German sandal maker Birkenstock has successfully brought an injunction against Amazon to prevent internet shoppers from being directed to the online marketplace with anything other than the correct spelling of the sandal brand name.

Why?

The reported motivation for the legal move by Birkenstock is to prevent unsuspecting shoppers from buying low-quality counterfeits through Amazon that would erode Birkenstock’s reputation.

The sandal company argued in a district court in Dusseldorf that Amazon booked variations of “Birkenstock” as keywords through Google AdWords, thereby potentially contributing to customers ending up with counterfeit versions of the sandals as a result of typing e.g. “Brikenstock”, “Birkenstok”, “Bierkenstock” or other variations into their Google searches for the product.

Ongoing

This move by Birkenstock appears to be part of an ongoing dispute with Amazon. A year ago, Birkenstock stopped dealing with Amazon in the United States, and has now said that it will end the sale of its products through Amazon in Europe after Amazon “failed to proactively prevent” the sale of counterfeit Birkenstock goods.

Misspelling Adverts Commonplace

One interesting aspect of this case is the fact that if the court’s final ruling (it’s still at a preliminary stage) goes in favour of the Birkenstock, this could have implications for all companies using the common practice of targeting PPC adverts at misspellings of brand / product names.

For example, in one widely publicised example from back in April 2013, confectionary brand Snickers based an online advertising campaign around misspellings of its brand name. The company worked with a London agency to build a list of the top 500 search terms, and by using an algorithm were able to generate a list of 25,381 different misspellings. The three-day campaign generated 558,589 ad impressions on those misspellings, and served as an example for what has now become a very widely used PPC tactic.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

This case raises some interesting issues for online business advertising. Obviously, businesses would like to protect themselves from the actions of counterfeiters and those trying to circumvent trademark law and pass off fake goods as popular brands. In this case, however, some commentators have pointed out that Amazon’s role does not appear to be a parallel form of digital deception, and that the mainstream practice of targeting ads to misspelled search terms can actually help shoppers find what they’re looking for more easily.

Also, some commentators have made the point that counterfeit products sold on Amazon are unlikely to be using misspellings in their online or physical branding, but are more likely to simply be superficially exact copies that are listed as the real thing in Amazon’s network of third-party sellers. If, in this scenario, Amazon used misspellings to advertise Birkenstocks to shoppers, and those shoppers bought counterfeit products as a result, the problem is would be more likely to be Amazon’s supply-chain structure than its search tactics.

If the German court’s final ruling goes in favour of Birkenstock, it could have much wider effects for online advertisers, and may not be to the benefit of web users.

The combination of Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has led to a cosmetics chain enabling customers to experiment with virtual make-up, and the animation of single still images into photos with moving facial expressions.

Virtual Cosmetics App

Back in March, the new ‘Virtual Artist’ app was first unveiled to the tech world. The app is now being used by French cosmetics / beauty brand Sephora to engage customers and allow them to try out and experiment quickly and easily with the company’s beauty products without needing to physically apply any of the actual products.

Photo Overlaid With AR Make-Up

Sephora’s ‘Virtual Artist’ app, which is used in some of their stores on iPads (available to customers as a smart-phone version) allows customers to try-on virtual make-up. The app, which was developed in partnership with AR company ModiFace, scans a photo of the user’s face, maps where the lips and eyes are, and lets users try on different looks.

The app gives users virtual tutorials that use AI and AR to show users (using a photo of their own face) how to contour, apply highlighter, and create winged eyeliner.

The app currently allows users to experiment with lip colours, eyeshadows, and false lash styles, and to add the products they like to an online shopping basket.

Not The Only One

Sephora’s proprietary ‘Virtual Artist’ app is actually joining the tech beauty gadget market a little late, as it follows in the footsteps of other similar ideas such as the HiMirror Plus, which scan users’ faces and recommends products and skin regimens.

Bringing Still Photos To Life

Another recent innovation to hit the news is a face mapping, AR and AI combined system that has been developed by a joint team from Tel Aviv University and Facebook.

The system enables a single still photo of a person / emoji character / painting of a person’s face to be animated with moving facial expressions.

How It Works

To enable the animation to work, the subjects submit a single still image of their face, plus, they film themselves pulling a variety of faces. Face mapping of the still photo as a guide, and the expressions, combined with a ‘driving video’ of another face, and the software’s ability to fill in the invisible gaps in the picture e.g. the inside of a subject’s mouth, enables moving facial expressions to be overlaid (using AR), thus producing an eerily realistic image with changing facial expressions and emotions.

