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Apple’s security restrictions for the Vision Pro are creating roadblocks for app developers but future users will be glad to see the privacy protections in place.
Vision Pro launched only in the United States With back in February, with China and several other countries expected later this year. So it’s no surprise that app developers want to get a piece of the pie. However, according to The Information via 9to5Mac, Apple is limiting the types of apps that companies want to make.
Developers have complained that they can’t use the device’s in-built cameras. For example, Antony Vitillo, developer of AR fitness game HitMotion, stated that he wanted to access the product’s cameras so that users could ‘interact’ with real-world items like punching bags.
Apple Vision Pro’s privacy boundaries
However, Apple doesn’t let apps access that level of data for privacy reasons – and with good reason. It’s not too long ago that people will remember the controversy around the Google Glass AR headset.
Users were uncomfortable with the omnipresence of a camera on a headset, with widespread concerns about data protection and privacy.
Apple has long been known for strong privacy measures, so users and developers can expect it to be no less tight with this kind of a product, too. While some apps might want access to the camera for purely practical, useful reasons, opening up that door could also allow in some maliciously minded people or groups.
No matter how good the app might be, it’s likely not worth handing over potentially unlimited access to a camera that people will have on display in their homes. With recent data from HP, reported on by Forbes, showing that 49% of Americans are concerned about someone watching them through their webcam, it can only be a welcome obstacle from the point of view of consumers.
It’s lucky that Apple has one tick in its book regarding the Vision Pro at least, after catching criticism upon its release for the eye-watering price tag.
Featured image: Apple
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Bitcoin and the wider cryptocurrency market are poised for significant growth this year, predicts Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of blockchain startup Ripple.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Garlinghouse predicted that the total market capitalization of the crypto industry could double to $5 trillion by the end of 2023.
Garlinghouse pointed to several macroeconomic factors driving this bullish outlook, including the recent approval of the first U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the upcoming Bitcoin “halving” event. The spot ETFs, which began trading on U.S. stock exchanges in January after being approved by the SEC, allow both institutions and retail investors to gain exposure to Bitcoin without directly owning the digital asset.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin halving, a technical event occurring roughly every four years that cuts the mining reward in half, is expected to take place later this month and could further constrict supply while demand grows. Garlinghouse told CNBC:
I’ve been around this industry for a long time, and I’ve seen these trends come and go. […] I’m very optimistic. I think the macro trends, the big-picture things like the ETFs, they’re driving for the first time real institutional money.
The cryptocurrency market has already seen impressive gains over the past year, with Bitcoin rising more than 140% and hitting a record high above $73,000 in March before pulling back. As the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, accounting for about 49% of the entire crypto market’s value, Bitcoin’s performance heavily influences the broader digital asset space.
An evolving landscape
Beyond the technical and macroeconomic drivers, Garlinghouse also sees positive regulatory momentum in the U.S. as a potential catalyst for the crypto market this year. With 2023 being an election year, there is optimism that the next administration may take a more accommodative stance toward the industry.
This comes despite the current SEC, under Chair Gary Gensler, taking an aggressive enforcement approach against crypto companies, including Ripple itself which is fighting a lawsuit alleging it illegally sold its XRP token as an unregistered security.
One of the things actually I’ll say on the macro tail winds for the industry: I think we will get more clarity in the United States. […] The U.S. is still the largest economy in the world, and it’s unfortunately been one of the more hostile crypto markets. And I think that’s going to start to change, also.”
Garlinghouse is not alone in his bullish predictions for the crypto market. Marshall Beard, COO of U.S. crypto exchange Gemini, recently told CNBC he expects Bitcoin to reach $150,000 later this year amid the confluence of factors like the halving, ETF launches, regulatory developments, and overall adoption and activity in the space.
Back in March, Bitcoin reached a new all-time high, surpassing the $71,000 mark for the first time. This surge came on the heels of the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority giving the green light to cryptocurrency exchange-traded products.
The upward trajectory of Bitcoin’s price gained momentum in January when the United States securities regulator approved spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This approval was a catalyst for the cryptocurrency’s value, which breached the $70,000 threshold just last week. In a similar vein, Ethereum (ETH) also achieved a significant milestone on Monday, crossing the $4,000 mark.
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A strong online presence has numerous benefits regardless of the size and type of your business. A solid online presence helps increase brand awareness, qualified leads, and sales. It’s vital to implement strategies to take your online presence a notch higher.
However, boosting your online visibility and confidence can be overwhelming.
How to Improve Your Online Presence
Whether you’ve taken the first steps or are planning to roll out a digital marketing campaign, the following strategies can help your business stand out from competitors.
1. Enhance Your Website’s User Experience
