Instagram helps overcome #Depression #Problems

21

October

2016

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With more than 500 million users, Instagram has become the home for visual storytelling for celebrities, brands, teens, musicians, and pretty much anyone with a camera to capture and share the world’s moments.

Back in the day Instagram was mainly used to post pictures of yourself or your perfectly brewed cup of coffee and to tag your friends in an endless stream of funny or interesting posts. Nowadays, the platform is widely used to inspire the crowd. Popular pages include people showing how to do your make-up perfectly, how to loose weight and show pictures of well-known models. The result? Instagram is turning into a platform facilitating vanity, through an overwhelming amount of pictures of seemingly perfect lifestyles and toned body’s.

U could imagine the impact of these shared moments on users with confidence and/or mental health problems. The amount of ‘ selfharming’ hash tags (e.g. #cutting, #selfharm, #thinspiration) will give you thousands of pictures of everything you can imagine and beyond, giving self-destructive behaviour a platform rather than the happy and interesting moments in our day-to-day life. With over 350 million people of all ages suffering from depression, this is not something to ignore.

Instagram recently acknowledged its responsibility towards the wellbeing of users and visitors of the platform and has come up with a new feature, to tackle this increasing problem within its community. The new feature will allow users to anonymously flag a photo when they think the person that posted it needs help. When flagged, the person will receive an automatically generated message, which states “Someone saw one of your posts and thinks you might be going through a difficult time. If you need support, we’d like to help”. After which the user can choose between a couple of options. Chief Operating Officer Marne Levine says that the tool is designed to let you know that you are surrounded by a community that cares about you, at a moment when you might most need that reminder.

In addition, specific tags associated self-harming acts, have been banned of the platform, discouraging the community to post pictures regarding these topics.

It’s great to see how a popular platform like Instagram is using its power to help people dealing with depressions or low self-esteem issues, rather than only focus on reach and popularity. Personally, I hope that other platforms will follow and start acknowledging their role in helping their users around the world.

1http://hellogiggles.com/instagrams-new-feature-mental-health/
2http://www.lindanieuws.nl/nieuws/meer-dan-filter-instagram-biedt-nu-ook-psychische-hulp/
3https://www.instagram.com/about/us/

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Technology of the week: Industry Disruption of PC Video-game Retailers (Group 4)

3

October

2016

4.67/5 (3)

This week we focussed on Industry Disruption, specifically in the field of PC gaming. To demonstrate the shift from buying your games in brick-and-mortar stores to online platforms we made a short video.

 

New business model

Thanks to the rise of internet, the purchase of videogames has largely shifted from offline to online. From 2009 to 2012 the physical distribution of video games decreased at an annual rate of 13.1%, while digital distribution grew at 12.6% over the same time period worldwide. This industry disruption was led by several new companies, one of them called Steam.

 

To buy a video game you download the Steam software onto your computer and create an account. This enables you access to the platform where gamers and developers interact with each other. The moment you buy a game Steam receives 30% of your purchase.

 

The loooong-tail of Steam

The long-tail theorem allows us to understand why Steam has become so popular. Its digital nature allows Steam to take advantage of the long tail strategy, by providing not only block buster games but also less popular games from unknown developers. These so-called “indie developers” are the ones providing the majority of games.

 

Indie developers helped Steam benefit from another theorem, the newly vulnerable market. By allowing indie developers and corporations to equally compete in its platform, Steam transformed video-game selling dynamics. Lowering entry barriers, the standards of videogame production have risen.

 

Security problems

However, it is not all roses. Steam is facing privacy and security issues. Steam has tried to reduce the risk of account theft by releasing Steam Guard, an additional security measure in the form of a mobile authenticator.

 

The competition
There are other companies trying to attack this new market or trying to protect their previously strong presence. This latter group are not succeeding because they are holding on to their traditional business model and only selling their own games. This includes big, well-known publishers such as EA and Ubisoft.

 

Kinguin

Kinguin is a marketplace where buyers and sellers meet to trade their game keys. Like Steam, Kinguin takes a certain percentage of these sales. But there is already a lot of discussion considering the ethics as not all of the revenue goes to the developers.

 

Humble Bundle

Humble Bundles’ business model is based on a pay-what-you-want system. It provides bundles of games, while helping you on making an educated decision on how much you should pay. Also, the gamer can allocate how much money goes to the publisher, charity and Humble Bundle itself. On the downside Humble Bundle does not provide a community feature or an active gameplay platform. Hence, gamers usually return to Steam.

 

The game player is largely benefited by using online digital game sellers. Lower costs, a larger selection, a strong community, improved gameplay, a user-to-user marketplace and goodwill from directly helping indie developers and charities. Its save to say that we’re experiencing a total industry disruption and the end of an era of brick-and-mortar PC game retailers.

1http://store.steampowered.com/

2https://www.humblebundle.com/gamemaker-bundle

3https://www.kinguin.net/

4https://www.accenture.com/t20150709T093434__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/LandingPage/Documents/3/Accenture-3-LT-10-Pulse-Gaming-Disruption.pdf

5https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/04/16/this-is-why-valves-business-model-is-so-totally-brilliant/

6https://openforum.hbs.org/challenge/understand-digital-transformation-of-business/business-model/humble-bundle-turning-computer-games-and-charity-into-good-business

7http://www.polygon.com/2015/2/9/8006693/the-truth-behind-those-mysteriously-cheap-gray-market-game-codes

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Big Data Versus Terrorism: The Battle Has Begun!

1

October

2016

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When you hear the word “Big Data”, what do you think of? Probably the way it provides major advantages to big businesses. How it allows them to develop effective strategies and offers them an insight into consumer trends. But what about its possible implications for security and intelligence?

It is believed that it’s possible to predict terrorist activity based on observations from online sources. For example trough posts on Facebook, searched keywords on Google and even the location function on your IPhone. Anything we do on the World Wide Web could be traced and analysed.

But how does it work?

The use of Big Data makes it possible to look in the future. This specific type of data analysis is called “Predictive analytics”, which is the use of data and statistical algorithms to identify the likelihood of future outcomes.

There are already police forces analysing our messages to anticipate terrorism. To decide where they should patrol on a certain day and time, they look for areas where there is some sort of “terrorist behaviour”. The goal is to significantly decrease the threat of terrorism and thus making the world a safer place. R. Horowiz, former head of the IT unit of the Israel Security Agency says that data analysis has made it possible to track down and eventually kill a number of enemies including senior Hamas leaders.

The cons

On the other hand critics claim not everything in this garden of big data analysis smells sweet. Though analysis seems to be accurate most of the time, there’s always the change of innocent people being suspected of terrorist activity because of little errors in the used algorithms.

So what about you? Do you prefer the idea of a saver world under de condition that you might be on the radar of these terrorist hunters or do you consider your privacy to be of greater value?

Sources:
https://datafloq.com/read/big-data-will-effectively-fight-terrorism/785
https://www.ciklum. com/blog/pros-and-cons-of-big-data/
http://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/predictive-analytics.html
http://www.investigativeproject.org/5555/the-first-weapon-against-lone-terrorists-big-data#

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