, one of the most popular self-hosted Git services, has been on a bit of a roll lately. Barely two weeks after launching its integration with GitHub, the company today announced that developers on its platform can now automatically spin up a cluster on Google’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and deploy their applications to it with just a few clicks.

To build this feature, the company collaborated with Google, but this integration also makes extensive use of GitLab’s existing Auto DevOps tools, which already offers a similar functionality for working with containers. Auto DevOps aims to take all the grunt work out of setting up CI/CD pipelines and deploying to containers.

“Before the GKE integration, GitLab users needed an in-depth understanding of Kubernetes to manage their own clusters,” said GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij in today’s announcement. “With this collaboration, we’ve made it simple for our users to set up a managed deployment environment on [Google Cloud Platform] and leverage GitLab’s robust Auto DevOps capabilities.”

To make use of the GKE integration, developers only have to connect to their Google accounts from GitLab. Since GKE automatically manages the cluster, developers will ideally be able to fully focus on writing their application and leave the deployment and management to GitLab and Google.

These new features, which are part of the GitLab 10.6 release are now available to all GitLab users.

 


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Google Cloud gives developers more insights into their networks


Google Cloud is launching a new feature today that will give its users a new way to monitor and optimize how their data flows between their servers in the Google Cloud and other Google Services, on-premises deployments and virtually any other internet endpoint. As the name implies, VPC Flow Logs are meant for businesses that already use Google’s Virtual Private Cloud features to isolate their resources from other users.

VPC Flow Logs monitors and logs all the network flows (both UDP and TCP) that are sent from and received by the virtual machines inside a VPC, including traffic between Google Cloud regions. All of that data can be exported to Stackdriver Logging or BigQuery, if you want to keep it in the Google Cloud, or you can use Cloud Pub/Sub to export it to other real-time analytics or security platform. The data updates every five seconds and Google premises that using this service has no impact on the performance of your deployed applications.

As the company notes in today’s announcement, this will allow network operators to get far more insights into the details of how the Google network performs and to troubleshoot issues if they arise. In addition, it will also allow them to optimize their network usage and costs by giving them more information about their global traffic.

All of this data is also quite useful for performing forensics when it looks like somebody may have gotten into your network, too. If that’s your main use case, though, you probably want to export your data to a specialized security information and event management (SIEM) platform from vendors like Splunk or ArcSight.


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How to Sell on Amazon: 12 Best Sites to Learn the Basics


sell-on-amazon

You have a great product. You’re using different online avenues to promote and sell it. Maybe it’s selling well and you want to take it further. Or maybe it’s not and you need a new strategy. So you’ve decided to hit one of the biggest online stores and become an Amazon Seller. But where do you start? These 12 online sources can help you get on the right track. You’ll not only learn how to become an Amazon Seller but get instructions, tips, and help with fulfillment, shipping, and other essentials. 1. Online Selling Experiment The Online Selling Experiment website...

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10 Remastered Video Games Worth Playing Again


remastered games

You’ll never forget the first time you played them. Maybe you were a child playing past your bedtime, or a seasoned pro testing your skill on the battlefield. Whatever the occasion, some games can change your world. Well, nowadays, we’re truly going back to the future. With updated hardware technology, graphics, and game design, there has been a resurgence of the classics you know and love being remastered for new audiences. Outdated graphics are no longer an excuse, so why not play the following games and get lost in the world of yesteryear! 10. Grim Fandango Remastered If you haven’t...

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MoviePass’ parent company acquires Moviefone


Helios and Matheson Analytics, which already owns movie ticket subscription service MoviePass, has acquired Moviefone.

Despite the old-school name, Moviefone is now a digital media business with trailers, movie information and ticketing via Fandango — it says it reaches 6 million unique visitors each month.

Moviefone was previously owned by Oath, the Verizon subsidiary formed from the merger of AOL and Yahoo. (Oath also owns TechCrunch). AOL acquired Moviefone for $388 million back in 1999.

The deal includes a $1 million cash payment, as well as stock that could bring the total value up to $23 million, according to Variety. That means Oath now has a stake in MoviePass. It will also continue sell Moviefone’s digital ad inventory.