A website is a vital asset for businesses in the digital age, where customers spend more time online. The website helps potential customers understand your offers and value proposition. Most importantly, it educates the audience about your work process, location, active hours, and contact information.
However, this doesn’t mean you should create a basic site. Instead, it must be visually appealing and user-friendly. Modern consumers have high expectations and won’t interact with low-quality or hard-to-navigate websites.
When new leads and customers visit your website, you want to ensure they can navigate easily and find what they want. Most importantly, it must adhere to ADA regulations that dictate how people with disabilities can access your site. User experience extends beyond what your customers see on your website. Ideally, offering outstanding customer service is prudent since it ensures customers have a pleasant online experience when buying from your brand.
2. Master Your SEO Strategy
Algorithms constantly evolve, making SEO one of the most reliable strategies to establish and build a strong online presence. Mastering the most current search engine optimization strategies ensure your brand shows up on the first page when people use similar queries on search engines.
Both on-site SEO and off-site SEO are vital for online marketing success. On-site SEO revolves around content, where you start by performing keyword research and including quality links. However, the content must be informative and answer all the search queries.
On the other hand, off-site SEO focuses on the technical part of content marketing. For instance, you should ensure the correct website setup, simple URL structure, and fast loading speed. Also, off-site SEO involves building social proof and credibility with authoritative backlinks. If you want to see substantial results, you can use SEO audit tools to optimize off-page and on-page local SEO.
3. Create Valuable Content Addressing Audience Pain-points
The ultimate goal for every business is to make profits, but you can only make money when you create value and address a need in the market. You can create value by offering helpful online content for free. This strategy helps your customers and enhances your online presence.
Start by studying your buyer personas and list their motivations and pain points. Understanding your target customers can help you generate content ideas to answer their questions and establish an effective content marketing strategy. Whether you’re giving professional advice through guest posts, blog posts, comments, or podcasts, always answer your audience’s queries.
For instance, if you’re a realtor in Virginia, try to cover all the questions about Virginia Beach house buyers to ensure your prospects understand how the process works. In addition, it sets your business apart from the competition.
4. Set Up and Maintain a Consistent Social Media Presence
Social media has become quite popular over the years. At least 4.76 billion people are active on social media platforms, making social media a vital tool for interacting with your target audience on various platforms.
A strong social media presence instills trust in your prospects and current customers. Brands that don’t have an active social media presence can make potential customers lose trust and doubt their existence.
In addition, social media offers a great opportunity for new businesses to establish credibility and industry reputation and showcase their products. Most people turn to social media when researching your brand to see your content and testimonials about your business from previous customers.
5. Consider Online Advertising
Online advertising offers a quick solution to the conventional process of building an online reputation. When your business appears on the first page of the search results, you can establish brand awareness and enhance online visibility.
You can place adverts on various search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Bing. Alternatively, you can try social media advertising on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube to diversify your online advertising.
However, it’s vital to consider the offer you want to promote before you start online advertising. You can promote high-conversion content, newsletters, or product landing pages. After prioritizing your offers, you can determine the most suitable platform to advertise on based on audience match.
6. Build a Qualified Email List
Email marketing offers an outstanding ROI of about $36 for every $1 you spend, making it a good choice when building an online presence. However, getting a good ROI depends on how you build a qualified email list.
And while you can buy an email list, it may not be suitable for your business since you’ll reach out to people with zero interest in your brand and products. They don’t understand your business, so any marketing material you send doesn’t add value.
Unsolicited promotional emails compel people to unsubscribe and consider your brand spammy. Creating a strategy that targets your ideal customers and motivates them to subscribe to your newsletters is essential. You can accomplish this by offering free guides, tools, discounts, and exclusive offers.
You can also implement website design updates and encourage visitors to sign-up for your newsletters. If you have a blog, include a sign-up form on a popular blog post so your readers can get updates on the latest content.
However, your strategy should focus on quality, not quantity. And since you’ll be using a paid email management tool to send email campaigns and manage subscriber lists, ensuring the subscribers matter to your business is important. This way, you can ensure all your subscribers have a high chance of becoming your customers.
Improving Your Online Presence
A strong online presence is vital for offline and online businesses. It’s essential to understand practical methods of improving your online presence and attracting more customers.
Implementing reliable marketing strategies can help you establish an online presence, enhance brand awareness, and nurture a strong industry reputation. While building a lasting online presence requires resources and effort, it leads to increased sales.
The post 6 Strategies to Improve Your Online Presence appeared first on ReadWrite.

