Sunday
Oct162022

Waze lets you drive away or with zombies this spooky season

Waze has another driving experience to get you in the mood this spooky season. You can now enter Waze's "Zombified" world and choose to team up with an expert escapist to avoid the zombies or with the undead themselves. The Survivalist will keep you away from the slow-moving menaces as you ride in the Escapemobile. You can show off your strength with the Survivalist Mood. Meanwhile, the Zombie voice navigation will give you a peek at the inner workings of the undead. You ride in the Zombieombile this time.

You can activate the experience by visiting this link or heading into the My Waze section in the app and tapping on the Drive with Zombies banner. Voice navigation is available in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Sunday
Oct162022

SoundCloud refreshes its creator suite

SoundCloud is looking to improve its creator offerings. In the first phase of "SoundCloud for Artists," there's a new creator dashboard where you can see your stats at a glance. One of the newest things is seeing your top fans. Soon the app can show you your top contributors and give you the option to connect with these superfans better.

“We can actually go back to that concept of you don’t need scale. You need to focus on your 1,000 [or] 100 true fans,” says Tracy Chan, SoundCloud's creator division lead. Last year, SoundCloud introduced a new system for allocating royalties. A listener's subscription revenue was divided among the artists they listen to, a move different from the standard pro rata model at Spotify and Apple. The big streaming services' subscription fees are pooled and allocated to artists based on the largest amount of streams.

Source

Saturday
Oct152022

Canadian Reviewer Weekly Roundup – 10/9 – 10/15

Saturday
Oct152022

Google labels ads in mobile search results as 'Sponsored'

Source: Google

Google is changing how paid search results show up on mobile. These will now carry a larger "Sponsored" tag instead of a simple "Ad" tag. The website name is listed at the top of each search result too. The "size and shape" of each site's favicons are also getting updated, so they're easier to see. Google plans to test a "similar experience" on the desktop "soon."

The change is implemented because Google wanted to ensure "ads are clearly labeled" with a tag that's "prominent and clear across different types of paid content." While the more prominent position of site names and favicons should make it easier to "identify the website that's associated with each result at a glance."

Source