Today after the bell, Alphabetannounced its Q3 performance. The Google parent company generated revenues of $46.2 billion and per-share profit of $16.40 off the back of net income of $11.2 billion.
Analysts had expected Alphabet to earn $11.21 per share, from revenues of $42.88 billion according to Yahoo Finance; other estimates were larger, targeting $11.37 in per-share income off revenue of $42.84 billion.
The company’s shares instantly rose around 8.5% after its earnings beat.
Digging into the company’s numbers, YouTube revenue rose to $5.0 billion, from $3.8 billion in Q3 2019. Analysts had expected YouTube to generate $4.52 billion in total revenue during the most recent quarter.
Google Cloud managed to generate $3.44 billion from $2.4 billion in Q3 2019. The Google Cloud collection of cloud computing, productivity software, and other enterprise services generated $3.0 billion in the second quarter of this year. Analysts had expected Google Cloud to generate $3.31 billion in total revenue during the most recent quarter.
And Alphabet’s skunkworks division, Other Bets managed to generate $178 million in revenue, another quarter in which the set of companies was an excellent source of negative operating income. The collection of efforts lost $1.1 billion in the quarter.
Google is testing a new feature that could improve discovery for Android apps on Google Play. The company confirmed it’s experimenting with a “Compare Apps” option that would allow Google Play users to quickly and more easily understand the slight differences between otherwise similar apps by comparing specific features and metrics — like star ratings or total downloads, for example.
The feature was first spotted by Android Police, which found it at the bottom of an individual app listing page for a media player on the Play Store (ver. 22.4.28).
Google confirmed the feature is live but only as a small test.
After users scrolled down past the app details and reviews, the page offered a comparison chart that allowed users to compare the VLC Player app with other media players across aspects like “Ease of Use,” support for offline play, and various media player specific features — like visual quality (HD, SD, etc.) and controls (gesture control, playback, scrubber, etc.).
The feature may leverage data Google has sourced from questions it asked app reviewers, though that aspect is not clear at this time. It also pulls in other data it already has on file, like the aggregate star rating and how many downloads the app has seen to date, for instance.
Typically, in place of the comparison chart, Google Play would provide a list of “similar apps” at the bottom of the listings page. This is similar to Apple’s “You Might Also Like” app suggestions and common across app stores. The idea with “similar apps” is to help point users researching apps to others in same genre. But making a determination of which to download often requires reading through the app’s descriptions and user reviews, which can be time-consuming.
With a comparison chart, users could more quickly figure out which app was the better fit for their needs, instead of wasting time researching or downloading multiple apps to install only to find they didn’t offer a particular feature the user had wanted.
Google confirmed to TechCrunch this is a “small experiment” that’s currently running, but says it doesn’t have immediate plans for a broader rollout. That’s a shame!
There’s an AR ghost on Google Search. There’s a dancing skeleton, set of creepy jack-o’-lanterns, and costumed cats and dogs, too. Ahead of Halloween weekend in the U.S., Google has launched a set of fun, augmented reality-powered features on Google Search which appear as an option when you search for specific Halloween terms using a mobile device.
For example, if you search for the word “Halloween” and scroll down the search results page, you’ll see a box that prompts you to “Summon up a 3D ghost.” When you tap the “View in 3D” button, you’re able to see the ghost floating around your room.
On the iPhone, you’ll first have to move the phone around the room to get started, as with other AR apps. On Android devices, however, the ghost immediately appears in 3D but there’s a separate button, “View in your space,” that will place the ghost in the environment with you.
Google says the features work in the Google Search app and in the mobile browser.
Once the AR object has been placed in your room, you can move around it to view it from different angles, move closer or further away, or drag it around it around with your finger. The object even leaves a shadow on the floor, to make it seem like it’s really there.
Spooky, Halloween music will also play in the background as the AR objects float or dance in your space. You can then take a photo or a video to share elsewhere, if you choose.
In addition the AR ghost, you can search for a set of three jack-o’lanterns, a dancing skeleton, a hot dog (well, a dog in a hot dog costume), a pirate dog, and a magic cat.
The latter two appear when you google for the keywords “dog” or “cat,” while a search for “hot dog” will pull up the playful dachshund that paws at the ground and wags its tail. Searches for “skeleton” and “jack-o’-lantern” (and some variations) will bring up the others.
You may also see a pop-up at the bottom of the main Google.com landing page that suggests you try the new AR feature, but it wasn’t showing up consistently for us on every visit.
