Monday October 20, 2014

• Alibaba is rolling out an ambitious one-stop-shop for mobile app developers in China: Alibaba claims that the range of services that it will offer to developers will be so complete that development teams will “no longer need a CTO,” in the words of Alibaba VP Wang Ruoxi, speaking at the company’s developer conference this week. “A product manager full of ideas could quickly develop an outstanding app.” (link)  

• Alibaba is also investing in US startups, and expanding its Cloud offering: It is signing on international and Chinese government clients for its cloud services Aliyun (link), and investing in startups in the US, such as smart-remote app maker Peel (link). The app originally essentially mimicked a hardware universal smart remote, and focused on providing that kind of experience to smartphone devices via an IR blaster, but the company has since shifted its focus to providing an intelligent remote companion that can generate custom content viewing suggestions based on viewer habits.

• Snapchat started monetizing! Gently though - only non-intrusive, non-targeted ads: The firm, valued at $10B, averages 100M users/month makes an app for sharing photographs that disappear in 1 to 10 seconds. Analysts opine that while Snapchat has a high engagement, particularly among millenials, its efforts to monetize will be hampered by its reputation as a sexting app, the short attention span of its users, and the absence of any audience targeting. (This attracted wide coverage - interesting links here,here and here). Snapchat's candid blog post, here, asserts that the move to display ads is simply because the firm 'need[s] to make money'. The first ad was for the horror film Ouija.