- Here is an audio (MP3) version of this snippet, and archived snippets are here.
- YouTube Takes On Amazon With New Gaming App: Google announced the release this summer of YouTube Gaming, a mobile application and website that will focus on video game videos and live streams. In a blog post, the company said YouTube Games would have individual pages for some 25,000 games as well as pages for particular publishers and gaming celebrities. This arena has become increasingly competitive. There is Twitch, the site where gamers watch each other play live, which Amazon bought for about $1 billion last year. And Twitch is facing competition from sites like MLG.TV, which has poached former Twitch stars like the Call of Duty phenom Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag. YouTube Gaming is the latest example of the website’s efforts to better serve a specific demographic of its customer base, with the goal of encouraging advertisers to spend more money. YouTube has also created an app specifically for kids who watch videos. YouTube is stepping up investments in new services to attract viewers and ad dollars to compete with Amazon, Facebook, Hulu and Spotify. In February, YouTube released YouTube Kids, which can be downloaded onto phones or tablets and includes special parental controls and programs such as Thomas the Tank Engine, Mother Goose Club and Reading Rainbow. It is also testing a stand-alone music service called YouTube Music Key.
- Nielsen Study: The average American used apps for 37.5 hours last quarter -- nearly a full work-week. Nielsen on Thursday released a new study showing that while the number of apps that smartphone-wielding Americans use holds steady at around 26.7 per month, we're spending more time with them overall. The average American used apps for 37 hours and 28 minutes last quarter -- nearly a full work-week. And that's up from 30 hours and 15 minutes just the quarter before and a 63 percent rise over two years, the company said in a blog post. Nielsen dug into its data and found that entertainment apps such as games, music and video seem to be the main culprits of the increase. Overall, smartphone users reported a 26 percent increase in the time they spend using their smartphones for the fun things in life, for an average of 13 hours and 20 minutes per month. Entertainment app users gained 13 million additional users over the past year. And, as a group, they spent nearly three hours more in apps than they did last year. Gaming, meanwhile, was the fastest-growing app category within entertainment. More than three-quarters of entertainment app users reported playing at least one game in the last quarter of 2014. Smartphone owners spend a little more than 10 hours playing games, which can get awfully addictive.Men use more apps than women -- 27.2, on average, versus 26.3 -- but women tend to spend about an hour more using apps overall each month.
- Alibaba Plans to Create TBO, China’s Version of Netflix, HBO: Alibaba is planning to build China’s version of Netflix and HBO via a new service called Tmall Box Office, as it tries to service 600 million families craving more entertainment content. Tmall Box Office will be offered in about two months through Alibaba's set-top box and smart televisions that carry its operating system, including those manufactured by Haier Group. Some of the content will be produced by the company and some purchased overseas. Alibaba is on a buying spree as it tries to compete with Tencent Holdings for China’s $5.9 billion online video market. Alibaba Pictures Group Ltd. completed a $1.57 billion stake sale in Hong Kong to help finance potential acquisitions in June. Billionaire Chairman Jack Ma visited Hollywood in October to acquire more content. “We want to create a whole new family entertainment experience,” Liu said. “Our goal is to become like Netflix in the U.S, HBO in the U.S.” It was not clear how the service would fit with Youku Tudou, one of China's biggest video streaming platforms in which Alibaba bought a 16.5 percent stake last year. However, unlike the majority of domestic rivals, about 90 percent of TBO's content will be paid for, either by monthly subscription or on a show-by-show basis, Liu said. The remaining 10 percent would be free. Netflix itself is also considering an entry into China, a notoriously difficult task for foreign Internet companies.
- Reliance readies for an e-Commerce push - talks of B2B marketplace and mobile payments at AGM. Mukesh Ambani said Reliance Retail’s fashion and lifestyle format will roll out its e-commerce property before the end of this year. Reliance Jio, the wireless telephony and data services unit of RIL, is set to launch 4G services by December this year. RIL will also use Reliance Jio’s internet infrastructure to roll out an e-commerce marketplace platform, group chairman Ambani said at the company’s 41st annual general meeting on Friday. Here’s a peek at upcoming JIO services: Jio Money – Digital payments and money transfer services including a digital wallet. Switch-and-Walk – an app that allows customers to seamlessly change phones. Jio Drive – a cloud app for storing, sync-ing and sharing content between devices and with friends. Jio Play – An HD TV service with hundreds of channels. Jio Beats – a digital music streaming service, that also allows download and offline listening. Jio Mags - a collection of popular magazines. Jio News – news from leading news publishing houses across multiple languages and categories.