Google has experimented with AR features on Google Search for some time, having offered up 3D models of animals, places, spaceships, celestial bodies including the moon, the planets and more, as well as biology terms, anatomical systems, chemistry terms, plus cars, shoes, and even Santa.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to find all the AR objects offered in one place — you usually just stumble upon them when searching.
Besides the AR Halloween search feature, Google also introduced two new doorbell ringtones for its Hello Nest devices, “Black Cat” and “Werewolf.” You can continue to use the sounds introduced last year, like ghost, vampire, monster or witch noises, for example.
Google Assistant, meanwhile, now tells Halloween-themed riddles and can sing a Halloween song, as well, in another nod to the holiday.
Posted by Peggy Chi, Senior Research Scientist, and Irfan Essa, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Research
At Google, we're actively exploring how people can use creativity tools powered by machine learning and computational methods when producing multimedia content, from creating music and reframing videos, to drawing and more. One creative process in particular, video production, can especially benefit from such tools, as it requires a series of decisions about what content is best suited to a target audience, how to position the available assets within the field of view, and what temporal arrangement will yield the most compelling narrative. But what if one could leverage existing assets, such as a website, to get a jump-start on video creation? Businesses commonly host websites that contain rich visual representations about their services or products, all of which could be repurposed for other multimedia formats, such as videos, potentially enabling those without extensive resources the ability to reach a broader audience.
In “Automatic Video Creation From a Web Page”, published at UIST 2020, we introduce URL2Video, a research prototype pipeline to automatically convert a web page into a short video, given temporal and visual constraints provided by the content owner. URL2Video extracts assets (text, images, or videos) and their design styles (including fonts, colors, graphical layouts, and hierarchy) from HTML sources and organizes the visual assets into a sequence of shots, while maintaining a look-and-feel similar to the source page. Given a user-specified aspect ratio and duration, it then renders the repurposed materials into a video that is ideal for product and service advertising.
URL2Video Overview
Assume a user provides an URL to a web page that illustrates their business. The URL2Video pipeline automatically selects key content from the page and decides the temporal and visual presentation of each asset, based on a set of heuristics derived from an interview study with designers who were familiar with web design and video ad creation. These designer-informed heuristics capture common video editing styles, including content hierarchy, constraining the amount of information in a shot and its time duration, providing consistent color and style for branding, and more. Using this information, the URL2Video pipeline parses a web page, analyzing the content and selecting visually salient text or images while preserving their design styles, which it organizes according to the video specifications provided by the user.
By extracting the structural content and design from the input web page, URL2Video makes automatic editing decisions to present key messages in a video. It considers the temporal (e.g., the duration in seconds) and spatial (e.g., the aspect ratio) constraints of the output video defined by users.
Webpage Analysis
Given a webpage URL, URL2Video extracts document object model (DOM) information and multimedia materials. For the purposes of our research prototype, we limited the domain to static web pages that contain salient assets and headings preserved in an HTML hierarchy that follows recent web design principles, which encourage the use of prominent elements, distinct sections, and an order of visual focus that guides readers in perceiving information. URL2Video identifies such visually-distinguishable elements as a candidate list of asset groups, each of which may contain a heading, a product image, detailed descriptions, and call-to-action buttons, and captures both the raw assets (text and multimedia files) and detailed design specifications (HTML tags, CSS styles, and rendered locations) for each element. It then ranks the asset groups by assigning each a priority score based on their visual appearance and annotations, including their HTML tags, rendered sizes, and ordering shown on the page. In this way, an asset group that occupies a larger area at the top of the page receives a higher score.
Constraints-Based Asset Selection
We consider two goals when composing a video: (1) each video shot should provide concise information, and (2) the visual design should be consistent with the source page. Based on these goals and the video constraints provided by the user, including the intended video duration (in seconds) and aspect ratio (commonly 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, etc.), URL2Video automatically selects and orders the asset groups to optimize the total priority score. To make the content concise, it presents only dominant elements from a page, such as a headline and a few multimedia assets. It constrains the duration of each visual element for viewers to perceive the content. In this way, a short video highlights the most salient information from the top of the page, and a longer video contains more campaigns or products.
