Adobe brings new Amazon and Google integrations to Magento

It’s only been a few months since Adobe launched its Commerce Cloud, based on its $1.6 billion acquisition of Magento. Today, at its Imagine 2019 conference, the company announced a number of updates to Magento that focus on expanding the platform’s reach for the small- and mid-size businesses that use the service.

When Adobe acquired Magento, many of these smaller companies that use the service worried that Adobe would mostly focus on its existing base of large enterprise customers — the kind of companies that already use its Experience Cloud. Today’s set of the announcements is, in many ways, meant to alleviate these fears.

The two most important pieces of news for Magento users are its new integrations with Amazon and Google.

On the Amazon side, merchants can now automatically manage and maintain their inventory on Amazon right from the Magento backend. They can set pricing rules for the Amazon Sales Channel, manage multiple Amazon brands with multiple Amazon accounts and, in return, get access to Amazon’s product data, too.

Access to this new feature is now available to all Magento users through a free extension that’s now available in the Magento Marketplace.

“For many brands and merchants, creating an Amazon storefront is not simple,” Jason Woosley, Vice President, Commerce Product & Platform at Adobe, told me. “It requires you to manage a whole host of new operational challenges. You introduce a new platform that your team has to learn how to use, how to manage and maintain. And if your teams are already maxed out, it’s going to require you to hire additional staff or make tradeoffs against your roadmap that don’t deliver against your business.”

As for Google, Magento today launched a native integration with Google Shopping (also through a free extension) that will allow Magento admins to manage their Google ads from their Magento dashboard and manage their Google Merchant Center accounts. This will allow them to manage their Google marketing campaigns right from Magento. Here, too, the idea is to allow merchants to use the tools they are already familiar with to expand their reach into other platforms, which typically involved switching back and forth between services and trying to keep them in sync.

Adobe also today announced that the Progressive Web Application (PWA) Studio, which allows more advanced Magento users to build more app-like online stores, now supports PayPal’s Braintree as a payment option. Woosley expects that PWA’s are the way forward for many Magento customers, especially in emerging markets.

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YouTube’s Bumper Machine offers an automated way to create six-second ads

After introducing a six-second “Bumper” ad format back in 2016, YouTube is unveiling a new tool that uses machine learning to automatically pull out a six-second version from a longer ad.

It might seem a little ridiculous to try to compress (say) a 90-second video into a six-second message. In fact, Debbie Weinstein, Google’s vice president of YouTube and video global solutions, acknowledged that there was some skepticism when Bumper ads were first announced, with advertisers wondering, “Can we actually tell our story in six seconds?”

However, Weinstein argued, “We learned over time that creatives love constraints. They’ve historically been constrained to 30 seconds, and then 15 seconds, and constrained by whatever dimensions of a particular media format.”

For some advertisers, she said, a Bumper may simply be a short teaser for a longer ad. For others, the format could provide a way to break down a 30-second ad into a sequence of six-second clips.

And with Bumper Machine — which YouTube is currently alpha testing, which will then lead into beta testing and eventually general availability — advertisers will have a tool to create a Bumper by scanning a longer ad for “key elements,” like a voice-over or a tight focus on human beings or logos or products. The result always ends with “the final call to action in the last two-to-three seconds of the video,” Weinstein said.

For example, as an early test, GrubHub took a 13-second ad and used Bumper Machine to create the six-second version below.

Weinstein suggested that Bumper Machine could be used by “many different advertisers of all shapes and sizes” — some of them might be smaller advertisers who want to create Bumpers with as little time and effort as possible, while larger brands and agencies may treat them as more of a “jumping off point,” which can be refined or serve as inspiration.

Either way, Weinstein isn’t expecting advertisers to just start posting machine-created Bumpers willy-nilly. The idea is to always have “some level of human review.”

“You’ll get three to four executions, the best guesses that the machine is going to make,” she said. “A human is going to go through and decide which of the three or four is best, or decide all of them are great, or do some light editing on top of that.”