MoviePass, meanwhile, allows customers to pay $9.95 a month (or less) to get one free movie ticket per day, albeit with inconveniences like the need to physically buy your ticket at the theater. Acquiring Moviefone is supposed to help the company expand into content and advertising.

“This natural alignment between MoviePass and Moviefone will help us grow our subscriber base significantly and expand our marketing and advertising platform for our studio and brand partners,” said MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe in the acquisition release. “Moviefone has been a go-to resource for entertainment enthusiasts for years, and we’re excited to bolster its presence and bring this iconic platform into the entertainment ecosystem of the future.”


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Pinterest aims for products from the store down your street as its next big ad business


Pinterest is known for having, and promoting, a lot of business content. It’s actually a majority of the content, and it’s usually from some of the most well-known brands that feed into the kinds of sometimes dream-level wants and needs of its users.

And while Pinterest a majority of Pinterest’s potential is locked up there, the company has increasingly turned its gaze toward smaller and smaller businesses to try to entice users with local content — including that clothing store right down your street. That’s part of the reasoning behind Pinterest’s Propel program, which it started a year ago to work with small businesses that really either didn’t know what they were doing, or had just never done it before. In another step toward that goal, Pinterest has hired Matt Hogle to be the global head of small business.

Hogle spent 9 years at Facebook, working with small businesses and will be part of the effort for the company to try to find the right set of tools and strategies in place to appeal to small businesses as it starts to ramp it into a significant portion of its revenue. The number of small businesses on Pinterest has increased by around 50% year-over-year, the company said, and it looks to continue to refine a kind of hybrid strategy that mixes platforms and interactions with real people in order to entice those businesses. That’s important for, say, a local clothing store that only has one store and a limited online shop, but has products that would perform well on their own as content on Pinterest — and could quickly add revenue if they started advertising on it.

“We, as an ads business, know what customers’ business objectives are, and we capture that at the early stages,” Pinterest head of global sales Jon Kaplan said. “We know what they’re targeting, how they’re targeting, who, and we know the creative best practices. We should be able in the very near future to take all these elements and say, oh this is your objective, we’ll obfuscate all this complexity and hit a target [return on ad spend] you have. We’re not far. We’ve obfuscated a lot of the levers one can pull in Propel.”

Propel, for now, is adopting an increasingly popular human/digital approach for smaller businesses that are looking to advertise for the first time on Pinterest. If they have no experience whatsoever, or don’t even know what to do, Pinterest’s goal is to serve as a resource for best practices when it comes to creative content down to where to target it. Pinterest is increasingly rolling out more self-serve tools with more robust targeting and tracking, but the kind of small businesses — the sum of which could eventually account for a big chunk of its revenue — that Facebook has snapped up with the prospect of getting in front of the exact right people at the right time. The company says it will be rolling out the “promote” button, which allows advertisers to click a button on a pin to quickly spin up a campaign, to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK in the next coming weeks.

In the end, Pinterest still has 200 million monthly active users, which is absolutely dwarfed by Facebook’s billions of users. But at the same time, Pinterest may be able to capitalize on the good will that Facebook has torched in light of its massive privacy scandal in which information on as many as 87 million users ended up in the hands of a research firm without authorization or permission. Facebook can prove a return on spend, but it can’t at the moment prove that it’ll be able to keep doing the same things that get that return on spend now that the Internet is revolting against Facebook for its massive breach of trust. (Hogle, to be clear, joined before details on the Cambridge Analytica scandal began pouring in.)

Pinterest’s value to advertisers is that it’s able to capture a potential customer when they are just a user clicking (or tapping) around Pinterest looking for ideas. Whether planning life events or just looking for wardrobe suggestions, Pinterest is able to go to advertisers and say they can catch them in those discovery stages and then stick the right ad in front of them to get their attention. Then, the service can follow the user all the way from when they are actually interested in doing something, searching for what to do, and eventually saving that product — or buying it.

