April Fool’s Day is the defacto pull a prank day and in the recent past, the pranks have moved from just between friends to corporates pulling elaborate pranks on their customers. This year is no different and we have listed the best corporate pranks from around the world, we would also include our own prank that but we’re not the kind to blow our own whistle.
HornHub
US-based adult entertainment website, PornHub, has done it again. Every year, PornHub pulls elaborate pranks on the sites visitors and every year, things get funnier. For 2018, April Fool’s, the site changed its name to HornHub, subsequently changing its content to be about Horns – musical instruments made of tube. As usual, people on Twitter were loving the joke:
Ok I usually hate April Fools Day but @Pornhub have got me a spicy one pic.twitter.com/rIAUidNCic
— Michael Beveridge (@mickyb273) April 1, 2018
Note, April Fool’s Day was yesterday, if you happen to visit the site today, you’ll be met by different kinds of horns.
Snapchat
Ever since Facebook shamelessly copied almost every feature that Snapchat has and baked these features into their own platforms, Snapchat has taken it upon themselves to troll Facebook every April Fool’s Day. Last year, Snapchat had a special filter that made it look like your snap was posted on Instagram. The company has done it again, this time trolling Facebook with their recent PR disaster. Snapchat created a filter that places a Facebook UI around your photo with Cyrillic script text, including likes from “your mum” and “a bot”.
In case you don’t get the joke, the Cyrillic script and “the bot” hints at the news that there are more than 50,000 Russian government-controlled bots on Facebook – these bots are said to have been used to influence the 2016 US presidential election. “Your mum” like is a repeated joke that Snapchat also used last year to hint at Facebook’s older user base. Touché Snapchat!
Safaricom
Safaricom made an announcement that they were launching a smart speaker that would be powered by AI and understand natural language, including Sheng. The service would be known as SASA and its main selling point would be its ability to understand Kenyan accents. It would also feature Bluetooth connectivity, 4G and WIFI integration, Songa and Masoko integration.
This was a good one and Safaricom should probably sit down and actually get us such a product, I mean, they are capable.
It’s not April Fool’s if Google doesn’t pull one on us. In the company’s tradition, Google had a couple of fake products and games lineup but the best was from Google’s Files Go team that created a bad joke detector. Files Go is a relatively new app from Google that is meant to help you free up space on your phone by using Artificial Intelligence to remove junk files and old apps from your phone’s storage.
As a joke, the team announced that FilesGo will now delete bad jokes that you may receive from family and friends. How does it work? It uses AI to determine the quality of a meme stored on your phone and it will group them into either good jokes or bad jokes thus allowing you to delete all the bad jokes in just one tap.
Lego
Legos are worldwide appreciated toys and we have interacted with them in one way or the other. The biggest challenge with Legos, however, is usually cleaning them up after the kids are done playing with them as leaving them lying on the floor could leave serious injuries on your feet. Well, Lego apparently announced a vacuum cleaner that not only picks up the Lego bricks but also sorts them according to colour. Well, this is a product we’d actually want to see invented.
