Category Archives: Business & Strategy

Facebook is profiling you (even if you are not on Facebook): 5 ways to stop it

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First of all, this is not a tutorial on how to update your Facebook privacy settings or how to delete your Facebook account. There is already enough information available on that. Google it. Also, lets be clear that Facebook has your data. There is no doubt around that. Doesn’t matter if you have deleted your Facebook account or uninstalled the Facebook app, there are lots of other apps (WhatsApp, Instagram and a lot of third party apps) that you use on a daily basis which are regularly sending your data to Facebook. Often when concerns are raised around user data privacy with Facebook, people have one of the 2 reactions –

  • Facebook is evil. Let’s delete Facebook and a bunch of deletefacebook hashtags start trending on social media for a few days. Then we forget all about it and Facebook gets back to collecting your data like nothing ever happened.
  • People feel defenceless against such a big tech giant and they try to hide their helplessness by saying “I got nothing to hide”, “So what if Facebook has my data? I’ll get better ads. Nothing wrong with that”.

And this narrative is fine to a certain extent. I don’t really mind if my data is being used “only” for the purpose of personalizing ads for me. But the truth is, that nobody knows how and when your data can be misused and by whom. I mean who would have thought that taking a simple personality test would end up influencing your voting decision. Remember Cambridge Analytica?

Data Privacy
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Apple bullies its way into the Mobile App Ad market

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Apple recently hit the market cap of $2 Trillion and became the most valuable company in the world. Innovation, customer focus, design excellence, great marketing and an incredibly loyal user base are some of the key drivers of this magnificent growth. But “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and of late, Apple has been kind of a bully in the tech ecosystem. They do whatever they want without consulting the other industry stakeholders and more often than not their decisions seem to be inspired by driving more sales of their hardware/services or more adoption of their digital products. And now it looks like Apple has made plans to bully its way into the $80 billion Mobile App Ad market.

Multiple Mobile Apps
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TikTok acquisition – Is TikTok really worth $50 billion?

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Love it or Hate it, but if you have even the slightest of the interest in the tech industry, the you just can’t ignore TikTok. And recently, the only big news in the tech industry that everybody is keenly following is the potential acquisition (in part or global) of TikTok. Microsoft is the frontrunner right now in the list of buyers with some reports suggesting the potential deal size to be as high as $50 billion. But, is TikTok really worth $50 billion? Or does it even make sense for anyone to acquire TikTok in the first place? Let’s try to figure out.

TikTok mobile application
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JioMeet vs Zoom – Thoughts beyond the copied User Interface (UI)

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So JioMeet has obviously “copied” / “inspired” it’s User Interface (UI) from Zoom. That is a fact and there is no denying it. Anyone who says otherwise need not be taken seriously.
Enough has already been said and discussed all over the internet about the UI similarities between JioMeet and Zoom. There is good amount of debate done and internet has basically been divided into 3 camps –

  1. People calling it a marketing masterstroke by Jio
  2. People calling it plain theft and even suggesting Zoom to take legal actions against Jio
  3. Meh.. So what ??

Anyways, here are my two cents on the topic –

The key metric that everyone is gunning for is the user base or adoption. The target group for these apps can be broadly divided into traditional B2B and B2C segments. Let’s discuss some key points for these segments –

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