Every month at SIMS, Max provides a brief run-down of just some of the tech-related news that may affect small businesses, and agencies that work with small businesses and we post the links here. If any of these catch your interest, but you're not sure how they would affect you, feel free to get in touch and ask!
For photos and notes from last night, you can find them in November SIMS write up. You can find slides from Kathryn and Julian's presentation here.
Instagram are providing yet more tools to help you reach new people on their network, this time with "streams".
http://recode.net/2015/10/31/instagram-joins-snapchat-twitter-with-new-event-specific-content-streams/
Anywhere that you might have been previously been pulling data into a spreadsheet to manipulate, you can now do it Analytics itself. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6121409
The new Apple tv is out. The media-based among you can create apps to deliver your content directly to millions of people on the Apple TV app-store.
http://www.apple.com/uk/tv/
Google's app (voice search) is getting even better at context when it comes to superlatives and dates.
http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-google-app-now-understands-you.html#gpluscomments
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/16/9745826/google-app-gets-smarter
Google is working on show warning about unencrypted email providers. If you're using a trusted email provider, you should be fine. If you're not sure, you might want to ask the person in charge of your emails before this becomes a thing.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/13/9728406/google-gmail-encryption-email-warnings
360 degree videos: We mentioned them at last month's SIMS, but now they're here and they're in your Facebook newsfeed.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/12/9723214/facebook-360-degree-video-ios
A redesign as Google continue to work out what Google+ is. Your opinion may vary depending on how (or whether at all) you use it. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/11/introducing-new-google.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/updating-our-search-quality-rating.html
Read the complete PDF file here.
“In 2013, we published our human rating guidelines to provide transparency on how Google works and to help webmasters understand what Google looks for in web pages. Since that time, a lot has changed: notably, more people have smartphones than ever before and more searches are done on mobile devices today than on computers.
We often make changes to the guidelines as our understanding of what users wants evolves, but we haven’t shared an update publicly since then. However, we recently completed a major revision of our rater guidelines to adapt to this mobile world, recognizing that people use search differently when they carry internet-connected devices with them all the time. You can find that update here (PDF).
There's a new book out with a comprehensive guide to learning Google Adwords & Analytics. At 480 pages, it's not for the beginner or the faint-of-heart, but you can get it on Amazon (including Kindle) now.
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Google-AdWords-Analytics/dp/0994390408/
http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/new-book-learning-google-adwords-and.html