Troll YouTube long enough and chances are good that you’ll come across all kinds of videos of the “How It’s Made” genre. And buried in with the frying pans and treadmills and dental floss manufacturers, there no doubt will be deep dives on how pipe is made. Methods will vary by material, but copper, PVC, cast iron, or even concrete, what the pipe factories will all have in common is the high degree of automation they employ. With a commodity item like pipe, it’s hard to differentiate yourself from another manufacturer on features, so price is about the only way to compete. That means cutting costs to the bone, and that means getting rid of as many employees as possible.

Such was not always the case, of course, as this look at how Irish Stoneware & Fireclays Ltd. made clay pipe, drain tiles, and chimney flues back in the 1980s shows. The amount of handwork involved in making a single, simple piece of clay pipe is astonishing, as is the number of hands employed at the various tasks. The factory was located in Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, Ireland, near an outcropping of shale that forms the raw material for its products. Quarrying the shale and milling it into clay were among the few mechanized steps in the process; although the extrusion of the pipe itself was also mechanized, the machines required teams of workers to load and unload them.

The amount of handwork that went into the pipes once they came out of the extruder was remarkable, especially the sewer pipes. The creation of the “Armstrong junction,” a complex fitting that serves as a cleanout and inspection port for sewer lines, was fascinating to watch, especially since almost no jigs were used and no measurements were taken. It was strictly Mark I eyeball stuff, along with skill and decades of experience.

We love these documentaries that capture what are now some of the long-lost methods of making stuff. The “Hands” series was made in the 1980s by RTÉ, Ireland’s public service broadcaster, and one gets the sense that even then, long before the current wave of off-shoring and globalization had begun, they knew they were capturing the last days of dying industries. We’re glad they did.

There’s something to be said for a song you enjoy so much you could listen to it again. Spotify is home to an immense amount of music, and when you find a song that just clicks with you in a certain time and space, sometimes you can’t help but just put it on repeat. If you know how to, that is. Let’s discuss how to put a song on repeat on Spotify.

READ MORE: What is the Spotify Premium Family plan?

THE SHORT ANSWER

Jessica Bursztynsky / CNBC:
Meta says it will change its stock ticker symbol to “META” prior to the market open on June 9  —  – Meta announced Tuesday that it will change its stock ticker symbol to “META” prior to market open on June 9.  — Facebook rebranded to Meta in October, saying it was part of its “growing ambitions beyond social media.”

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

When the company formerly known as Facebook announced its plan to rebrand last October, it also announced a new stock ticker. At the time, execs said that after ten years as FB, its NASDAQ listing would transition to MVRS for the metaverse. However, after the investment fund listed under META vacated the symbol in January, Meta Platforms quickly confirmed that it would use META instead, while at the same time announcing its first drop in daily active users, ever. Now it has filed paperwork saying the shift will become official before the market opens on June 9th (via CNBC).

Right now, people still think of Meta as the home of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, but the plan is to make it into much more than those social media mainstays….

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Keeping up appearances is a good thing. If people associate you with a photo that you use on other platforms, like Facebook or Instagram, adding that same profile photo to your Spotify account can help them identify you. At the same time, if you want to switch things up and go with a different photo for your Spotify profile, you always have the option of doing that, too. Let’s review how to change your profile picture on Spotify.

Read more: How to find your Spotify username

THE SHORT ANSWER 

Atlas VPN:
Safari now has an estimated 1B+ users, making it the second browser to pass the milestone, behind Chrome’s 3.37B+, but ahead of Edge’s 212M+ and Firefox’s 179M+  —  Browsers can connect you to any place on the internet.  It retrieves and renders data to show it nicely on your screen.

Have you been slowly falling down a rabbit hole of Stallman-like paranoia of computers ever since installing Ubuntu for the first time in 2007? Do you now abhor anything with a GUI, including browsers? Do you check your mail with the command line even though you’re behind seven proxies? But, do you still want to play Minecraft? If so, this command-line-only screen viewer might just be the tool to use a GUI without technically using one.