Scene Composition & Video Rendering
Given an ordered list of assets based on the DOM hierarchy, URL2Video follows the design heuristics obtained from interview studies to make decisions about both the temporal and spatial arrangement to present the assets in individual shots. It transfers the graphical layout of elements into the video’s aspect ratio, and applies the style choices including fonts and colors. To make a video more dynamic and engaging, it adjusts the presentation timing of assets. Finally, it renders the content into a video in the MPEG-4 container format.
User Control
The interface to the research prototype allows the user to review the design attributes in each video shot extracted from the source page, reorder the materials, change the detailed design, such as colors and fonts, and adjust the constraints to generate a new video.
In URL2Video's authoring interface (left), users specify the input URL to a source page, size of the target page view, and the output video parameters. URL2Video analyzes the web page and extracts major visual components. It composes a series of scenes and visualizes the key frames as a storyboard. These components are rendered into an output video that satisfies the input temporal and spatial constraints. Users can playback the video, examine the design attributes (bottom-right), and make adjustments to generate video variation, such as reordering the scenes (top-right).
URL2Video Use Cases
We demonstrate the performance of the end-to-end URL2Video pipeline on a variety of existing web pages. Below we highlight an example result where URL2Video converts a page that embeds multiple short video clips into a 12-second output video. Note how the pipeline makes automatic editing decisions on font and color choices, timing, and content ordering in a video captured from the source page.
URL2Video identifies key content from our Google Search introduction page (top), including headings and video assets. It converts them into a video by considering the presentation flow, the source design and the output constraints (a 12-second landscape video; bottom).
The video below provides further demonstration:
To evaluate the automatically-generated videos, we conducted a user study with designers at Google. Our results show that URL2Video effectively extracted design elements from a web page and supported designers by bootstrapping the video creation process.
Next steps
While this current research focuses on the visual presentation, we are developing new techniques that support the audio track and a voiceover in video editing. All in all, we envision a future where creators focus on making high-level decisions and an ML model interactively suggests detailed temporal and graphical edits for a final video creation on multiple platforms.
Acknowledgments We greatly thank our paper co-authors, Zheng Sun (Research) and Katrina Panovich (YouTube). We would also like to thank our colleagues who contributed to URL2Video, (in alphabetical order of last name) Jordan Canedy, Brian Curless, Nathan Frey, Madison Le, Alireza Mahdian, Justin Parra, Emily Ryan, Mogan Shieh, Sandor Szego, and Weilong Yang. We are grateful to receive the support from our leadership, Tomas Izo, Rahul Sukthankar, and Jay Yagnik.
Juganu, the venture-backed Israeli company that makes lighting systems capable of emitting light at specified wavelengths, is now selling a product that it claims can disinfect surfaces and deactivate pathogens in an attempt to provide buildings with new safety technologies that can prevent the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The company claims that its J.Protect product was clinically validated through a study conducted by Dr. Meital Gal-Tanamy at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Medicine (although Dr. Gal-Tanamy’s research typically focuses on the Hepatitis C virus, which has a different transmission vector than airborne viruses like Sars-Cov-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19).
Juganu said that the new product has been registered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 48 states and is currently working with Comcast, Qualcomm and NCR Corp. to bring its lighting disinfectant and deactivation technology to markets around the country.
The lighting technology uses two kinds of ultraviolet light — A and C — to render viruses inert and kill bacteria on surfaces, according to the company’s claims.
When people are present in a room, the company’s system uses UVA light which can render viruses inert after eight hours of exposure. If the room is empty, the lighting system will use UVC light, which is more potent as a disinfectant and more harmful to people, to disinfect a room in less than an hour.
The company tested its technology on surfaces, but did not conduct any tests involving their lighting system’s effects on aerosolized viral particles, which have been determined to be the main cause of infections from the novel coronavirus.
“We got an exemption from the FDA and are approved for distribution by the EPA in 48 states,” said Juganu chief executive, Eran Ben-Shmuel in an interview.
The company has already pre-sold the lighting technology in Israel and in India, according to Ben-Shmuel, and is now taking orders for installations in the U.S.
Juganu, which has raised $53 million to date from investors, including Comcast Ventures, Viola Growth, Amdocs and OurCrowd, has offices in Israel, Brazil, Mexico and the U.S., and has sold lighting systems to municipalities and businesses around the world.
The new hardware opens up a new line of business in the booming market for technologies targeting the reopening of businesses in the nations that have been hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Smart lighting will be one of the biggest areas of opportunity for physical spaces. We are evolving from lights simply illuminating spaces to disinfecting and securing them, as well as promoting well-being by recreating natural light shifts based on sunrise and sunset,” said Ben-Shmuel, in a statement.