YouTube introduces six-second Bumper ads

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ServiceNow acquihires mobile analytics startup Appsee

In a carefully framed deal, ServiceNow announced this morning that it has acquired the intellectual property and key personnel of mobile analytics company, Appsee for an undisclosed price. Under the terms of the deal, the co-founders and R&D team will be joining ServiceNow after the deal closes.

It’s worth noting that ServiceNow did not acquire Appsee’s customers, and the company is expected to wind down its existing business over the next 12 months.

Appsee provides more than pure numerical analytics. As the name it implies, it lets developers see what the user is seeing by recording an interaction and seeing what went right or wrong as the person used the program.

GIF courtesy of Appsee.

ServiceNow wants to take that functionality and incorporate it into its Now Platform, which enables customers to create customized service applications for their businesses, or use mobile applications it has created out of the box.

The company sees this as a way to improve the UI and build more usable apps. “We’ll be able to use Appsee for our mobile app and browser analytics. This can be used across all three of our workflows, and with this level of visibility our customers will be able to see how customers or employees are engaging [with the application]. With these analytics, ServiceNow will be able to provide insights on user behavior. In turn, this will help us provide an improved UI for customers,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Just last week at its Knowledge 19 customer conference in New York City, the company announced Now Mobile a new tool for performing tasks like ordering a new laptop or searching for the holiday calendar, and a mobile on-boarding tool for new employees. Both of these will be available in the company’s next release and could benefit from the Appsee functionality to improve the overall design of these products after it releases them to users.

Appsee has always been focused on capturing user activity. Over the years it has layered on more traditional analytics like DAUs (daily active users) and crash rates, the kind of metrics that can give companies insights into their user experience, but they combine that with the visual record to help see more detail about exactly what was happening, along with myriad of other features, all of which will be incorporated into the ServiceNow platform moving forward.

The deal is expected to close by the end of Q2 2019.

With $1M In Funding, Appsee Promises Mobile Developers Real Insight Into Their Users

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How to Create a Custom Color Palette in Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is an incredibly versatile program. Whether it’s textures, gradients, or paint brushes, there seems to be no end to the ways that you can adapt this program to suit your needs.

However, when it comes to coloring your images, what if you don’t like Adobe Photoshop’s default color swatches? With that in mind, here’s how to create a custom color palette in Photoshop.

Step 1: Find Your Color Inspiration

The first thing you’ll want to do is open an image where you can draw “color inspiration” from.

For this tutorial I’m going to use the file we created for another tutorial explaining how to use the blending mode in Photoshop.

After you open up your file, you’ll see a screen setup similar to the one I have now. Your image will be in the center of your workspace, and your default color palette will be along the right side.

Step 2: Learn About Your Color Swatches Panel

The place where we’ll be focusing our efforts is the Color Swatches Panel, located in the top right-hand corner of your workspace.

This is what your default color swatches will look like, so long as you leave them unaltered—a group of squares laid out in a grid.

Along the top row you’ll see a series of seemingly random colors. These are colors I’ve sampled recently with my Eyedropper tool in my own version of Photoshop. Photoshop puts them there so I can quickly pull them up again if I need to.

Beneath these samples is a rectangular grid. This grid contains Photoshop’s default color palette.

This grid is fine by itself, but as mentioned we’re creating a custom color palette, so we won’t need it. Let’s get rid of these swatches.

Step 3: Delete the Old Color Swatches

To delete these color swatches, click on the dropdown menu icon in the top right-hand corner of your Swatches panel. We’ve highlighted it in red for this tutorial.

Next, a giant menu will emerge. This menu will give you a list of all the actions you can take with your Swatches panel.

It will also give you a list of default colors available to you in Photoshop. Click on Preset Manager.

Once you click on Preset Manager, a new pop-up box will emerge. In this box you can control the color swatches currently active in your Swatches panel.

You can also:

• Load more colors to make the color palette larger.
• Delete colors.
• Rearrange the color grid.
• Rename the colors you already have.
• Create a brand new set of colors.

To delete these default colors, left click on the first color.

Then left click + shift on the last color, to highlight the entire palette. You’ll know it’s highlighted by the blue outlines around the squares.

