This Week’s News Highlights — QLD Business Grants, Bing Updates & More

News Highlights from 2 August – 6 August 2021

Monday, 2 August 2021 News Highlights

• A one-off $5,000 payment will be available to eligible Queensland businesses who have seen a 30% reduction in turnover due to restrictions. Keep an eye on the QLD Government website as more information becomes available.
• (RESOLVED) Microsoft is experiencing outages this morning, impacting OneDrive, Outlook, Teams and other products. 
• As of 27 September 2021, if you’re running on an Android 2.3.7, you won’t be able to sign into your Google account on the device. If you’re already logged in, you may still be able to use your Google account, but wouldn’t be able to log out/log back in.

Tuesday, 3 August 2021 News Highlights

• Twitter is now allowing users to create or connect accounts through their Apple or Google accounts. To connect an account, the emails must be the same.
• Google has launched a Google Meets app to make video conferencing through the platform even easier.
• Microsoft 360, Microsoft’s new cloud PC setup, will be available on a subscription basis, starting from $31 a month per user, depending on storage needs.
• News Corp Australia and Google are launching an education program in early 2022 to help journalists and media learn how to utilise digital mediums.

Wednesday, 4 August 2021 News Highlights

• Microsoft is releasing a host of features for Microsoft Ads advertisers, including Target Impression Share automated bidding, new product conversion goal analytics for shopping ads, new automated extensions and more.
• WhatsApp has rolled out a ‘one view’ photo and video feature, similar to Snapchat, for added privacy in the app. Once the chat has been opened, the photos and videos will be seen and then removed from the chat history.
• Google Maps on iOS will soon be available in dark mode. The dark mode Google Maps feature should be available under Settings in the coming weeks.

Thursday, 5 August 2021 News Highlights

• Google has removed ‘safe browsing’ from their Google page experience update, with the search engine confirming they would not be using it as a ranking factor. In a Google Search Central blog, they said it was due to safe browsing sometimes being outside of the control of the website owner.
• TikTok is testing a stories feature, where users can upload story TikToks, which will be removed from the platform after 24 hours. It comes as other platforms, like Twitter, YouTube and Instagram have utilised the TikTok style of short-form videos.

Friday, 6 August 2021 News Highlights

• Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate has said the council plans to meet next week to put a plan together for a Gold Coast Small Business Relief Package to support businesses impacted by restrictions.
• Australia Post has partnered with 7-Eleven to offer free all-hours parcel collection lockers at more than 1,000 7-Eleven locations throughout Australia.
• Bing has launched Make Every feature Binary (MEB), which in the easiest explanation possible, is a machine-learning technology to help improve search result relevance on the search engine. For those focused on good SEO practices, it’s no concern to you.
• Twitter is adding a co-host feature to Twitter Spaces to make it easier to moderate events on the feature.

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