ByteDance on Thursday unveiled its first consumer hardware product, a smart light lamp with a display, that it says is part of its education technology portfolio as the Chinese internet giant continues to expand to categories beyond social video.
The Dali smart lamp features a display, camera and built-in digital assistant. The Dali smart lamp (in Chinese), which starts at $119, is aimed at school-going children who can use the device to finish their homework, ByteDance said (in Chinese) at a press conference. The camera will enable parents to tutor their kids and check in remotely via a mobile app.
The smart lamp could prove successful in China where, like many other markets, a large number of parents struggle to find a balance between their work and personal lives, and engage better with their kids.
Zhou Kang, founder of Czur, a Chinese startup making connected devices, including smart lamps that rival those of ByteDance, told TechCrunch that it’s still an experimentation phase for companies that are building smart devices aimed at kids. “Customers will form their preferences for software and content. It will be challenging to drive software demand through hardware sale. Nonetheless, [ByteDance’s attempt] gives parents more options.”
ByteDance said the smart lamp is part of the company’s push into its education category, which it is now calling Dali Education (Dali is Chinese for big force). The Chinese giant, which owns viral short-video app TikTok, forayed into the education category several years ago.
The company today runs a range of education services, including GoGoKid, which teaches kids English classes, and Qingbei, which replicates the classroom experience. All of these products, including Guagua Long and Open Language, are now part of the Dali Education umbrella.
The company said more than 10,000 employees are already working on its education arm. No word on whether ByteDance plans to launch the Dali smart lamp outside of China.
NetEnt has tapped the managing director of its India arm to take over the top technology job at the online casino games provider following the departure of Tobias Palmborg. Palmborg left his post as chief technology officer (CTO) at the Stockholm-listed supplier last September 4 after a two-and-a-half year stint, iGaming Business reported, and the […]
The power of venom -- and how it could one day save your life | Mandë Holford
Venom can kill ... or it can cure. In this fascinating talk, marine chemical biologist Mandë Holford shares her research into animal venom, from killer sea snails to platypuses and slow lorises -- and explores its potential to one day treat human diseases like cancer. The mechanism behind this powerful substance is still mysterious, Holford says, but: "Someday, snail venom might just save your life."
Edward Tian is a computer science student at Princeton and an investigator at Bellingcat who combines technology and investigative journalism.
On August 12, Twitter launched a complete rebuild of its 2012 API, with new endpoints for data collection, new access levels and a new developer portal. Notably, the version 2 API was presented as a step in mending the notoriously fractious relationship between Twitter and its third-party developer community.
Improvements for third-party developers, however, arrived with hints of irony leaving many startup CEOs in the ecosystem unconvinced. Within 35 days of the v2 launch, Twint, a popular data scraping tool for researchers and journalists, stopped working. Twint is the latest casualty in a long string of third-party applications, including Tweetbot, Twitpic and numerous others that have shut down as a result of Twitter’s API restrictions.
“It may be time to get into another game,” says Ben Strick, a BBC investigator specializing in Twitter analytics.
“The game has already changed,” adds Tim Barker, the former CEO of DataSift, who explained that there is rightful skepticism over improvements in Twitter’s treatment of third-party applications. From a purely business standpoint, once Twitter directly entered the data analytics market after its 2014 acquisition of Gnip, it wanted limited players and no longer a competing ecosystem. Under increased public scrutiny of social media platforms post-Cambridge Analytica, Twitter also prioritized guarding its platform’s image, hoping to ward off increased regulation of its data.
“You can look on Crunchbase, but I can guarantee no one is in their bedroom starting a Twitter-centric startup anymore,” says Barker.
The most glaring evidence of Twitter tightening access to its data are massive hikes in pricing, which have pushed several startups out of the market. “In the early days,” Barker explains, “the pricing of Twitter data was volume based, as they were building an economy and an ecosystem.” But once that market matured and was funded by venture capitalists, Twitter was a post-IPO company that saw an opportunity to churn profits.
According to Stuart Shulman, CEO of Texifter, the market price of high-quality metadata for 100,000 tweets in 2011 was around $25-$50 USD. Today, Twitter estimates for the same quantity of data could potentially cost tens of thousands of dollars.