Next, click Delete, then click Done.

Don’t worry that this will permanently change your default color palette. Photoshop already has the template saved so you can call it up later.

Step 4: Use the Eyedropper Tool

Now that you’ve gotten rid of your default colors, you’re ready to create new ones.

To select individual colors for your custom color palette, activate your Eyedropper tool, found in the left-hand toolbar.

Next—in the top left-hand corner where you see a dropdown menu that says Sample—click and choose All Layers.

This All Layers option means that you’re sampling all layers in a file as they appear in a “finished” image—not how the colors look when they are on separate layers.

This will make the process of picking your colors much quicker.

Step 5: Create a New Color Swatch

After you have your Eyedropper tool and All Layers selected, click on your page where you want to sample a new color.

You’ll see a color wheel pop up around the color you’re sampling. On the top of the wheel you’ll see the color you’re currently sampling—in my case, bright pink. Along the bottom will be the color you previously sampled with your Eyedropper tool. For me, that color was red.

Once you have your color, move your Eyedropper tool over the empty Swatches panel. You’ll notice that the cursor switches from an Eyedropper icon to a Paint Bucket.

Once the icon switches, left click on the empty Swatches panel. Photoshop will immediately drop your new color into the window pane.

After you drop the swatch, a window called Color Swatch Name will emerge. This is where you will name your new swatch and have the option to save it to your library. Once you name it, click OK.

If you clicked the option to save this color to your library, you may see the Libraries panel open up and extend over the Swatches panel—especially if this is the first time you’ve completed this step.

We’re not going to explore Libraries in this tutorial. To get rid of it, simply click on the button that says Libraries. It will collapse the panel and you can keep working on your Swatches.

Step 6: Finish Creating Your Color Swatches

After you finish Step 5, repeat that step again and again until you have as many colors as you need for your custom color palette.

Each time you add a new color, it will show up in your Swatches panel.

Once you have all the colors you need, click on the Swatches dropdown menu, then click Preset Manager.

As we did when we first opened Preset Manager, you’ll see the options to Load, Save Set, Rename, and Delete.

Instead of deleting colors, however, we’re going to rearrange them based on hue.

To rearrange your swatches, click on a color so it’s highlighted. Then click and drag the color to where you want it to show up. You’ll know where you’ve dragged this color by the blue line that shows up as you pull it across the swatches.

Arranging the colors like this allows you to see if you’ve sampled the same color twice.

In this case, I did sample the same color twice. To delete that extra color swatch, click on it so it’s highlighted blue. Then click Delete.

After your color palette is arranged to your satisfaction, click Done. Photoshop will exit the Preset Manager.

Step 7: Save Your Color Palette

Once you’re out of the Preset Manager, you can check to see how your colors look in the Swatches panel.

If you’re happy with what you have, it’s time to save.

To save these swatches as a custom color palette, click on the Swatches dropdown menu, then click Save Swatches.

The Save As dialogue box will pop up, and you can name your color palette from there. Give it a meaningful name that is easy to remember.

Step 8: Reset Your Swatches Back to Default

Let’s say you don’t want to use this custom color palette anymore, and you want to go back to default.

To do this, click on your Swatches dropdown menu. Then click Reset Swatches.

When Photoshop prompts you to replace your current colors, click OK.

It’s important that you do not click Append here. If you do, it will simply add the default colors to your custom color palette instead of replacing them.

Step 9: Reload Your Custom Color Swatches

Now that you have your default color palette active, how do you find your custom swatches again? How do you switch back?

Again, the process is simple.

Just go to the Swatches panel, click on the Swatches dropdown menu, then click Replace Swatches.

Inside your Color Swatches folder, you’ll find the file for the color palette that you want to use. Select the file you need, click Open, and it will load.

And that’s it! You’re done.

Other Ways to Customize Photoshop

Now that you’ve learned how to create a custom color palette in Photoshop, you can put this skill to good use when you’re designing your next image.

Are you looking for other ways to customize the program? Then check out our tutorial detailing how to create custom brushes with Photoshop.

