Google Launches Analytics 360 Suite for Enterprises and Other News

It’s a day of launches and patents in tech today. And we’ve got lots of news to share! Let’s get right into the details.

Google Launches Analytics 360 Suite for Enterprises

To compete with the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Facebook, Google has launched the Google Analytics 360 Suite for enterprise businesses to offer data and marketing analytics. Priced at $150,000/year and having the features of Analytics Premium and Adometry (a company acquired by Google in 2014), the suite has a total of 6 components, of which 3 are completely new.

The tools are very detailed and informative in what they do for an enterprise. Google Audience Center 360 is a data management platform to offer insights into customer data and campaigns in Adwords and DoubleClick. Google Optimize 360 helps marketers test and personalize websites. Google Data Studio 360 offers data analysis and visualization capabilities. Google Tag Manager 360 provides intelligent online marketing tagging for digital products.

Amazon Patents Pay-with-a-Selfie Technology

Amazon has filed a patent application for a type of technology that allows users to ‘pay with a selfie’.

“While many conventional approaches rely on password entry for user authentication, these passwords can be stolen or discovered by other persons who can impersonate the user for any variety of tasks,” Amazon wrote.

“Further, the entry of these passwords on portable devices is not user friendly in many cases, as the small touchscreen or keyboard elements can be difficult to accurately select using a relatively large human finger, and can require the user to turn away from friends or co-workers when entering a password, which can be awkward or embarrassing in many situations.”

A selfie can be forged, you say? Amazon argues that “a user can be asked to perform a specific motion, gesture, or action within the field of view of the camera to help verify that the image information corresponds to a physical human user”. For example, a user can be asked to blink with his left eye only, or to wave a particular hand at the camera.

Apple News Opens to All

Apple has opened the gates of its news publishing platform, Apple News, to all publishers and even individual bloggers. After its debut in September and up until now, the app only allowed publications from high-profiles news websites and blogs. Apple has fixed an issue with analytics and has integrated ComScore into the app, the figures of which will be available by mid-2016.

Google Reveals 77% of Web is Secure

Google has revealed that encryption now protects over 77% of all web traffic to Google’s data centers, a figure that rose 25% since 2013. All Google services, apart from YouTube, are encrypted and protected from hackers.

"Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the web even safer for everyone," Google said.