In 2018, Texifter (customer #9 of Gnip) failed to renew its eighth annual agreement for premium Twitter data. During annual contract renegotiations, Twitter sharply increased prices and imposed increasingly stringent regulations, including a quota on the amount of data Texifter could license access to. In Shulman’s words, “Twitter made it mathematically impossible to turn a profit.”
Level is one of the newer players in the smart lock space, but with a design pedigree that includes a lot of former Apple employees, the company’s already attracting a lot of praise for its industrial design. I tested out both of its current offerings, the Level Bolt and the Level Touch, and found that they’re well-designed, user-friendly smart locks that are a cut above the competition when it comes to aesthetics and feature set.
The basics
Level’s debut product, the $229 Level Bolt, works with existing deadbolts and just replaces the insides with a connected locking mechanism that you can control from your smartphone via the Level app. The newer $329 Level Touch is a full deadbolt replacement, include the faceplates, but unlike most other smart locks on the market it looks like a standard deadbolt from the outside – albeit a very nicely designed one. The Level Touch is available in four different finishes, including satin nickel, satin chrome, and polished brass and matte black (the latter two are listed as ‘coming soon’)
Image Credits: Level
The Bolt is similar in concept to other smart lock products like the August lock, in that you use it with your existing deadbolt, which means no need to replace keys. It also leaves the thumb turn intact, however, meaning from all outward appearance it isn’t at all obvious that you have a smart lock at all. Installing it is relatively simple, and basically amounts to a lock mechanism transplant. Level includes different cam bar adapters that fit the vast majority of available deadlocks, so it should be something most homeowners can do in just a few minutes. The Bolt offers access sharing via the app, auto lock when you depart, Auto Unlock when you arrive, an activity log, temporary passes, and a built-in audio chime. It also works with Apple’s HomeKit for remote control, voice control via Siri, automation and push notifications.
Image Credits: Level
The Level Touch takes everything that’s great about the Bolt, and adds in some super smart additional features like a capacitive external deadbolt housing, which allows an amazing touch-to-lock/touch-to-unlock feature, and NFC that allows you to use programmable NFC cards and stickers to issue revokable passes to unlock your door. On top of all that, it’s probably the most attractive deadbolt I’ve ever owned or used, which is saying a lot in a field of smart locks where most offerings have unsightly large keypads or large battery compartments.
Design and features
The Level Bolt’s design is clever in its ability to be completely invisible when in use. The deadbolt itself is the battery housing, holding one lithium CR123A battery (included in the box, offers over a year’s worth of use). Installing the Bolt was as easy as unscrewing my existing deadbolt, removing the internal deadbolt mechanism, picking out the right adapter for the cam bar, and then inserting it into my door’s deadbolt lock and screwing back together the external face plates. It took under 10 minutes, start to finish.
Setting up the lock was also simple. You just download the app and follow the instructions, and you’ll be able to control your app in just minutes, too. Using the app, you set up a home profile for your lock or locks, and you can also invite others in your household to share access (they’ll have to install the app and get a profile to do so). You can also set up HomeKit if you have an Apple device and a HomeKit hub (this could be an Apple TV, or an iPad) and instantly unlock a lot of features including remote unlocking and locking control when you’re away from home.
Image Credits: Level
Even without HomeKit, you can set up Level to automatically lock once you leave a certain geofenced area around your home, and to automatically unlock once you return within that perimeter. It’s a fantastic convenience feature that works great and offers tons of benefits when it comes to things like coming home with armfuls of groceries, or large packages.
With the Level Touch, you get all of the above, plus a feature I’ve come to find indispensable: touch control. The metal exterior of the Level Touch’s outside cylinder has capacitive touch sensors, which means that like your iPhone’s screen, it can detect when it’s touched by a finger or skin. You can activate a touch-to-lock feature which will allow it to lock whenever people leave and hold their finger to the deadbolt cover, and you can even set it to unlock when it detects a touch combined with immediate proximity of your phone for identity verification purposes.
To me, this is even more useful than auto-lock/auto-unlock, and yet still much more convenient than fumbling with keys or even using the app to manually lock/unlock. It’s one of Level Touch’s unique advantages, and it’s a big one.
As for installation of the Level Touch, it’s also very easy – no more difficult than installing any deadbolt you might buy at the hardware store. Like the Bolt, it uses a single CR123A battery loaded right into the deadbolt itself that should give you enough power for over a year of use.
Bottom line
Smart locks have become a lot more prevalent over the course of the past few years, but they also haven’t really progressed much in terms of functionality or design. Level has upended all that, bringing the best of convenience features and miniaturized hardware technology to smart, modern design that leapfrogs the competition.