It’s that potential value for advertisers that’s taken it to a $12.5 billion valuation in its most recent financing round. But while Pinterest is probably still a sort of curiosity buy for larger advertisers and brands, the challenge has been to chase down the businesses that don’t have huge marketing budgets and might not even be considering Pinterest as a potential advertising platform. After all, the playbook for Facebook is robust and there are plenty of success stories, and the same is true for Google. But at the same time, that bespoke coffee shop down on Valencia Street in San Francisco may have products that line up perfectly for a Pinterest user that’s looking for a holiday gift down the line.

“Over the coming nine months, into 2019, I think we’re gonna continue to invest in ways that make it easy for our small businesses to grow with us,” Hodle said. “Small businesses are unique in the sense that they don’t have the time or energy or resources — the CEO might also be the HR person and the marketing person, and so on. We need to make it extremely lightweight and seamless. At the end of the day, if we can’t provide value and deliver on the money they spend with us and demonstrate the value that’s created there — sales being that number one performance indicator for these companies — then we’re failing. The things we’re gonna continue to build are ways to make that process as easy and seamless.”

“Small businesses add disproportionate value to Pinners and our ad ecosystem,” Hogle said. “I truly believe that small businesses are part of the fabric of every community, they’re the engine that drives every economy around the world. Their relevancy, category or vertical, or proximity to consumers creates disproportionate organic value to Pinners and also creates disproportionate commercial value. Our goal is to show the people the most relevant ad they possibly can based on what they’re trying to accomplish. We can’t do that if we do not meet the needs of the vast majority of businesses that exist. It is a strategic decision, but it’s not just one that goes into paid ads, it creates disproportionate value for the entire platform and ecosystem.”

Hogle’s conversations started mid last year with Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s former president who left in November last year. What started as an exchange of ideas turned, as these conversations often do, it discussions about a potential job at Pinterest, and finally months later he ended up joining to start helping with the company’s small business efforts. Pinterest is increasingly looking to staff up with a suite of executives that will help it get its business in order ahead of a potential IPO. That includes a new COO, Francoise Brougher, who joined in February from Square.

But if Pinterest is going to eventually go public, and get its employees and investors paid out for their efforts, it needs to show that it can be a business that’s beyond just a curiosity budget for a big brand. Getting small businesses on board, like the ones Hogle looks to capture that are right down the street, are a big part of what the company hopes will eventually show that it has a diversified revenue stream and not beholden to just the big and potentially fickle budgets of larger brands.

“Our ad platform is not very old by industry standards, but the rate of development on our self serve tools and the rate of development on interfaces for our small customers is moving at a place where I’m really pleased,” Hogle said. “The ability to carve out opportunity for advertisers is something that’s moving really quickly. Is it where it needs to be long term, of course not, but we’re gonna continue to invest. One of the reasons I joined was it was very clear to me that small businesses were a priority. We are going to invest in products and we’re also going to invest in educational programs. We’re gonna invest and provide in the necessary resources.”


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IMAX and Conversive launch a conversational AR app with chatty pandas


While IMAX has become synonymous with enormous theatrical screens, Chief Marketing Officer JL Pomeroy told me the company has “been an innovator at the forefront of technology breakthroughs for the last 50 years” — for example, it recently started creating virtual reality arcades.

And today, IMAX is releasing its first augmented reality project, developed in partnership with conversational technology company Conversive and tied to the release of the new IMAX documentary Pandas.

With Pandas AR, children don’t just watch an animated panda in real-world environments — they can also talk to it, getting educated on facts about pandas and taking quizzes about what they’ve learned. The experience is part of a new, free iOS app called Yakables, which Conversive plans to expand with more talking animals.

Pomeroy said she first met with Conversive CEO Kevin Cornish for a general discussion about how IMAX might incorporated AR, but it just so happened that he showed off his platform using a talking panda —  so a collaboration around Pandas seemed obvious. She described the work of Conversive and Cornish’s agency Moth + Flame as “miraculous,” particularly since they had to work on “a very quick timeframe” to get the app ready for the documentary’s release.

In fact, Cornish said that writing the script and finding the right voice actor ended up taking the most time, with the actual animation requiring only a day. That’s because Conversive’s technology can combine motion capture with the “intent” behind an actor’s words to programmatically generate character animations.