Why?

Since the system was developed in conjunction with Facebook, tech commentators have speculated the first use of the system will be as part of a fun craze to help engagement with the Facebook platform.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

It is not difficult to see how, as with the Sephora example, a system that encourages and enables customers to engage with, try out, and willingly widen their knowledge of a product range with minimum risk and hassle could be useful and relevant to many kinds of businesses in different markets e.g. beauty, interior design, furnishings / furniture, and other self / lifestyle / home and garden markets. The ability to enable customers (B2B and domestic) to visually experience and explore products and services like never before offers an exciting opportunity for businesses.

The ability to animate still images in a realistic and engaging way could also feed into multiple industries e.g. marketing / advertising / display / promotions, photography / graphics, greetings and gifts and many more.

The leverage gained from the synergies of combined new technologies could provide exciting business opportunities and areas to develop competitive advantages that are likely to reduce in cost over time.

Apple’s on-stage demo of the new iPhone X in front of the world’s media last Tuesday suffered an unexpected glitch as its new face recognition feature didn’t work, and now Apple is offering an explanation of what went wrong.

Not Recognised

The nearly two-hour on-stage demo of the new phone, by Craig Mr Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering at the company’s Cupertino, California headquarters, failed to hit the right note as it was overshadowed by the failure of the new handset to recognise his face as a means of authentication.

Others Moving The Handset

Statements by Apple since the incident have placed the blame on the fact that the phone’s authentication system tried to recognise the face of those moving the phone into position, ready for the presentation. These attempts, therefore, counted as two unsuccessful authentication attempts because the faces were not those of Craig Federighi.

Unfortunately for Mr Federighi, the phone, for reasons of security, is designed to only accept 2 unsuccessful authentication attempts using the facial recognition feature, before the feature is disabled and the user has to go to the trouble of manually typing in a passcode.

Irony

The awful irony of the presentation was that ‘Touch ID’, which was being replaced with the 10th anniversary iPhone X, would have allowed five failed attempts before seeking a passcode.

What made things seem worse was the fact that this new iPhone feature had been developed after Apple reportedly gathered a billion images to ‘train’ the feature to recognise broad geographic and ethnic data sets, and that Apple had earlier described Face ID as being “effortless” to use, and even more accurate than its fingerprint-based Touch ID system.

Apple has also said that the 3D front-facing camera has been designed to learn what users look like and is only inaccurate one in 1 million times.

Also For Payment and Emojis

As well as providing authentication to unlock the phone, The Face ID feature has also been designed to authenticate Apple Pay and create the customisable animated emoji.

Spare

Fortunately for Mr Federighi, he had a spare phone standing by so that he could at least continue the presentation.

Theories

Prior to Apple’s attempt to explain what went wrong with the feature, different theories had been offered online as to what may have caused the problem, including the idea that Mr Federighi’s wiping of the stage make-up on his face before this second attempt may have interfered with the system.

Concerns

Some commentators have expressed concerns about how the use of Face ID could affect the privacy and security of users, and that the technology may not be entirely effective where users need to keep their face partially covered e.g. for religious / cultural or work reasons.

The largest concern for many people, however, has been the substantial $999 price tag for the phone ($999 for the 64GB version and £1,149 for 256GB).

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Having an up to date phone that can cope with the demands of doing business on the move are the main concerns for many businesses, and having a time-saving, new security feature such as Face ID would be a bonus. For many business people, however, the high price of the phone, and the loss of trust in its Face ID abilities already (remember that Face ID also authorises Apple Pay as well as the phone itself) have meant that they may stick with their existing phone for the time being.

For Apple, which is not doing as well as it would like in large markets such as China, the public Face ID failure, which may well have been legitimately caused by features designed to protect the security of users, could prove to be costly. It may also have done nothing to boost business confidence in the kinds of biometric security measures that are being introduced to so many business services e.g. banking.

This story also helps to illustrate the delicate balance between price, value, and perceived benefits in products and services. Even though the sophisticated AI / biometric technology in Face ID is really quite spectacular, if a product has no real perceived benefits compared to existing products / versions, customers may not see the value that they will gain by paying the high price.

The government has provided a boost to the UK’s digital and technology industries in the form of £700m of funding as part of the launch of its Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

Announced Last Year

The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund was announced last year by Prime Minister Theresa May at the CBI Annual Conference in November, and is intended to be a strategic part of the government’s Industrial Strategy.