The vertical tabs concept is not new to web browsers. It can be enabled in all major web browsers through extensions. In fact, Chrome offered vertical tabs as a built-in feature for some time before removing it. Why use vertical tabs in Edge? Vertical tabs are boon, especially for wide and ultra-widescreen monitor users. These […]
Over the course of the last few years, Microsoft started adding the concept of ‘data types’ to Excel, that is, the ability to pull in geography and real-time stock data from the cloud, for example. Thanks to its partnership with Wolfram, Excel now features over 100 of these data types that can flow into a spreadsheet. But you won’t be limited to only these pre-built data types for long. Soon, Excel will also let you bring in your own data types.
That means you can have a ‘customer’ data type, for example, that can bring in rich customer data from a third-party service into Excel. The conduit fort his is either Power BI, which now allows Excel to pull in any data you previously published there, or Microsoft’s Power Query feature in Excel that lets you connect to a wide variety of data sources, including common databases like SQL Server, MySQL and PostreSQL, as well as third-party services like Teradata and Facebook.
“Up to this point, the Excel grid has been flat… it’s two dimensional,” Microsoft’ head of product for Excel, Brian Jones, writes in today’s announcement. “You can lay out numbers, text, and formulas across the flexible grid, and people have built amazing things with those capabilities. Not all data is flat though and forcing data into that 2D structure has its limits. With Data Types we’ve added a 3rd dimension to what you can build with Excel. Any cell can now contain a rich set of structured data… in just a single cell.”
The promise here is that this will make Excel more flexible and I’m sure a lot of enterprises will adapt these capabilities. These companies aren’t likely to move to Airtable or similar Excel-like tools anytime soon but have data analysis needs that are only increasing now that every company gathers more data than it knows what to do with. This is also a feature that none of Excel’s competitors currently offer, including Google Sheets.
Gmail supports a plethora of search operators to help you instantly find that elusive email message buried in your mailbox. You have size search - like larger_than:5mb - to find the big messages in your account. File search - like has:attachment filename:doc - will locate email messages that contain specific file attachments. This graphic illustrates all the known Gmail search operators that work both on Gmail website and mobile.
Search by Date in Gmail
Date search in Gmail helps you locate emails sent or received during a specific period. Here are some examples:
newer_than:7d from:me - Emails sent in the last 7 days
after:2020/10/15 before:2020/10/20 from:uber - Emails from Uber received between October 15 and October 20.
newer_than:60d older_than:30d - All emails received in the previous 30-day range.
The date in the Gmail search query is specified in the YYYY/MM/DD format.
Search Emails by Specific Time in Gmail
Gmail supports an undocumented time-based search option that lets you find emails sent or received during a specific hour, minute or event second. For instance, you can limit your Gmail search to emails that were received between October 10 8:15 PM and October 10, 2020 8:45 PM.
To get started, convert the date and time to Epoch time and then use the timestamp with the standard after or before search operator of Gmail.
For instance, the Epoch time for October 10 8:30 PM is 1602774000 and that of October 10 8:45 PM is 1602774900. Use the search query after:1602774000 before:1602774900 to:me in Gmail and you’ll get a list of all emails that were received during that 15-minute period.
Epoch time is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (UTC). Use the Epoch converter to represent a human readable date and time in Epoch and use that timestamp with the before or after search operator of Gmail to find that elusive email.
Date and Time Search with Google Script
Here’s a little snippet that will automate your Gmail search by time using the Gmail API. It will fetch all email messages that were received between 12:15 PM and 1:30 PM.
constemailReceived=()=>{constsecondsSinceEpoch=(date)=> Math.floor(date.getTime()/1000);const after =newDate();const before =newDate();
after.setHours(12,15,0,0);
before.setHours(13,30,0,0);const query =`after:${secondsSinceEpoch(after)} before:${secondsSinceEpoch(
before
)}`;const messages = Gmail.Users.Messages.list('me',{
q: query,});
Logger.log(messages);};
When you send an email campaign through Gmail, you’ve an option to specify a different reply-to email address for your emails. When the email recipient hits the “Reply” or “Reply All” button, the To field in their email reply will be automatically populated with the email address that you’ve specified as the Reply-to email at the time of sending.
You can even specify more than one email addresses in the reply-to field, separated by commas, and they will all show up in the To field of the reply field. For instance, you could send emails from your own email address but the replies would be received in your email inbox as well as the support team.