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8 Useful Google Tools and Apps You May Have Overlooked

Google’s ecosystem of services has exponentially ballooned over the years. Whether it’s the smart home market, mobile, entertainment, or the web, Google has managed to attain a dominant position in a wide range of sectors.

Being such a large conglomerate, Google also has a number of lesser-known products apart from the chartbusters. Here are some useful Google tools and apps you may have overlooked and should give a try.

1. Google Shopping

Google Shopping is an aggregator platform that lets you browse listings from a bunch of e-commerce services. The website functions as an extension to the widgets Google displays when you look up a particular product on its search engine.

On Google Shopping, you can search for items and check their availability as well as pricing on wherever they’re up for sale. In addition, dedicated pages for products can be accessed directly on Google Shopping and you can even read their reviews and descriptions.

Google Shopping also takes cues from the data Google has on you such as your browsing habits and suggests products you might be interested in. It’s compatible with several categories including Electronics, Skin Care, Books, and more.

2. Google Jamboard

Google Jamboard is from the company’s hardware division and is a digital whiteboard for enterprises. Jamboard is essentially a 55-inch, 4K touchscreen on which teams can scribble and discuss.

Since the board can connect to the internet, all your sessions are uploaded automatically eliminating the need for you to manually take pictures.

Plus, there are a series of collaboration tools that enables you to work together with remote employees too. Jamboard can detect up to 16 touchpoints at once so that multiple users can sketch and brainstorm.

3. Google Sites

Google Sites is a design tool for quickly developing mockups for new websites. It features a straightforward layout where you can drag and drop elements and edit them however you want without going through any learning curves.

Google Sites also offers a couple of themes you can apply. On top of that, you have the ability to create and link pages for producing the entire website.

Moreover, Sites integrates well with Google’s other products such as Sheets, Docs letting you import documents or charts. You can share your sites with other users and collaborate with them in real time.

Once you’re done with the design, you can preview the site and publish it at a custom URL if you’d like to instantly share it with someone else.

Want to understand the extent of Google Sites’ capabilities? Learn how to make your own website using Google Sites.

4. Google Expeditions

Google Expeditions is primarily built for classrooms and comes with guided virtual reality tours for students. The apps host a vast library with trips ranging from the outer space to historical landmarks.

With Google Expeditions, you can explore key sights in 360-degree while a narrator details the stories behind them. Google says there are over 200 lessons and all of them can be streamed for free. Furthermore, Google has been gradually Augmented Reality experiences to the app lately.

If you don’t have a VR headset, Google Expeditions can render in 2D as well. It can be installed on both iOS and Android.

5. Google Trusted Contacts

Google’s Trusted Contacts is a safety app using which you can keep tabs on your loved ones’ whereabouts. You can share your location with your trusted contacts in real-time and request theirs.

Users have the option to temporarily or permanently give access to their location and revoke whenever they want to. On the app, people can post updates too while they’re in transit to inform others about their status.

What’s more, there’s an emergency feature which automatically shares your location with your trusted contacts if you don’t respond to a request in a specific time period.

6. Google Domains

Google Domains is another handy utility by the company that, as the name suggests, lets you manage and purchase domains. On Google Domains, you can buy new addresses or transfer your existing ones if you find the interface more appealing.

In addition, it offers a series of other tools for tasks you need to perform after acquiring a new domain. That includes site creation apps from Google’s partners like Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, and services to form a custom email account.

Google also throws in a few complimentary add-ons such as a privacy filter, customizable sub-domains, email forwarding, and more. It supports all the extensions as well whether you want .biz or .dev.

7. Google Tilt Brush

Tilt Brush is a full-fledged painting app for high-end Virtual Reality headsets such as HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality devices. Google Tilt Brush houses every tool you would need to draw a masterpiece out of thin air. It turns your room into a canvas and all you need to do to doodle is wave your hand.

There is a multitude of brush options, color palettes, and shades. Google Tilt Brush can even connect with Poly so that you can upload your artwork to the web.

Google also offers a handful of tutorial videos if you’d like to get started and understand how to operate it.