“The content can be generated really quickly, at a really low cost, so that having hours of conversational education is actually a realistic thing,” Cornish said.

He also argued that by placing the panda in a real-world environment, the interaction becomes more immersive: “The screen disappears and it becomes about you and this subject.”

And while this is just one project and one app, Pomeroy predicted that we’ll see more AR from IMAX in the future.

“This particular app in support of the documentary Pandas is a great test for us,” she said. “We fully anticipate this will be the first of many.”


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Pinterest aims for products from the store down your street as its next big ad business


Pinterest is known for having, and promoting, a lot of business content. It’s actually a majority of the content, and it’s usually from some of the most well-known brands that feed into the kinds of sometimes dream-level wants and needs of its users.

And while Pinterest a majority of Pinterest’s potential is locked up there, the company has increasingly turned its gaze toward smaller and smaller businesses to try to entice users with local content — including that clothing store right down your street. That’s part of the reasoning behind Pinterest’s Propel program, which it started a year ago to work with small businesses that really either didn’t know what they were doing, or had just never done it before. In another step toward that goal, Pinterest has hired Matt Hogle to be the global head of small business.

Hogle spent 9 years at Facebook, working with small businesses and will be part of the effort for the company to try to find the right set of tools and strategies in place to appeal to small businesses as it starts to ramp it into a significant portion of its revenue. The number of small businesses on Pinterest has increased by around 50% year-over-year, the company said, and it looks to continue to refine a kind of hybrid strategy that mixes platforms and interactions with real people in order to entice those businesses. That’s important for, say, a local clothing store that only has one store and a limited online shop, but has products that would perform well on their own as content on Pinterest — and could quickly add revenue if they started advertising on it.

“We, as an ads business, know what customers’ business objectives are, and we capture that at the early stages,” Pinterest head of global sales Jon Kaplan said. “We know what they’re targeting, how they’re targeting, who, and we know the creative best practices. We should be able in the very near future to take all these elements and say, oh this is your objective, we’ll obfuscate all this complexity and hit a target [return on ad spend] you have. We’re not far. We’ve obfuscated a lot of the levers one can pull in Propel.”

Propel, for now, is adopting an increasingly popular human/digital approach for smaller businesses that are looking to advertise for the first time on Pinterest. If they have no experience whatsoever, or don’t even know what to do, Pinterest’s goal is to serve as a resource for best practices when it comes to creative content down to where to target it. Pinterest is increasingly rolling out more self-serve tools with more robust targeting and tracking, but the kind of small businesses — the sum of which could eventually account for a big chunk of its revenue — that Facebook has snapped up with the prospect of getting in front of the exact right people at the right time. The company says it will be rolling out the “promote” button, which allows advertisers to click a button on a pin to quickly spin up a campaign, to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK in the next coming weeks.

In the end, Pinterest still has 200 million monthly active users, which is absolutely dwarfed by Facebook’s billions of users. But at the same time, Pinterest may be able to capitalize on the good will that Facebook has torched in light of its massive privacy scandal in which information on as many as 87 million users ended up in the hands of a research firm without authorization or permission. Facebook can prove a return on spend, but it can’t at the moment prove that it’ll be able to keep doing the same things that get that return on spend now that the Internet is revolting against Facebook for its massive breach of trust. (Hogle, to be clear, joined before details on the Cambridge Analytica scandal began pouring in.)

Pinterest’s value to advertisers is that it’s able to capture a potential customer when they are just a user clicking (or tapping) around Pinterest looking for ideas. Whether planning life events or just looking for wardrobe suggestions, Pinterest is able to go to advertisers and say they can catch them in those discovery stages and then stick the right ad in front of them to get their attention. Then, the service can follow the user all the way from when they are actually interested in doing something, searching for what to do, and eventually saving that product — or buying it.

It’s that potential value for advertisers that’s taken it to a $12.5 billion valuation in its most recent financing round. But while Pinterest is probably still a sort of curiosity buy for larger advertisers and brands, the challenge has been to chase down the businesses that don’t have huge marketing budgets and might not even be considering Pinterest as a potential advertising platform. After all, the playbook for Facebook is robust and there are plenty of success stories, and the same is true for Google. But at the same time, that bespoke coffee shop down on Valencia Street in San Francisco may have products that line up perfectly for a Pinterest user that’s looking for a holiday gift down the line.