Next click on the Configure menu to open the Mail Merge sidebar.
Here go the Reply-to address file and type an email address. If you wish to receive replies on multiple email addresses, type them all here separated by commas.
Now when you send the email campaign, open one of the emails in the sent items folder, expand the message header and you should see the specified email addresses listed in the reply-to field.
Why is Google Ignoring the Reply-to Address
If you send a test email to yourself, you’ll get the email in your inbox. If you hit the reply button in that message, you may notice that that reply-to field contains your own email address and not the custom email address(es) that you’ve specified in your mail merge.
That’s the default behavior in Gmail if the “from” address on an email message is the same as the “to” address or is one of your own email aliases. To test your reply-to functionality, you should send emails to an email address that is not connected to your current Gmail account or set the “From” address as a non-Gmail address.
This Google Script will help you download your email messages from Gmail to your Google Drive in the EML format.
What is the EML Format
The .eml file format is popular for transferring emails from one email program to another since it complies with the RFC 822 standard and thus can be natively opened inside Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook. You can even open EML files inside Google Chrome by dragging the file from your desktop onto a new browser table.
EML files contains the email content (email body, header and encoded images and attachments) as plain text in MIME format.
Download Gmail message as EML Files
Inside Gmail, open any email thread, go to the 3-dot menu and choose “Download Message” from the menu. It will turn your current email message into an eml file and save it your desktop.
However, if you wish to automate the process and download multiple emails as eml files in your Google Drive, Apps Script can help.
The script searches for emails from the specified sender, gets the first email message and downloads it your Google Drive.
Forward Gmail as EML Attachment
If you are to forward an email message as an attachment, the .eml format may be recommended since it preserves all the formatting and attachments of the original email thread in a single file that can be attached to the email.
If there was any doubt that yesterday’s flogging of big tech CEOs by Senate republicans was anything other than an electioneering stunt, president Trump has thumped the point home by tweeting a video message to voters in which he bashes “big tech” as (maybe) too powerful but certainly in need of being “spoken to” and (maybe) more.
The not-so-subtle suggestion being that a vote for Trump is a vote to break up the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter.
In the video Trump signposts the DoJ’s antitrust suit against Google — ending with a call to his supporters to get out the vote. So the president is brandishing an anti-big tech message as the latest cudgel in his culture war, just a few days ahead of the 2020 US presidential election.
“For a long time I’ve been hearing about how powerful big tech is, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or Google or any of them,” he begins the video, before making a quick vanity-dig about winning the 2016 election regardless of the “powerful” platforms being “totally against me”, as he glibly claims — entirely failing to mention that Facebook actually allowed its network to be a free and unfettered conduit for millions of pieces of anti-Clinton, pro-Trump propaganda cooked up in Russia.
Instead, he segues into a claim that the platforms have taken their power to a “a new level”, as he puts it — accusing them of “suppressing the corruption of Joe Biden” by ‘not letting the stories out’.
This is a direct reference to Trump’s Democrat challenger for the White House, and an indirect reference to a controversial New York Post story about a cache of emails purported to have been found on laptop hardware owned by Biden’s son Hunter — but which carry the distinct whiff of another election-focused political disinformation operation.
The big difference this time around is that ‘big tech’ is rather more alive to the reputational risks to their platforms and companies if they’re found ignoring another orchestrated episode of election interference.
Twitter initially blocked links to it citing its hacked materials policy — though it later revised the policy after Republicans screamed ‘censorship’. And CEO Jack Dorsey got plenty more grilling on that theme at yesterday’s Senate hearing as Republican senators used the hearing as an opportunity to try to mint gotcha soundbites on bogus claims of big tech’s ‘anti-conservative bias & censorship’.
The tech CEOs mostly had to sit there and be bashed as it’s not politic for them to suggest Republicans might be experiencing more content moderation vs liberals because they break the rules more. Instead the electioneering pantomime ran on for hours.
Trump is just closing the loop on the politically biased soundbite fest by trying to turn tedious and trumped up claims of anti-conservative bias into a bald ‘get out the vote’ message to his base.
“Big tech has to be spoken to and probably in some form has to be stopped,” is the closest he gets to an actual policy position here. So Trump voters shouldn’t get their hopes up that he might actually deliver a break up of Facebook et al either.
