When Apple’s WWDC 2020 digital-only Keynote event kickstarted, all eyes were on the new mac OS Big Sur and the ambitious Apple Silicon chips.

But, from the perspective of advertisement agencies, it was the new iOS 14 privacy-based features that sent shockwaves in their industry and became the major talking point.

For the uninitiated, a lot of apps today use an Advertising identifier (IDFA). It allows developers and marketers to track activity for advertising purposes.

Plenty of marketing agencies backed by Google and Facebook run campaigns to record purchases, usage time, user actions, and subsequently serve personalized ads.

Over 100K apps on the App Store today have the Facebook or Google SDK integrated which tracks and sends your data to the tech giants and third party brokers. …

We’re at the start of 2021 and a lot happened in the machine learning community during the past year.

Without wasting any time, here’s a tour through the most popular and trending open-source research projects, demos, and prototypes. It ranges from photo editing to NLP to training models with “no-code,” and I hope they inspire you to build incredible AI-powered products.

1. Background Matting v2

Background Matting v2 takes a cue from the popular The World is Your Green Screen open-source project and showcases how to remove or change the background in real-time. …

“Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA. Since we started WhatsApp, we’ve aspired to build our Services with a set of strong privacy principles in mind.”

This is what Facebook claimed after acquiring WhatsApp in 2014. And though at the time of writing WhatsApp’s privacy policy page still displays the same message, yet Facebook has just brought another bazooka in the war against Apple.

If you’ve opened WhatsApp on your Android or iOS device in the past week, you’d probably have seen the following dialog:

The introduction of iOS 14 brought in a slew of enhancements and interesting new features in Apple’s computer vision framework.

Vision framework was released in 2017 in a bid to allow mobile application developers to leverage complex computer vision algorithms with ease. Specifically, the framework incorporates a host of pre-trained deep learning models whilst also acting as a wrapper to quickly run your own custom Core ML models.

After the introduction of Text Recognition and VisionKit in iOS 13 to boost OCR, Apple shifted its focus towards sports and action classification in iOS 14’s Vision framework.

Primarily, the Vision framework now lets you do Contour Detection, Optical Flow Request and includes a bunch of new utilities for offline video processing. But more importantly, we can now do Hand and Body Pose Estimation — which certainly opens the door for new possibilities in augmented reality and computer vision. …

Bitcoin ended its bear run from a 12 month low in March 2020 to an all-time high above $23,000 by mid-December.

By the end of 2020, there was a lot of conjecture surrounding the wild rally of Bitcoin. Most people called this just another crypto bubble like the one in 2017.

Though in their defense, there are some similarities between Bitcoin’s bull run of 2020 and the two-month epic rally during 2017 — both of them happened at the end of the year and gained steam due to the halving event.

Regardless, now that we’re in 2021 and Bitcoin has already surpassed $34K, with a 20% YTD within the first three days of the year(that’s more than what most investment vehicles give per year), it’s pretty obvious that the current bull run is a lot different than 2017 and we can’t draw parallels. …

At the turn of this decade, very few people would have predicted that 2020 is going to be the year of Apple.

Fast forward three months and the chances looked even slimmer. The pandemic threatened to eclipse Apple’s limelight and delay their product release cycles — especially the 5G testing on iPhone 12.

Regardless, here we are at the start of 2021, and Apple, now a $2 trillion-dollar company despite all hiccups has stunned one and all.

They didn’t deliver a 120Hz display iPhone. Nor were they able to conduct a single live event for their product launches. Yet, through breakthrough technological advancements, clever business strategies, and smart marketing moves Apple has defied all expectations and emerged as the clear winner. …

Recently, I read an insightful piece where the author shared his first-hand experience in building Hackintosh(a home built computer that runs macOS).

The article evoked a sense of emotion as the writer walked us through his journey in building a PC to make it run macOS and how the new Apple Mac Mini is killing that ability with the new ARM-based M1 Chip.

Though the future of Hackintosh looks grim and there’s no doubt that its days are numbered, yet I believe there’s still some steam left. The support for Intel-based Mac won’t disappear abruptly.

Before we get down into the diminishing prospects of DIY Macs with the new Apple Silicon hardware, let’s dig through what a Hackintosh is and how it garnered so much popularity. …

Google has had a rollercoaster ride in 2020. They’ve had a lot of ups and downs and besides the usual killing of their own products, the search engine giant found themselves in the midst of the biggest anti-trust lawsuit of the decade this year.

Though their 8 billion dollar deal to stay as the default search engine on Apple devices had become the cusp of the DOJ hearing, yet Google played plenty more shrewd business strategies over the course of 2020 just to stay relevant.

For those unfamiliar, Google once had a motto: “Don’t be evil”. There’s little doubt that Google used that slogan as a jibe at its rival who were increasingly exploiting their customers while the tech giant was developing trust through its free products and services. …