This remote screen viewer is built in Python by [louis-e] and, once installed, allows the client to view the screen of the server even if the client is a text-only console. [louis-e] demonstrates this from within a Windows command prompt. The script polls the server screen and then displays it in the console using the various colors and textures available. As a result, the resolution and refresh rate are both quite low, but it is still functional enough to play Minecraft and do other GUI-based tasks as long as there’s no fine text to read anywhere.

The video below only shows a demonstration of the remote screen viewer, and we can imagine plenty of uses beyond this proof-of concept game demonstration. Installing a desktop environment and window manager is not something strictly necessary for all computers, so this is a functional workaround if you don’t want to waste time and resources installing either of those components. If you’re looking for remote desktop software for a more specific machine, though, take a look at this software which enables remote desktop on antique Macs.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Netflix’s test to crack down on password sharing has reportedly left some users confused, according to a report from Rest of World. The streaming service started experimenting with password-sharing solutions in Peru, Chile, and Costa Rica in March, prompting subscribers in these markets to pay an additional fee to enable streaming for others outside their household who use the same account.

When speaking to over a dozen Netflix subscribers in Peru, Rest of World found that most users weren’t formally made aware of the policy change through an email or notification sent by Netflix — not even two months out from Netflix’s initial announcement. The outlet also learned that Netflix’s level of enforcement varied from user to user, with some…

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Press-n-go. | Image: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The first time I started a car by pressing a button, it felt too easy and convenient — like I had somehow stumbled into a tax bracket I don’t belong in. “You’re telling me,” I thought, “that I can just leave my keys in my pocket, and the car will let me get in and drive around?”

The push-button ignition is one of those buttons that doesn’t really add any new functionality over the thing it’s replacing (in this case, the ignition system that has you insert and turn a key). It exists solely for the sake of convenience, a job that it excels at. You get in the car, press down on the brake pedal and a button, and you’re ready to drive. It’s barely more difficult than unlocking your phone.

It’s also, for most of us, anyway, the most raw…

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Instagram is the ideal platform for sharing visual content like photos and videos. As you may know, whenever a user posts a photo to their Instagram account, they publish a caption with it that describes the content, gives it context, and is optimized with hashtags. However, did you know that you could see captions—or subtitles—on Instagram videos, too? Let’s discuss how to turn captions on or off on Instagram videos.

Read more: How to turn YouTube closed captions on or off

A playlist is an amalgamation of various songs that are organized in an easily accessible way. Spotify allows you to download music through playlists, and you can add up to 10,000 songs to those playlists at any given time. In order to build any kind of playlist, you need to know how to add songs to a playlist on Spotify. 

Read more: How to shuffle on Spotify

THE SHORT ANSWER

Greg Stohr / Bloomberg Law:
SCOTUS blocks Texas’ social media content moderation law in a 5-4 vote, putting the measure on hold while a constitutional challenge proceeds in a lower court  —  The US Supreme Court blocked a Texas law that critics say would fundamentally transform Twitter Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook …

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

A Texas law that would have banned much social media moderation is once again on hold. In a 5-4 ruling handed down today, the Supreme Court vacated an earlier decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, meaning that HB 20 — which forbids banning, demonetizing, or downranking Texas users’ posts based on “viewpoint” — will be blocked while a lawsuit over its constitutionality proceeds. A lower court had already blocked the law in 2021 before the Fifth Circuit unblocked it this May.

NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), who filed suit to stop HB 20, petitioned the Supreme Court for a ruling earlier this month — responding to a surprising and unexplained ruling from the Fifth Circuit. Justice Samuel…

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Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
TikTok is testing a “clear mode” feature that removes usernames, captions, audio information, and more for a distraction-free scrolling experience  —  TikTok is testing a new feature that would allow for a distraction-free scrolling experience on the app, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.

Leah Nylen / Bloomberg:
Sources: the FTC has revamped its Amazon antitrust probe, shaking up the investigative team, re-interviewing potential witnesses, and asking about the MGM deal  —  The US Federal Trade Commission has revamped its antitrust probe of Amazon.com Inc., shaking up the investigative team …

As electronics hobbyists we are grateful to our spouses and flatmates who gracefully tolerate all of our weird equipment and chaotic projects in their homes. But it takes a different level of dedication to share one’s home with a pipe organ enthusiast: back in the 1970s, one organist in Bristol went to the effort of installing a full-sized church organ into their house, effectively turning the modest dwelling into one giant musical instrument. Recently however, the house passed on to new owners who, understandably anxious to reclaim some space, listed the whole system on eBay.