The ironies are of course hot and heavy, given evidence shows social media algorithms’ baked in preference for spreading controversial/outrageous content further and faster than the blander, more nuanced stuff that’s likely to be closer to the truth. Simply put, it’s human nature to click on the crazy stuff — and ad-funded platforms are fuelled by eyeball engagement. So lies have been great for big tech’s bottom lines.
That then means these very same ‘big tech’ platforms tend to amplify Republican messaging — certainly of the Trumpian flavor, i.e. where trumped up claims, lacking in evidence and/or reality, are preferred. (Like, say, Trump calling Mexicans rapists or claiming the pandemic is over as thousands continue to die. Or that he has immunity from COVID-19 when the scientific consensus is we don’t know how long a person may be immune after fighting off the virus and we know some people have been reinfected with COVID-19, and so on.)
So the scale of the nonsense being peddled by Trump’s Republican party is indeed very strong and very powerful. But then, well, we haven’t been in Kansas for a long time.
At the time of writing Twitter has also not placed any kind of contextual labelling on Trump’s tweet — despite the contents of the video arguably containing misinformation about big tech itself. But that’s just one more irony to add to the steaming pile.
And if you’re feeling a pang of pity for the tech CEOs caught in this partisan bind it pays to remember they made their bed by claiming to operate community and content policies they didn’t — and still don’t — properly enforce. Which makes Trump their very own monster.
When it comes to gifting teachers, pupils usually come up with photo frames, coffee mugs, and pens, which isn’t bad but quite out-dated. Here are some of the best gifts for teachers, which you can look into this holiday season. Albert Clock Your classes are time-bound, and teachers don’t have better control over it with […]
Social media platforms are excellent means to connect to the world. We get to make new friends, reconnect with older ones, and know about personal experiences worldwide. These platforms are also used by different companies to promote their business. They build their own pages, promote their products, and interact with the customers. These approaches taken […]
To meet some of that challenge, today, LinkedIn is launching a new Career Explorer tool to help people find new jobs. Out in beta today in English (and adding further languages soon), this is not another job search engine. It’s a tool that matches a person’s skills with jobs that she or he might not have otherwise considered, and then provides pointers on what extra skills you might want to learn to be even more relevant.
Alongside this, LinkedIn is launching a new skills portal specifically to hone digital skills; subtle profile picture “frames” to indicate when you’re looking for work, or when you are hiring; and interview prep tools.
The Career Explorer tool is perhaps the most interesting of the new features.
Built with flexibility in mind, LinkedIn is leaning on its own trove of data to map some career paths that people have taken, combining that with data it has on jobs that are currently in higher demand, and are extrapolating that to help people get more creative about jobs they could go for.
This would be especially useful if there are none in their current field, or if they are considering using the opportunity of a job loss to rethink what they are doing (if Covid-19 hasn’t done the rethinking for them).
The example that LinkedIn gives for how this works is a notable one. It notes that a food server and a customer service specialist (an in-demand job) have a 71% skills overlap.
Neither might be strictly considered a “knowledge worker” (interesting that LinkedIn is positioning itself in that way, as it’s been a tool largely dominated by the category up to now), but both interface with customers. LinkedIn uses the Explorer to then suggest what training you could undertake (on its platform) to learn or improve the skills you might not already have.
The Career Explorer is a development on the skills assessment tool that LinkedIn launched last year, which were tests that people could take to verify what skills they had and what skills they still needed to learn for a particular role.
In the midst of a pandemic, that effort took on a more pointed recovery role, with skills training developed in partnership with Microsoft (which owns LinkedIn) specifically to address digital gaps in the employment market, which when filled could help the economy rebuild. LinkedIn said that to date, around 13 million people have used the those tools to learn new skills for the most in-demand jobs.
The idea with these new tools is that while people may be losing their jobs, there is still work out there. LinkedIn itself says it has more than 14 million positions open right now, with close to 40 million people coming to the site to search for work every week, and three people getting hired each minute. So the aim is to figure out how best to connect people with the opportunities around them.
And given that LinkedIn, now with 722 million users, has long made recruitment and job searches a central part of its business — both in terms of traffic and in terms of the revenue it makes from those services; I often think of it as the place where professionals go to network and look for work — launching these tools not only can help LinkedIn be a more useful partner in the job-search process. It helps keep that jobs business evolving at a time when it otherwise might feel somewhat stagnant. And after all, despite the activity on LinkedIn, unemployment remains high and some believe will get worse before it gets better again.
