We are back with the latest news in the digital marketing world! Grab your preferred drink of choice and tune in to Sunday Rundown #84 🙂

Microsoft kickstarts settlement discussions with European cloud companies over antitrust complaints

Microsoft has kickstarted settlement discussions with European not-for-profit trade association Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), some six months after CISPE filed an antitrust complaint alleging that Microsoft was using its dominance in business software to tether customers to its Azure cloud platform.

The news comes less than a month after news emerged that Microsoft was close to settling a separate complaint with a trio of cloud organizations in Europe, including France’s OVHcloud, Italy’s Aruba and Denmark’s industry association Danish Cloud Community. The trio filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission (EC) last March, alleging that Microsoft made it more expensive to run its software in rival clouds compared to its own Azure platform, while also making it technically more difficult to run some of the programs.

TikTok remains top social app for teens despite drop in favorability, study finds

  • TikTok remains teens’ most favored social media platform so far in 2023, though its favorability fell one percentage point from the fall of 2022 with a 37% share, according to Piper Sandler’s Spring 2023 Taking Stock with Teens survey.
  • Behind TikTok is Snap (27%) and Instagram (23%). TikTok has been the top ranking social media app since spring 2022, when it unseated Snap. Thirty-one percent of teens spend their daily video consumption on Netflix, followed by YouTube (28%), both falling one percentage point from last fall.
  • Among spending priorities, food was top of the list for men (24%) and clothing was top of the list for women (28%). Nike remains the top brand for all teens for both apparel (33%) and footwear (61%), while Amazon is regarded as the top e-commerce site (57%).

Google celebrates April Fools’ with Cardboard Plastic, ‘the world’s first actual reality headset’

With the release of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, it’s a very serious few weeks for virtual reality. So it’s the perfect time to lighten up with Google’s latest April Fools’ Day product: an all-new VR headset that truly lives up to the medium’s promise. That’s Google Cardboard Plastic, “the world’s first actual reality headset.”

Designed with “4D integrated perspective, 360-degree spatially accurate sound, 20/20 resolution, and advanced haptics for realistic touch sensations,” Plastic is an elegant piece of hardware that claims to let you “notice what you do, see, and feel more than before” — because it’s a clear block of plastic, obviously. As Google puts it, “what’s realer than real? Probably nothing. Or maybe something! I doubt it, though. I think we’re done.”

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