October marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month and with online safety being top of mind, Google has launched new products and features to help people everywhere. These releases include in-built features that work around-the-clock to take the security burden off users, and updates to privacy controls that help to easily protect personal information.

• Dark web report: Users can check if their Gmail address has been exposed on the dark web as well as get guidance on how they can protect themself online by accessing the Dark Web Report in their account menu in the Google App. They just have to sign into the Google App and tap their profile picture to open the menu.
• Passwordless by Default: Passkeys are a simpler and more secure way to sign into sites online and can be used with the Google Accounts. To make transition to passwordless even easier, Google is offering the ability to set up passkeys for all users — by default.
• A new requirement to make email safer for everyone:  Gmail recently announced new requirements for large senders to make email safer and more user-friendly for everyone, including enforcing authentication, enabling easy unsubscription, enforcing a clear spam rate threshold. This is in addition to Gmail’s AI-powered defenses, which block more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware — that’s 15 billion unwanted emails every day. 
• Easier access to clear browsing data: Google added an option to quickly delete users’ browsing history in Chrome without interrupting current activities. Users just need to click the three dots in the top-right corner of the Chrome browser and select “Clear browsing data”.
• Use the Google App as the credential provider for your iOS device: Google Password Manager is built into the Google App and you can already use it to securely save your passwords and sign in faster when you’re using the app. Now, you can set it as your Autofill provider so that the Google App can help you quickly and securely autofill your passwords into any app or website on your iOS device.

Feel free to read more about the announcements in Google’s blog post.

By MediaBUZZ

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group unveiled its latest large language model, Tongyi Qianwen.

Media placement and creative work hand in hand when it comes to effective advertising strategies. A new study by MAGNA Media Trials and Yahoo set out to understand the role that creative quality plays in ad effectiveness, and the elements that contribute to quality creative. Creative, the Performance Powerhouse found that while media placement helps marketers find consumers where they are, creative quality was responsible for 56% of purchase intent, illustrating the strong performance of both tactics as they work together. The study suggests that marketers can greatly benefit from making small improvements to their creative in order to optimize ad performance, while also driving brand quality and trust.

The Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum (IDI Forum) 2023, revolving around the theme of "New Apps ∙ New Data ∙ New Resilience," took place on May 23 in Munich, Germany. The Forum brings together global industry experts and partners to explore the future of digital infrastructure towards the yottabyte era (a yottabyte is equal to a quadrillion gigabytes).

IBM released its annual Cost of a Data Breach Report, showing the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million in 2023 – an all-time high for the report and a 15% increase over the last 3 years. Detection and escalation costs jumped 42% over this same time frame, representing the highest portion of breach costs, and indicating a shift towards more complex breach investigations.

Google and the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) announced a strategic collaboration to bolster Singapore’s cyber resilience. This partnership covers four key pillars: threat intelligence sharing, joint operations, technical collaboration, and ecosystem development.

A 2023 Emotional Intelligence Market study citing “heavy growth” of $49.93 billion USD by 2027 exemplifies the extent to which mastering “EQ” versus IQ is taking brands to exciting new levels of success … and why not embracing EQ can result in extreme opportunity loss or, far worse, be an outright brand buster. This as today’s highly discriminating and demanding marketplace is seemingly rife with substitutable solutions. Whether the B2B or B2C sector, more often than not today’s consumers have alternate options—and they know it.

Microsoft introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot earlier this year, which will bring powerful new generative AI capabilities to apps millions of people use every day like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Microsoft Teams and more.

5G will account for over two-fifths (41%) of mobile connections in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region by 2030, up from 4% in 2022, according to the GSMA's Mobile Economy APAC 2023 Report.

Organizations in Singapore are increasing their reliance on the cloud. Nearly nine in ten organizations in the country are using cloud services, with about 70% taking a hybrid cloud approach.

The Asia Video Industry Association’s (AVIA) Future of Video India conference opened to a full house with a keynote conversation with Shri Apurva Chandra, Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB). Secretary Chandra stated that with OTT (over-the-top), Indian content has become more accessible and more acceptable to a global audience. “Quality of content has always been very good in India, but now it is easier for Indian content to travel across the world. OTT has helped it in a big way,” said Chandra. He also reiterated the need for OTT to continue with a soft touch approach, as the three tier self-regulatory system has been working well. While there were concerns that light touch regulation has led to less desirable content, he remained of the view that the industry needed to be more self-aware so that the government need not step in. Chandra also shared that a National Broadcasting Policy has been in the works, as the industry was becoming more fragmented. However, this would take time in order to balance the conflicting interests of all the disparate parties.

Yahoo Advertising announced a new integration with Twilio Segment Customer Data Platform (CDP) to drive greater advertising reach and relevance, without relying on third-party cookies.

Appier announces that it has integrated Generative AI (GenAI) technology into three major marketing capabilities across its product lines. By connecting its advanced GenAI algorithms with OpenAI's ChatGPT language model, Appier can leverage the power of pioneering technology to help businesses increase productivity through advertising keywords and targeting parameters generation; intelligent conversational chatbot creation; and marketing copywriting and automatic content generation.

The marketing data and analytics company, Kantar, revealed the winners of the 2023 Creative Effectiveness Awards in Southeast Asia, recognizing the most impactful ads of last year.