No cash in this attic; just lots of zinc pipes and pneumatic tubing.

Thankfully, the auction was won not by some scrap metal dealer but by [Look Mum No Computer], our favourite expert on odd musical instruments. He drove out all the way from Kent to help disassemble the organ and stuff the dozens of pipes, miles of cable and numerous valves, tubes, latches and switches into his van. Once back home, he faced the daunting task of reassembling the whole lot into something capable of playing music, which he’s currently documenting in a video series.

The organ’s new home is This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete, where it has its own room decorated in a style similar to the house it spent much of its life in. The first step to getting it working was to fire up the blower, which is effectively a powerful electric air pump together with a pressure-regulating mechanism. Once this was working, one row of pipes was added to test the actuation system. This consists of a set of solenoids that simply open or close the air supply to each pipe. [LMNC] still had an Arduino-based organ driver system from an earlier project, which allowed him to connect a MIDI keyboard to the partially-complete instrument and play a few notes on it.

There’s still a lot to be done, but we’re definitely impressed by what [LMNC] has achieved so far and can’t wait to see the organ restored to its former glory. We already knew that you could control pipe organs through MIDI, and we’ve seen much smaller organs built from scratch. Thanks for the tip, [hackbyte]!

Passant Rabie / Gizmodo:
Elon Musk: “Starlink 2.0 satellites are almost an order of magnitude more capable than Starlink 1.0” and weigh 4.8X more, needing the upcoming Starship rocket  —  The generation 2 satellites are meant to be more powerful than their earlier counterparts.  —  Alerts

Jordan Novet / CNBC:
Salesforce reports Q1 revenue of $7.41B, up 24% YoY, vs $7.38B est., net income down 94% YoY to $28M, and operating cash flow up 14% YoY to $3.68B; stock up 6%+  —  – Salesforce earnings beat expectations on the top and bottom lines.  — The Dow Jones Industrial Average component changed …

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2 out of 10 new businesses close in the first year of operation, and 9 out of 10 startups fail (Startup Genome data). Despite entrepreneurs’ colossal motivation and a strong urge to make a great product, they often make mistakes that could have been avoided.

CEO & Founder of Refocus, Roman Kumar Vyas, will tell you about the most common mistakes that every marketer and entrepreneur should avoid.

#1 Not Understanding the Market

You came up with a new product and decided to launch it on the market right away. At the same time, you have no idea of the market needs and your target market. If the market is declining, your project has a chance to go down at the start.

EXAMPLE: The launch of a mobile-video platform, Quibi, was a big failure, despite high expectations and impressive investments. Between Warner Bros, Lionsgate, MGM, and more investors, the streaming platform has raised around $1.8 billion overall.

In addition, the company was managed by the magnate and former chairman of Walt Disney Studios, Jeffrey Katzenberg. With those resources came great promises to rock the market for streaming television. Quibi wanted to compete with TikTok, YouTube, and other popular services.

How could Quibi fail? A complete misunderstanding of their consumers and the trends of the market.

The quality of films and T.V. series was inferior to competitors — Quibi accepted projects that HBO or Netflix did not accept.
According to Sensor Tower, the app has been downloaded 4.5 million times, but 92% of users refused to renew their subscription after the trial period. Among the reasons for the refusal were the quantity of content and the high cost. Quibi has asked for $8 per month with 175 shows in the first year of launch, whereas Netflix offers for $9 about 2,000 films and 3,800 TV series.
Quibi was advertised during the Oscar broadcast. But the viewers’ average age hits 56 years old and over. Moreover, instead of advertising shows, Quibi promoted the platform itself. 70% of the surveyed Oscar and Super Bowl viewers thought Quibi was a food delivery service.

