Incred­i­bly — this arti­cle will not men­tion Poke­mon GO. The weeks dig­i­tal news round-up in a cou­ple of min­utes:

After weeks of post-Brex­it doom and gloom in the eco­nom­ic news, it’s odd­ly com­fort­ing to hear that Google’s par­ent com­pa­ny, Alpha­bet, has report­ed a strong rise in Q2 rev­enues — a $21.5bn, or 21.3% increase.

To put these fig­ure in con­text, note that at the begin­ning of the week we final­ly had the con­fir­ma­tion that Ver­i­zon had acquired Yahoo for $4.83bn.

In fact, Q2 has post­ed some very healthy num­bers for the whole tech indus­try, with Face­book and Ama­zon also exceed­ing rev­enue expec­ta­tions — in the lat­ter case mak­ing Jeff Bezos the third rich­est man in the world.

Alpha­bet’s prof­it rise rise was part­ly due to a 29% rise in Google’s aggre­gat­ed paid clicks (indi­ca­tion that their recent rejig­ging of their paid ad lay­out is pay­ing div­i­dends).

No sur­prise then that Google CEO Sun­dar Pichai declared ear­li­er this week that “There’s an amaz­ing atmos­phere at Google”, and the com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to make head­way in con­fi­dent, dis­rup­tive ven­tures such as Google Fibre.

Per­haps it’s no won­der that Mark Zucker­berg, announced in Face­book’s Q2 earn­ing call that the social net­work are look­ing at expand­ing into the search adver­tis­ing space.

Data-driven = winning

Dig­i­tal mar­keters aren’t the only ones obsessed with data these days. With Chris Froome’s stun­ning third vic­to­ry in the Tour de France, ana­lysts have been bur­bling about how ana­lyt­ics played a piv­otal role the Team Sky suc­cess train.

Brails­ford’s approach to ‘mar­gin­al gains’ — the prin­ci­ple that when you make 1% improve­ments in a num­ber of areas, the cumu­la­tive gain ends up being much greater — is well known, and this year’s Tour de France fur­ther affirmed the pow­er of the con­cept.

Sky’s sheer dom­i­na­tion of this year’s tour cer­tain­ly makes a strong case for all of us to apply data-obsessed prin­ci­ples to many aspects of life, and it’s cer­tain­ly a les­son that is also being increas­ing­ly adopt­ed by Olympic teams in prepa­ra­tion for Rio.

Digital developments

A lit­tle clos­er to home, Google’s expand­ed text ads have rolled out, as has respon­sive ad func­tion­al­i­ty for native plat­forms.

And just in case you haven’t heard enough about the mete­oric rise of a cer­tain app… Pris­ma is build­ing on its top 10 posi­tion in the iOS App store by rolling out it’s prod­uct to new plat­forms. Android users going into the week­end will be pleased to know that they too can add all kinds of artis­tic fil­ters to their sum­mer pics.