“Over the coming nine months, into 2019, I think we’re gonna continue to invest in ways that make it easy for our small businesses to grow with us,” Hodle said. “Small businesses are unique in the sense that they don’t have the time or energy or resources — the CEO might also be the HR person and the marketing person, and so on. We need to make it extremely lightweight and seamless. At the end of the day, if we can’t provide value and deliver on the money they spend with us and demonstrate the value that’s created there — sales being that number one performance indicator for these companies — then we’re failing. The things we’re gonna continue to build are ways to make that process as easy and seamless.”

“Small businesses add disproportionate value to Pinners and our ad ecosystem,” Hogle said. “I truly believe that small businesses are part of the fabric of every community, they’re the engine that drives every economy around the world. Their relevancy, category or vertical, or proximity to consumers creates disproportionate organic value to Pinners and also creates disproportionate commercial value. Our goal is to show the people the most relevant ad they possibly can based on what they’re trying to accomplish. We can’t do that if we do not meet the needs of the vast majority of businesses that exist. It is a strategic decision, but it’s not just one that goes into paid ads, it creates disproportionate value for the entire platform and ecosystem.”

 

Hogle’s conversations started mid last year with Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s former president who left in November last year. What started as an exchange of ideas turned, as these conversations often do, it discussions about a potential job at Pinterest, and finally months later he ended up joining to start helping with the company’s small business efforts. Pinterest is increasingly looking to staff up with a suite of executives that will help it get its business in order ahead of a potential IPO. That includes a new COO, Francoise Brougher, who joined in February from Square.

But if Pinterest is going to eventually go public, and get its employees and investors paid out for their efforts, it needs to show that it can be a business that’s beyond just a curiosity budget for a big brand. Getting small businesses on board, like the ones Hogle looks to capture that are right down the street, are a big part of what the company hopes will eventually show that it has a diversified revenue stream and not beholden to just the big and potentially fickle budgets of larger brands.

“Our ad platform is not very old by industry standards, but the rate of development on our self serve tools and the rate of development on interfaces for our small customers is moving at a place where I’m really pleased,” Hogle said. “The ability to carve out opportunity for advertisers is something that’s moving really quickly. Is it where it needs to be long term, of course not, but we’re gonna continue to invest. One of the reasons I joined was it was very clear to me that small businesses were a priority. We are going to invest in products and we’re also going to invest in educational programs. We’re gonna invest and provide in the necessary resources.”


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How to Open and Extract RAR Files on Mac


rar-files-mac

So you just downloaded a file and it arrived as a RAR archive. You’ve never seen such a format before and, try as you might, you just can’t seem to crack it open to access the goodies waiting for you inside. In this quick overview, you’ll learn everything you need to know about what RAR files are, why they exist, and how to open them and extract their contents on a Mac. What Is a RAR File? If you already know this, or if you just don’t care, feel free to skip down to the next section for the actual...

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15 Fun Websites for Instantly Beating Boredom Online


Even Steve Jobs was a fan of boredom. He believed that boredom allowed room for creativity. We all know how that turned out.

So, why don’t you take a page out of the latest from mind science and celebrate the doldrums of inactivity? You can do a lot of random things on the internet, but here are the best sites to visit if you need to kill some time.

1. The Secret Door

Open The Secret Door - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

It won’t open into a dark nook at Hogwarts, but it can take you to equally unexpected places around the world. The idea is simple — open the secret door and let Google’s Street View transport you to an interesting place on the globe.

Think of it as a portal for virtual globetrotting. And if you don’t like it, just click the Take Me Somewhere Else button. It definitely ranks as one of the more fun ways to use Google Maps and Street View.

2. Museum of Endangered Sounds

Endangered Sounds of Old Technologies - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

Want a dose of serious nostalgia? Maybe, the sound of a dial-up modem will do it for you or the dial of a rotary phone. The Museum of Nostalgia will send you back in time. The single-person effort from Brendan Chilcutt aims to preserve the signature sounds of old technologies.

