Xpertfeed

Summary: Thanksgiving and Black Friday are delivering record online sales and a lot of that traffic is being delivered via smartphones and tablets. Black Friday and Thanksgiving shoppers increasingly relied on the small screen as mobile traffic dominated online sales, according to data compiled from various sources. Adobe reported that online sales hit a record $3.34 billion on Black Friday. According to ChannelAdvisor , 68.2 percent of Thanksgiving Day e-commerce traffic came via a smartphone. Toss in tablets and 77.8 percent of traffic on Thanksgiving came via a mobile device. And perhaps the biggest wrinkle is that mobile orders outpaced computer orders. Fifty-three percent of orders were driven through a mobile device. Mobile devices still struggled to deliver sales conversions (2.1 percent for smartphones), but traffic delivered the numbers, according to ChannelAdvisor. Walmart's mobile traffic was more than 70 percent of its Black Friday total, said ChannelAdvis...

Summary:  After banning dedicated fake news sites, Facebook must still explore alternative With Hillary Clinton having been favored by most pollsters to win the presidential election, there has been no shortage of soul searching and finger pointing by her backers. One target of  the blame game has been Facebook , which Clinton supporters have accused of keeping Trump supporters in an echo chamber of partisan and  fake news . These news items may have been driven by politics or simply profit by unscrupulous clickbaiters. But whatever the reasons behind them, fake news is a big problem that Facebook needs to address. On the other hand, he believes the company  must do more to ferret out fake news stories  including the  outright banning of dedicated fake news sites . Still, while the Facebook CEO admits that some stories are just outright fabrications, others have some elements of truth or are subject to interpretation.Mark Zuckerberg's reaction...

Summary: The Australian government is hoping to bolster the appeal of a career in cybersecurity by launching Academic Centres of Cyber Security Excellence . The federal government has announced it will be launching Academic Centres of Cyber Security Excellence in the hope of improving Australia's cybersecurity through education and research. For a cost of AU$4.5 million, the government expects the centres will help address Australia's shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals. Pointing to a survey released on Tuesday that found two-thirds of Australian young adults had never discussed a career in cybersecurity at high school, Tehan said Australia needs to work harder to encourage future employment in the sector as there is a growing demand for cybersecurity professionals.In a joint statement, Education Minister Simon Birmingham and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Cyber Security Dan Tehan said the centres will produce work-ready graduates to increase...

Zarget, a conversion rate optimisation and marketing automation software company, has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India. Zarget, a SaaS company that provides web optimisation and marketing automation tools, has secured $6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India, with existing investors Accel and Matrix Partners contributing to the round. This brings the total amount raised by the startup to $7.5 million. The latest round of funding will help  Zarget  scale its products and take on global competitors such as Optimizely. Four months after the launch of its platform, Zarget has attracted more than 1,000 customers in 10 countries, including Landesk in the US, BizTalk360 in the UK, and Buscape in Brazil. The startup was founded in 2015 by three ex-Zoho employees Arvind Parthiban, Naveen Venkat, and Santhosh Kumar, who spent a decade building business productivity tools and customer relationship management software at Zoh...

Summary:  After building up the capabilities of its ID Graph, Oracle is making the tool a direct part of its Audience Builder UI. For more than a year, Oracle has been building up the capabilities of ID Graph, a tool in the Oracle Data Cloud that helps marketers understand consumer behavior across channels. On Wednesday, Oracle announced it's putting ID Graph directly into the hands of marketers with an enhanced version of Audience Builder, the user interface within the Oracle Data Management Platform. The updated Audience Builder makes it easier for customers to manage and select certain types of customer identities, in order to analyze audiences based on the device or platform within which the ID was created. "In the past, you weren't really able to manage all of these different identities and where they were going," Oracle senior product marketing manager Karen Kokiko. "Marketers knew customers were making these journeys across devices... A consume...

Summary: Hackers targeted the tech companies as recently as February 2016, but Foursquare denied a breach. Another day, another hack. Weebly and Foursquare are the latest in a long line of tech companies under scrutiny for their security practices. On Thursday, breach notification site LeakedSource posted details of the attacks  in a blog post  explaining what happened. More than 43.4 million accounts were stolen in the attack, thought to have been carried out in February. According to a sample of the data, each record in this mega breach contains a username, email address, password, and IP address. Stolen passwords were stored with bcrypt, a strong system for scrambling passwords. In a statement, the company confirmed the breach. "At this point we do not have evidence of any customer website being improperly accessed," said a spokesperson. "We do not store any full credit card numbers on Weebly servers, and at this time we're not aware that any cr...

Summary:  Details of a new Windows 10 Paint app have leaked ahead of Microsoft's supposed all-in-one Surface (Surface studio) launch later this month. Microsoft has been working on a major refresh of its Paint app for Windows, which introduces support for 3D objects, stickers, and other tools for creatives. A  video demonstration  and  tutorial  for the new Paint, found by Twitter user WalkingCat, details a complete overhaul and new features to support 3D creation,  sharing 3D designs with a community  of artists, and stickers. The new app is currently only available to invited alpha testers but it may get a wider showing at Microsoft's upcoming Windows 10 event on October 26,  according to  Windows enthusiast site Thurrot.com. Microsoft watchers expect the company will unveil an all-in-one Surface PC and a possible Surface keyboard and mouse. The tutorial video shows new painting tools that support pen and touchscreen...

Summary:  Six days after delivering a failed Windows 10 update, Microsoft has offered a fix-it script and an explanation. Six days after it delivered a cumulative update that failed to install on some users' PCs, Microsoft has released a fix-it tool. In an email statement, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the update, which tries to install and then rolls back repeatedly, affects PCs that previously ran a build delivered through the Windows Insider Program and were later switched to the public Current Branch release. " We became aware of an issue with the recent Windows 10 cumulative update that impacted a small number of customers in the Windows Insider Program that were running a previous build of the OS. We have created a solution to resolve this issue, which is now live and can be accessed  here ." That link goes to the  Windows 10 1607 (RS1) Script fix to unblock update for Insider , a Microsoft Installer file that makes the same changes I desc...

Summary: G oogle has rolled-out new data-saving features targeting Android and Chrome users on slower mobile networks. Google's News and Weather app for Android is getting a new Lite mode, designed to save bandwidth for users on slower connections. The new Lite mode will do away with some of the extras found in the normal mode, while cutting images and other content to the bare essentials. Google says Lite will use less than a third of the data of normal mode. Besides saving on summary news information within the app, Lite mode also automatically optimizes the webpages that are opened. Google's  has said in the past  this feature helps load pages four times faster and use 80 percent less data. Lite mode will automatically detect when a device is on a slower network, or it can be manually set to always on or always off. The new mode is  rolling-out  this week to users in India, where mobile networks are largely 2G and 3G, and will arrive in Brazil, I...

Summary:  Microsoft's coming Skype Teams service may be available for beta testing by November. Meanwhile, LinkedIn and Microsoft are partnering on new training courses. Microsoft may be aiming to deliver a beta version of its  Skype Teams service  -- its intended Slack competitor -- by November, according to a new report. Sams' sources also said Skype Teams will likely be available as part of the various Office 365 business plans, and it will be integrated with other Office 365 services. Given there's also a free tier of Slack, I wonder whether Microsoft may opt for a freemium model, as it has with a number of its existing services, and offer an entry-level free version of Skype Teams with options to upgrade to unlock more features.Brad Sams of Petri.com provided an update this week from his sources on  what's happening with Skype Teams . Sams said Skype Teams has been under development for 18 months and that it's currently in private testing. An expan...