ANSWER: Ways to avoid this mistake:

Conduct market research — market volume and total addressable market (TAM). Explore assessments of different players, read, research, and consult market experts.
Identify if the market is growing or not. If it’s growing, then at what pace? Study the data for 3-5 years and the forecast for 2-5 years.
Study industry trends and market preferences. Watch for new products and solutions like food delivery aggregators, sports services, or how your target market reacts to these trends.
Do a competitive analysis. (i.e., how many companies there are, how long they have been on the market, and what their market segment is)

#2 Failing To Understand Your Audience

Have you launched an ad campaign, but no one clicks on the banners? Most likely, there is an issue with defining the audience and communication.

EXAMPLE: When the Refocus team launched its marketing agency, they promoted the product on the U.K. market — the installment card. [credit card.] “With no doubt, we decided that the product would be most in-demand among girls, simply because they love shopping and often make expensive purchases. It was a big failure, so we lost hundreds of thousands of pounds [dollars] in the ad campaign.”

“Realizing our mistake, we decided to do a deep research — CustDev. It turned out that the most relevant audience segment is men 35-45 years old. So, unfortunately, we spent a lot of money and time running irrelevant ads.”

Marketing should be flexible: if you understand that something goes wrong, you should find a solution and change the situation ASAP.

ANSWER — Ways to avoid this mistake:

Interview clients using the JTBD methodology (the essence: the client hires a product to do some work). You need to find 7-9 respondents from each audience segment for a representative sample.
Analyze the received data and look for standard and repetitive phrases.
The data about JOBS, will be the basis of meanings for creatives (banners, videos) and landing pages.
One of the critical tasks of CustDev is to understand the client’s pains and JOBS. If you stop for a moment and adjust communication, you can increase your profitability. This is logical because the product is made for the client; no one will tell you how to satisfy the client’s needs better than them.

Recommendations:

The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez.

#3 You Don’t Follow the Trend in Creatives

Marketing changes all the time. So you need to keep an eye on trends and develop your creativity. Your creatives should be eye-catchy; otherwise, you will lose all your budget with no profit.

ANSWER: Ways to avoid this mistake:

Follow the trends regularly. For example, unpacking videos are the most popular and have the best C.R. You are familiar with this type of video when a happy customer unpacks the product and explains why it is needed. Another popular format is production video, where customers can see the stages of production. The CEO videos of executives discussing their products and product review videos from ordinary customers are also trustworthy and effective.
Explain the JOBS of the product in the first 3 seconds. In this case, you will draw your customer’s attention.
If your ads put users to sleep, don’t expect them to click. Your creatives must break banner blindness and have a bright design.

EXAMPLE: Hoof Doctor provides hoof care and farrier products for horses. The company launched the ad campaign with a product review video from its customers. In this video, the man spoke about the advantages of the product and his experience. It wasn’t a scripted video. Instead, it was spontaneous with an imperfect speech from a real customer who bought the product. This video increased the level of trust among the target audience.

#4 You Don’t Have an Elaborated Sales Funnel

You can have great marketing, but it’s pointless if your sales funnel isn’t so great. A poorly elaborated sales funnel leads to money wasted. What could go wrong? For example, a client opens a website, sees it’s not mobile-friendly, and the call to action (CTA) button isn’t working.

How often have you left a request or feedback on a website but never got an answer?

ANSWER: Ways to avoid this mistake:

It’s better to adjust the analytics in every sales funnel stage and control all the data in real-time. It’s crucial to understand how people move from every stage and then go away. Your goal is to optimize the sales funnel as much as possible. For better user experience — make your website mobile-friendly. The lead form should be convenient and easy to load. Otherwise, customers will choose your competitors.
Add triggers in potentially weak stages. Work on the trigger strategy — set up push notifications or emails so that users don’t leave if you can’t fix the funnel quickly.

#5 Forgetting the Importance of Analytics

One of the most serious and expensive mistakes entrepreneurs and marketers make is the lack of a system for collecting and analyzing data on marketing effectiveness. As a result, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

ANSWER: Ways to avoid this mistake:

Every digital project should start from analytics. You should measure Conversion Rate (C.R.), Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost per Click (CPC), and other essential marketing metrics.
Control the sales data: use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) properly, and enable call tracking.
Use the system of end-to-end analytics — it’s a data combination of all steps from the banner to repeated purchases in CRM. For example, knowing which ad channel or ad campaign converts money better is necessary.

