HUAWEI… what a week! (Translation: Wowee… what a week!) There’s plenty happening in the tech world – here’s all the quick bites you need:
Huawei faces a challenging time. The Chinese tech giant has been in the news this year with the US fearing that their technology was being used to spy on the US. As a result, President Donald Trump issued an executive order stating no American company can do business with Huawei. This became a major obstacle for Huawei almost immediately but the final blow to its expansion hopes was Google recently announcing it has cut all ties with Huawei. It’s well known that Google and Huawei have been involved for years with the Android phone, but with the executive order in place, Google has had no option but to follow suit with the rest of the US and part ways. It leaves Huawei in a really tough spot now: a company that was expected to be the number 1 smart phone vendor in the world hitting a big hurdle.
Another week another data breach – I feel I’m sounding like a broken record at this point. This week’s data breach targets Instagram. The personal data of almost 50 million users, including celebrities, was exposed to hackers in the social media giant’s biggest leak on record. The leak exposed information such as email addresses, phone numbers, which was being stored on a database seemingly leading to an Indian marketing company called Chtrbox. This particular company pays “social media influencers” to post sponsored content for brands such as Adidas and Ray-Ban. The vulnerability has since been repaired (patched) and all is back to normal, but it’s the latest in the ongoing series of privacy scandals affecting Facebook and its subsidiaries.
Apple just achieved another record. In a recent report by Forbes, Apple is the first company in the world to receive a valuation of $200 billion or more (in this case, US $206 billion). Below Apple is Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook – Facebook being the only company in the top five that saw a decline rather than growth due to their scandal-plagued 2018. Looking ahead though, Google could take top spot sooner than you may think. The company saw 27 per cent growth in their valuation and shows no signs of slowing. Just four years ago, Apple was twice as valuable as Google. Now things are getting tighter between Apple (US $206b) and Google ($US167.7b).
To get noticed in the app market, you have to be creative. BP is doing that, celebrating their 100th anniversary by launching a fully integrated campaign called “The Great Aussie Run”. The centre-piece of the campaign is a uniquely Australian arcade-style app where customers can win prizes in-game and redeem them at BP stores nationwide. Customers simply make a fuel or shop purchase, receive a game card and enter a code to unlock up to eight levels and five different characters to “Play to Win”. Since the campaign launched, the app has been downloaded over 120,000 times and has already reached the # 1 spot for free game downloads and is yet to leave the top 10.
That’s it for another week – enjoy your weekend!