3. I Need A Prompt

I Need a Prompt - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

This neat website will cure your boredom with a thunderbolt of inspiration. Maybe, just a gentle prod if you aren’t a writer. But if you are a person of the pen then try the creative writing prompts on the site that will make you think about unfamiliar situations. The online tool is also an Amazon Alexa skill now.

4. NSA Haiku Generator

NSA Haiku Generator - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

You wouldn’t combine the NSA and poetry even within a few words of each other. But this automatic haiku generator manages to pull it off. So, go ahead and stoke your wildest imagination with weird mashups of wonderful syllables.

The source of the random words is the NSA’s database of search terms it uses to red flag terrorist threats.

5. Sketch Something Daily

Sketch Something - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

Creativity is the magic pill to zap boredom. Sketch Something Daily is the antidote to your artistic mental blocks. So, pick up a pencil, pen, or even a paintbrush to take on a daily sketch challenge with the help of the illustrations here.

Try it as a daily habit and stifle the yawns as you interest yourself enough to learn the basics of drawing with the help of other sites on the web.

6. One Tiny Hand

One Tiny Hand - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

Apply a Photoshop trick to one part of the human anatomy and you have a viral hit. One Tiny Hand gazes at only one thing and make you laugh at the images of celebrities with one hand reduced in size.

Surprisingly, the Tumblr blog started with Beyoncé Knowles and not the two head of states who are parodied often.

7. 2 Kinds of People

2 Kinds of People - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

Another humorous Tumblr blog. Another dosage of laughter. The simple illustrations show that there are only two kinds of people in the world. Those that have a sense of humor and the rest who don’t.

If you fall in the former, then you will have cured your boredom. If not, read on.

8. Stinkmoji

Stinkmoji - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

Switch on your speakers. Turn on your webcam. And make a face at your computer. Stinkmoji is a face recognition experience that uses a 3D emoji to mimic the faces you make at the camera. It even includes an Easter egg when you open your mouth wide enough.

Oh, just make sure it’s not on your list of timewaster websites when you are in the office.

9. Gross Science

YouTube alone can take care of your lifelong boredom. So, I am cheating by mentioning the Gross Science channel. But, I couldn’t help myself as I got pulled in by all the bizarre but scientific videos here.

So, find out about clothes made of slime. Or, why your pee can change the world. As I said, I couldn’t help myself.

10. Innovation Station

The Innovation Station - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

While we are on the subject of science and videos, could I also mention Innovation Station? This website alone could give you enough energy to ward off boredom. It showcases the latest videos on innovation and futuristic technologies.

It is a wonderful learning platform. As their charter says, “We aim to inspire and educate by putting innovations and innovators in the spotlight.”

11. Weird or Confusing

Weird or Confusing - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

Wonder how unicorn meat tastes. This site will make you wonder about things like that. Press the button and it will beam you into the crazy aisles of eBay and its shopping universe where everything can be sold.

Well, it’s not all useless. That inflatable unicorn horn for cats sounds like a better deal than unicorn meat. Just hope it’s not a new eBay scam.

12. frankenSim

frankenSim - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

The web toy is a wonderful simulation project by a London based animation studio. Here, you get to play “God” or Victor Frankenstein. The interactive may sound grotesque but it interesting as you manipulate the different organs and see what results.

In short, the developers say that this is a musing on how Frankenstein might have experimented with modern web tools.

13. The Symphony of Blockchain

The Symphony of Blockchain - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

Visuals can help you understand even the most complex of technologies. Blockchain and cryptocurrency are all the rage now. The Symphony of Blockchain takes you on an interactive, visual and auditory exploration of what it’s all about.

It’s wonderfully hypnotic as the 3D Bitcoin blocks move and expand against the background of music. Click on each block and it opens to give you more information.

14. The Passive Aggressive Password Machine

The Passive Aggressive Password Machine - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

Let’s not underrate the value of a strong password in keeping the world safe. The PaP Machine is a neat little side project that can bring you out of your boredom fairly quickly with its funny and honest feedback on the strength of your passwords.