The big idea is that the fund can enable businesses and researchers to work together to identify industrial and societal challenges that are crucial to the UK economy, and offer opportunities for UK businesses to exploit these through innovation and positioning in e.g. a large or fast-growing and sustainable global market.

Divided Into Core Areas

The funding, which will be managed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the UK government’s innovation agency, Innovate UK, will be divided into six core areas.

These are the development of new battery technologies for electric cars, robotics and AI systems for use in “extreme” environments, innovative technologies in aid of patients seeking new drugs and treatments faster, driverless automobile AI tech, aerospace materials and a satellite test facility.

Robots & AI First

The first competition for funding will be the development of robotics and artificial intelligence systems that can be deployed in extreme environments. In this first round, £42 million is up for grabs for research hubs that can translate fundamental science in robotics and AI into real-world applications.

The Largest Sum

The largest sum of £246 million funding will be available, as part of the ‘Faraday Challenge’, for businesses that can help the country move towards a low-carbon economy, through researching, developing and manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The UK has big ambitions to be a leading global digital and technology competitor, but also faces many challenges in enabling it to get there, such as a technology skills gap, difficulty in raising funding by traditional means, and the uncertainty of the possible effects of Brexit.

This Industrial Challenge fund could, therefore, be an important enabler for the tech industry and the economy as a whole by opening up new possibilities for the country, and by helping the UK to have an opportunity to lead the world in developing the kind of science that underpins new technologies and their applications. This could also provide many spin-off benefits and opportunities for many other UK businesses e.g. as suppliers to the new industries.

Google Cloud Computing Chief Diane Greene said in a blog post on Friday that Google will stop scanning Gmail content for creating personalized ads. This move, due to happen later this year, is in line with Google’s enterprise offering, G Suite.

G Suite Gmail Already Not Used

Diane Greene has said that G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization. G suite is Google’s set of (cloud based) intelligent apps (Gmail, Docs, Drive and Calendar) that is designed to help organizations to work collaboratively regardless of their physical location.

Significant

The announcement that Google will stop using the scanned content from Gmail outside of G Suite is significant because the Gmail service is estimated to have more than 1.2 billion users worldwide (compared to G Suite’s 3 million), and it should please privacy campaigners worldwide.

How Do Personalised Ads Work?

Personalised / targeted online adverts work by using a person’s browsing habits combined with other data collected from their online activities to display adverts that are more personalised or more likely to be relevant to that person’s likes and tastes, and may therefore be more successful. Advertisers claim that people look more positively on relevant adverts, and that their clients (the businesses buying the adverts) can make a better ROI using this method.

Privacy campaigners on the other hand object to too much monitoring and sharing and cross-referencing of a person’s data, and the fact that it can make the individual identifiable, and, therefore, could pose a security risk and / or give companies too much control.

Google

It is common knowledge that Google has in fact been accessing its users ‘Gmail’ email service since its inception, to create the adverts which are shown to individual users with that email service.

Back in June last year, Google changed the way it tracks its users across the internet by combining users’ personally identifiable information from Gmail, YouTube and other accounts with their browsing records, despite previously pledging that these data sets would be kept separate to protect individuals’ privacy.

Users could opt-out of being tracked this way by visiting the activity controls section of their account page, and by then unticking the box marked “Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services”.

Not The Only Ones

Google is certainly not the only company to track users and use their history, activity and content to deliver targeted ads. Facebook, for example, tracks likes and shares, and many websites that we all visit share our activities with networks of third parties who share, collaborate, link and de-link personal information to generate target ads.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Businesses clearly need to be able to advertise their products and services in order to sell them, and online advertising can be an immediate and cost effective option, particularly if it is intelligently targeted.

Too much online advertising, however, can be very frustrating for web users because it can hinder access to content and waste time, plus, in times where cyber crime levels are high and GDPR is on the way, we all need to able to (and are being given more powers to) protect our personal data.

This move by Google is therefore likely to be broadly welcomed, and is likely to provide Google with some good PR, although there will still be other ways that Google will collect information about us online to keep tailoring advertisements. For example, this could still include data from the videos we watch on YouTube, and what we search for online and through Google Chrome (if we’re signed into our Google accounts). Google will also still be able to scan the contents of our emails for anti-spam, anti-phishing, malware detection services.

It is possible to check how Google targets its adverts by going to the "Ads settings" option within Gmail.