EXAMPLE: The online store of German premium cosmetics, Phyris, initially chose cosmetologists as the main segment of the target audience. The company focused on communication on the texture and the effect of creams — functional JOBS. The conversion rate was very low.

After getting CustDev, they realized that their customers pay a lot of attention to cosmetics packaging. Owners of Phyris didn’t expect that having a beautiful cream in the bathroom is essential for their audience.

When a guest sees aesthetic jars in the bathroom, they think that the person who uses them is in another league. The social JOB turned out to be more important than the functional one.

So they began to use images of jars in premium interiors in ad creatives and add better infographics on the product card. The advertising campaign paid off perfectly, and the company received several million. The conversion rate increased four times.

Understand Motivation — Learn from your mistakes.

In his book Business The Speed Of Thought, Bill Gates wrote: “Learning from mistakes and constantly improving products is a key in all successful companies.”

Don’t be afraid of mistakes — they happen to everybody. If something is wrong with marketing — dig deeper, find the problem and fix it.

You don’t have to wait until all the budget is wasted and gone, and it’s too late to make a difference. 

Image Credit: Internal article photos provided by the author. Thank you!

Top Image Credit: by Alena Darmel; Pexels; Thank you!

The post The Best Ways To Avoid 5 Common Marketing Mistakes appeared first on ReadWrite.

Dell’s 32-inch display comes with a focus on video calls. | Image: Dell

Dell has finally revealed the $1,599.99 price attached to the UltraSharp 32-inch 4K video conferencing monitor it previewed at CES (via 9to5Mac). If that price sounds familiar, it’s because Apple’s 27-inch Studio Display costs almost the exact same amount — only Dell justifies the price with the monitor’s size and its camera sensor, while Apple’s sales pitch leans on that still-rare 5K resolution.

The Dell monitor (U3223QZ) comes with a focus on videoconferencing, made clear by Dell’s built-in UltraSharp webcam with a 4K HDR Sony Starvis sensor that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help keep you in the frame during a call. This is a bit like Apple’s Center Stage feature used in the Studio Display and other Apple devices, a similar…

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TikTok’s testing a “clear mode.”

Some TikTok users have started noticing a “Clear Mode” option, which lets them watch a video without the UI overlay that usually shows things like the favorite and comment buttons and other info about the video. TikTok confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s currently testing the feature, but it’s unclear how many people have access to it.

Those that are in the test group (which includes at least two Verge staffers) can access clear mode by pressing and holding on a video, then tapping the Clear Mode button on the menu that pops up. The same method can be used to exit clear mode, and there’s also a button in the bottom right corner that will return you to the standard UI.

Activating clear mode is a two-step process….

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Users wanting multi-day battery life from the upcoming Google Pixel Watch may be in for a disappointment.

The Pixel Watch was unveiled at Google I/O, after years of rumors and anticipation. One of the main questions was what kind of battery the wearable would have and how long it would last. According to 9to5Google’s source, the new watch will feature a 300mAh battery that will last up to one day on a full charge.

Dan Goodin / Ars Technica:
Researchers told Microsoft on April 12 of an RCE Windows exploit being used in the wild; Microsoft now calls it a critical flaw, but it’s still unpatched  —  All supported versions of Windows affected.  —  A critical code execution zero-day in all supported versions of Windows …

Moses Ingram as Reva Sevander / the Third Sister. | Image: Disney Plus/Lucasfilm

In response to a swift and all too predictable wave of racist backlash from Star Wars “fans” dismayed by the idea of Black people existing in space, Disney has issued a statement supporting Obi-Wan Kenobi actor Moses Ingram.

Though Obi-Wan Kenobi’s first two episodes premiered only just last week, that was all the time it took for Star Wars obsessives to fixate on Ingram’s character Reva Sevander, one of the Galactic Empire’s Inquisitors tasked with exterminating the galaxy’s Jedi. On the Monday following this year’s Star Wars Celebration event, Ingram took to her personal Instagram account to share a selection from the “hundreds” of anti-Black, misogynist messages she’s received for portraying a fictional villain who does evil things….

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