15. Arbitrary Awards

Arbitrary Awards - best Fun Websites to beat boredom

Did you know that most awards are paid for? Well, if you didn’t then that’s what this site tells you. The developers here made their own awards and gave you a platform to gift yourself one with the many choices available.

You deserve an award if you have scrolled so far down the page. And, if we managed to cure your boredom then we deserve one too. Just a nice word in the comments will do for now.

The Cure for Boredom Is Curiosity

We cycle back to what dreamers and achievers believe in. And to add an official stamp of approval to it, let me tell you about the Boredom Conference held every year. Yes, it is a scientific conference with a scholarly purpose.

So, don’t try your best to zap your boredom. Use it creatively and who knows you just might light up a new motivation.

Image Credit: monkeybusiness/Depositphotos


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Australia latest to open probe into Facebook data scandal


Australia’s privacy watchdog has opened an investigation into Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.

Yesterday Facebook revealed that more users than previously thought could have had their personal information passed to the company back in 2014 — saying as many as 87 million Facebook users could have had their data “improperly shared”, thereby confirming the testimony of ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, Chris Wylie, who last month told a UK parliamentary committee he believed that substantially more than 50M Facebook users had had their information swiped.

And while most of these Facebook users are located in the US, multiple millions are not.

The company confirmed the international split yesterday in a blog post — including that 1 million+ of the total are UK users; more than 620k are Canadian; and more than 300k are Australian.

Though in tiny grey lettering at the bottom of the graphic Facebook caveats that these figures are merely its “best estimates” of the maximum number of affected users.

After the US, the largest proportion of Facebook users affected by the data leakage were in the Philippines and Indonesia.

In a statement today the Australian watchdog (OAIC) said it has opened a formal investigation into Facebook.

“The investigation will consider whether Facebook has breached the Privacy Act 1988(Privacy Act). Given the global nature of this matter, the OAIC will confer with regulatory authorities internationally,” it writes. “All organisations that are covered by the Privacy Act have obligations in relation to the personal information that they hold. This includes taking reasonable steps to ensure that personal information is held securely, and ensuring that customers are adequately notified about the collection and handling of their personal information.”

We’ve reached out to the National Privacy Commission in the Philippines for a reaction to the Cambridge Analytica revelations.

Indonesia does not yet have a comprehensive regulation protecting personal data — and concerned consumers in the country can but hope this latest Facebook privacy scandal will act as a catalyst for change.

Elsewhere, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced that it was opening a formal investigation into Facebook on March 26. In an op-ed, privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien also wrote that the Cambridge Analytica scandal underscored deficiencies in the country’s privacy laws.

“At the moment, for example, federal political parties are not subject to privacy laws,” he said. “This is clearly unacceptable. Information about our political views is highly sensitive and therefore particularly worthy of protection. We must take action in the face of serious allegations that democracy is being manipulated through analysis of the personal information of voters. Bringing parties under privacy laws would be a step in the right direction.”

Back in Europe, the UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, was already investigating Facebook as part of a wider investigation into data analytics for political purposes which it kicked off in May 2017.

We’ve asked if the agency intends to also open a second investigation into Facebook in light of the 1M+ UK users affected by the CA data mishandling — and will update this post with any response.

Late last month the UK’s information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, revealed the watchdog had been looking into Facebook’s partner category service as part of its political probe, examining how the company used third party data to inform targeted advertising.

In a statement she said she had raised the service as “a significant area of concern” with Facebook — and welcomed Facebook’s decision to shutter it.

And last month the ICO was also granted a warrant to enter and search Cambridge Analytica’s offices.

Reacting to the Cambridge Analytica scandal last month, Andrea Jelinek, chair of the European Union’s influential data protection body, the Article 29 Working Party — which is made up of reps of all the national DPAs — said the group would be supporting the ICO’s investigation.

“As a rule personal data cannot be used without full transparency on how it is used and with whom it is shared. This is therefore a very serious allegation with far-reaching consequences for data protection rights of individuals and the democratic process,” she said in a statement. “ICO, the UK ́s data protection authority, is conducting the investigation into this matter. As Chair of the Article 29 Working Party, I fully support their investigation. The Members of the Article 29 Working Party will work together in this process.”