Bitcoin’s (BTC) impressive 7.6% price increase between April 6 and April 8, reaching an intraday peak of $72,747, has sparked widespread speculation about the underlying causes.
While some may point to inflows from spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as the main factor, it’s also very likely that a range of macroeconomic factors or halving anticipation played a major role. Crypto intelligence firm Santiment suggested that increased trader activity has persisted and it remains to be seen whether it will stick after the halving event expected to take place on April 19.

#Bitcoin #ETF volume hasn’t slowed down four weeks after the $BTC #AllTimeHigh. Among $GBTC, $IBIT, $FBTC, $ARKB, $BTCO, $BITB, and $HODL, trader activity is still notably higher than the turning point that began in late February after an influx of individual trading began… pic.twitter.com/LErr5T8BWF
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) April 7, 2024

It seems unlikely that Ethena’s purchase of $500 million in Bitcoin for its USDCe stablecoin collateral was the sole driver, given Bitcoin’s large daily spot trading volumes. Rather, investors’ expectations about the economy and cost of capital are likely more significant. Periods of increased liquidity and stimulative monetary policies tend to benefit scarce assets like Bitcoin, especially during times of persistent inflation.

After the unprecedented growth or USDe since launch, Ethena hedges represent ~20% of ETH open interest as of today
With $25bn of BTC open interest readily available for Ethena to delta hedge, the capacity for USDe to scale has increased >2.5x pic.twitter.com/glyvBQFEwj
— Ethena Labs (@ethena_labs) April 4, 2024

A disagreement
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently warned that the resilient U.S. economy could lead to stickier inflation and higher rates than expected. This helps explain premiums on gold ETFs in China as investors brace for inflation amid concerns over U.S. fiscal debt, exacerbated by recent government spending packages.
The banker’s comments follow Goldman Sachs chief investment officer, Sharmin Mossavar-Rahmani, claiming that Bitcoin is not considered an investment asset class and that the bank does not believe in cryptocurrencies. He said:
If you cannot assign a value, then how can you be bullish or bearish?
While some may argue that these dynamics don’t inherently favor Bitcoin since inflation erodes disposable income and rising U.S. debt could trigger a downturn, it’s hard to predict how investors will react given Bitcoin’s fluctuating correlations with stocks and gold. Escalating U.S.-China trade tensions may have also boosted interest in Bitcoin and gold as hedges.
Notably, gold hit a record $2,354 on April 8 even as Treasury yields climbed, defying their typical inverse relationship. The same day, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the U.S. may impose tariffs on subsidized Chinese clean energy products and noted other nations may also restrict trade with China.
I wouldn’t rule out anything out at this point. We need to keep everything on the table. We want to work with the Chinese to see if we can find a solution. […] We just want to make sure that we’re not driven out of business, and that our firms and workers have opportunities in these industries which will be important ones in our future.
In this context, Bitcoin’s surge to $72,000 likely reflects investors seeking a hedge against worsening global economic relations and fallout from U.S. stimulus measures, rather than being driven mainly by one-off Bitcoin purchases from certain investors. A confluence of macroeconomic factors appears to be the more plausible explanation.

The recent updraft that took Bitcoin’s price higher and higher took hold after the U.S.’s approval of spot Bitcoin spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) back in January, propelling the cryptocurrency to breach the $70,000 mark for the first time.

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A new video showcasing what Riot Games has planned for League of Legends suggests it’s following in the footsteps of hit game Vampire Survivors.
Taking the gaming world by storm in 2022, Vampire Survivors is a shoot ’em up video game developed and published by indie game developer Luca Galante, also known online as poncle. The game relies on time survival mechanics, featuring minimalistic gameplay and rogue elements – features that appear to be built upon in League of Legends’ summer update.
In the video detailing the work currently underway on League of Legends, Riot Games developer Selina Liu described the upcoming PVE mode as a “bullet heaven survivor PVE game mode”. That certainly echoes the trigger-happy vibe of Vampire Survivors.
“You’ll be able to fight against hordes of enemies by yourself or with friends”, developer Eduordo Cortejoso added. “I know a lot of us, myself included, have some pretty fond memories of previous PVE modes like Odyssey or Star Guardian, this time we wanted to make something markedly different”.
With Vampire Survivors being such a massive hit over the last couple of years, this isn’t the first game to take inspiration from other franchises, such as the recent Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. The budding genre, often known as an autoshooter, includes a character moving around the map and dealing with regular swarms of oncoming enemies at ever-increasing difficulty.

When is the League of Legends update coming?
The update is due to come out in the summer, although no exact date has yet been shared. Riot Games plans to release more details in a written dev blog next week. Keep an eye on the League of Legends website to be the first to know.
This isn’t Riot Games’ first foray into PvE game modes, having developed similar formats linked to the Star Guardian and Odyssey alternate universes before.
Featured image: League of Legends
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