8. Google One

Google revamped its cloud storage subscriptions a while back. It’s now called Google One and includes much more than just additional cloud space.

Apart from extra storage, Google One brings you 24/7 access to Google Support, the option to share your plan with up to five other family members, Google Store discounts, Google Play credits, and more.

It’s not available globally but it can be bought in a ton of regions such as the United States. Google One starts at $1.99/month for 100GB and goes all the up to $9.99/month. The additional storage is applied across most of Google products like Drive, Gmail, and Photos.

More Google Apps You Might Have Never Heard Of

Google has expanded its reach into a wide gamut of internet fields. Most of the time, however, users don’t go past its leading services such as Google Maps and Google Search.

The aforementioned apps are just some of Google’s lesser-known products. There are a bunch of other Google apps you might have never heard of.

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Your iPhone Could Save Your Life: 6 iPhone Emergency Features

Hotstar, Disney’s Indian streaming service, sets new global record for live viewership

India’s video streaming giant Hotstar, owned by Disney, today set a new global benchmark for the number of people an OTT service can draw to a live event.

Some 18.6 million users simultaneously tuned into Hotstar’s website and app to watch the deciding game of the 12th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament. The streaming giant, which competes with Netflix and Amazon in India, broke its own “global best” 10.3 million concurrent views milestone that it had set last year.

Hotstar topped the 10 million concurrent viewership mark a number of times during this year’s 51-day IPL season. More than 12.7 million viewers huddled to watch an earlier game in the tournament (between Royal Challengers Bangalore and Mumbai Indians), a spokesperson for the service said. In mid-April, Hotstar said that the cricket series had already garnered 267 million overall viewership, creating a new record for the streamer. (Last year’s IPL had clocked 202 million over viewership.)

Fans of Mumbai Indians celebrate their team’s victory against Chennai Super Kings in IPL cricket tournament in India.

These figures coming out of India, the fastest growing internet market, are astounding, to say the least. In comparison, a 2012 live-stream of skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumping from near-space to the Earth’s surface, remains the most concurrently viewed video on YouTube. It amassed about 8 million concurrent viewers. The live viewership of the royal wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was also a blip in comparison.

As Netflix and Amazon scramble to find the right content strategy to lure Indians, Hotstar and its local parent firm Star India have aggressively focused on securing broadcast and streaming rights to various cricket series. Cricket is almost followed like a religion in India.

In 2017, Star India, then owned by 21st Century Fox, secured rights to broadcast and stream IPL cricket tournaments for five years for a sum of roughly $2.5 billion. Facebook had also participated in the bidding, offering north of $600 million for streaming. (Star India was part of 21st Century Fox’s business that Disney acquired for $71.3 billion earlier this year.)

That bet has largely paid off. Hotstar said last month that its service has amassed 300 million monthly active users, up from 150 million it had reported last year. In comparison, both Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have less than 30 million subscribers in India, according to industry estimates.

In the last two years, Hotstar has expanded to three international markets — the U.S., Canada, and most recently, the UK — to chase new audiences. The streaming service is hoping to attract Indians living overseas and anyone else who is interested in Bollywood movies and cricket, Ipsita Dasgupta, president of Hotstar’s international operations, told TechCrunch in an interview.

The streaming service plans to enter Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand in the next few quarters, Dasgupta said.

That’s not to say that Hotstar has a clear path ahead. According to several estimates, the streaming service typically sees a sharp decline in its user base after the conclusion of an IPL season. Despite the massive engagement it generates, it remains operationally unprofitable, people familiar with Hotstar’s finances said.

The ad-supported streaming service offers about 80 percent of its content catalog — which includes titles produced by Star India, and shows and movies syndicated from international partners HBO, ABC, and Showtime among others — for no cost to users. One of the most watched international shows on the platform, “Game of Thrones,” will be ending soon, too.

The upcoming World Cup cricket tournament, which Hotstar will stream in India, should help it avoid the major headache for sometime. In the meanwhile, the service is aggressively expanding its original shows slate in the nation. One of the shows is a remake of BBC/NBC’s popular “The Office.”

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