Also last month the European Commission’s justice and consumer affairs commissioner, Vera Jourova, told the BBC that the executive body would like to see new legislation in the US to strengthen data protection.

In Europe the incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) beefs up the enforcement of privacy rules with tighter requirements on how data is handled and a new regime of tougher fines for violations.

“We would like to see more robust and reliable legislation on American side,” said Jourova. “Something similar or comparable with the GDPR. And I believe that one day it will happen also in United States and that’s why I am now so curious how American society will react on this scandal — and other scandals which might come.”

The EC has a specific lever to press the US on this point — in the form of the Privacy Shield arrangement which simplifies the process of authorizing personal data flows between the EU and the US by allowing companies to self-certify their adherence to a set of privacy principles.

Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are signatories to Privacy Shield — and are currently listed as ‘active participants’ in the framework (for now).

The mechanism was negotiated as a direct replacement for Safe Harbor — after Europe’s top court struck down that earlier arrangement, in 2015, in the wake of the Snowden disclosures about US government mass surveillance programs.

The Privacy Shield arrangement has its critics. It also includes a regime of annual reviews. In the BBC interview Jourova made a point of reminding the US that the arrangement — which thousands of companies rely on to keep their data flows moving — remains under constant review.

She also said she would be writing to Facebook seeking answers about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “What we want from Facebook is to obey and to respect the European laws,” she added.

For its part Facebook caused confusion about its commitment to raising data protection standards on its platform this week after founder Mark Zuckerberg told a Reuters journalist that it will not be universally applying GDPR for all its users — given the law applies for all Facebook’s international users that essentially means the company intends to apply a lower privacy standard for North American users (whose data is processed in the US, rather than in Ireland where its international HQ is located, within the EU).

However in a follow up conference call with journalists Zuckerberg made some carefully worded remarks that seem to further fog the issue — saying: “We intend to make all the same controls available everywhere, not just in Europe” yet going on to caveat that statement with: “Is it going to be exactly the same format? Probably not. We’ll need to figure out what makes sense in different markets with different laws in different places.”

At this stage it remains unclear whether Facebook will universally apply GDPR or not. Zuckerberg’s remarks suggest there will indeed be some discrepancies in how it handles data protection for different users — what those differences will be remains to be seen.

Yesterday the Facebook founder also revealed that search tools on the platform had made it possible for “malicious actors” to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide — essentially confessing to yet another massive data leak.

He said Facebook had now disabled the tool.

As with the millions of Facebook users whose data was improperly passed to Cambridge Analytica, the company is unlikely to be able to precisely confirm the full extent of how the search loophole was exploited to leak personal data.

Nor will it be able to delete any of the personal information that was maliciously swiped.


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How to Insert Special Symbols and Characters in a Google Spreadsheet


From copyright symbols to plain checkmarks, special characters are needed now and then. So, you may be surprised to know that Google Sheets has no way to insert a special character in its menu.

But there are two workarounds that will help you jump the hurdle and work better on Google Drive.

Method 1: Use the Windows Character Map

If you are on Windows 1o (or any other version), then you can use the native Character Map to copy and paste a special character into a Google Sheet.

  1. Launch Character Map.
  2. Pick the desired font for your special characters. Double click on the characters that you want to use. Press the Copy button to copy the characters to the clipboard.
  3. Open your Google Spreadsheet. Paste the characters (Ctrl + V or right click and paste) into the cell that you want.

Method 2: Use Google Docs + Google Sheets

Google Docs Character Map

Surprisingly, Google Docs has a native Character Map which is missing on Google Sheets. So, this can become the tool to “share” a special character within the same Google Drive.

  1. Open your spreadsheet and also open a Google Doc.
  2. Go to the Google Docs. Click on Insert > Special Characters.
  3. The special character is inserted into Google Docs first. Copy this special character in Google Docs and paste it into your spreadsheet.

Either of these methods should solve the problem of “missing” special characters in Google Sheets.


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