- Facebook will tweak your news feed based on how long you look at stuff: Facebook is tweaking its algorithms to account for a new metric: the amount of time you spend looking at things in your feed, regardless of whether or not you actively interact with it. Scroll past something without stopping for long, and Facebook’s algorithms will slowly learn that you don’t particularly care for that sort of content. Camp out on a post for a bit, though, and Facebook starts the timer behind the scenes. If you spend more time on this story than you spend on most things in your feed — studying a picture, perusing the comment thread — they’ll take that as a signal that it’s something you care about. Facebook is doing this because it realizes that you probably don’t always like, share or comment on the stuff that pops up in your Facebook feed, even if it’s something you care to see. In other words: those endless baby photos and motivational fitness memes that you tend to scroll right on past? At least theoretically, this change allows Facebook’s algorithms to take the hint without requiring you to lift a finger.
- Here is an audio (MP3) version of this snippet. Experimental.
- Nielsen to measure digital ads in partnership with Tencent: Nielsen announced on Wednesday that it is partnering with Tencent Holdings to measure its digital audience in a move that could direct more ad dollars from companies in the United States to China's biggest social network. Nielsen said it is launching its Digital Ad Ratings, which tracks unique users, reach and frequency of a digital ad across computers, tablets and smartphones for the first time in China. Comscore, which offers a similar service and competes with Nielsen, said it is already available in China. The online gaming company Tencent, which also operates the popular mobile messaging app WeChat with 500 million monthly active users, has been making a big push to increase its advertising revenue especially through mobile. Nielsen will measure an ad campaign in a combination of surveys, consisting of 46,000 Chinese consumers, and aggregated, anonymous data from Tencent's hundreds of millions of active users. Tencent, which has a market value of $190 billion and reported first-quarter online advertising revenue of $438.4 million competes with Alibaba and Baidu.
- Its a Small World: Ola-owned TaxiForSure integrates Alibaba-investee Paytm wallet as cashless payment option, joining its arch-rival Uber: TaxiForSure, has tied up with Alibaba-backed online payments platform Paytm. The move will allow users of TaxiForSure to go cashless and pay through Paytm’s pre-paid wallet, the company said in a statement. Customers can link their debit card or bank account via a Paytm wallet or recharge their Paytm wallet and use it to pay for their rides. In March, cab hiring startup Ola had acquired TaxiForSure in what largely a stock transaction. Interestingly, Ola also has a prepaid wallet called Ola Money. Last November, on-demand car service Uber, Ola's arch-rival in India's ride-hailing space had joined hands with Paytm.
- Google and Apple Adjust Their Strategies on Mobile Payments: The battle for mobile software dominance revolves around two companies: Apple and Google. Now both giants are also going head-to-head in mobile payments, as they prepare to push deeper into digital wallets. Google is set to unveil plans at its annual developer conference on Thursday for an overhaul of its mobile payment products. Changes include a service called Android Pay that will let merchants accept credit card payments from inside their mobile apps and can be integrated with loyalty programs at retailers, the people said. Google Wallet, a mobile commerce app, will also be reintroduced as a peer-to-peer payments app that consumers can use to send money to each other directly from their debit accounts, they said. Apple is preparing to announce details about enhancements to Apple Pay at its software conference next month. Those include a rewards program for the mobile wallet service. The moves are the latest advances in mobile payments as several players jockey for an edge. With more consumers willing to make purchases using smartphones, companies are rushing to take the lead in the market, spurring eBay’s PayPal to heavily market a suite of mobile apps, while start-ups like Square and Stripe expand their payments processing software to small and midsize businesses. The stakes are also high for Apple and Google, which are entering mobile payments later than others in the industry. For Apple, mobile payments tie people more directly to its main product, the iPhone. For Google, payments are a hook to reel people into its ecosystem of services and another way to gain insight about consumers. The challenge for Apple and Google, along with rivals, is that the mobile wallet is generally a technology in search of a problem. Cash and credit cards are easy to use and accepted broadly worldwide. As a result, the mobile wallet is typically more of a supplementary service than a replacement. Nonetheless, mobile payments are growing quickly. Forrester Research predicts they will balloon to $142 billion by 2019 in the United States, almost tripling from $52 billion in 2014. Still, Google and Apple offer something that few others can: Hardware, software and an insatiable desire to win. “Google and Apple have deep pockets and the appetite to invest,” said Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research. “They may create something that is a lasting disruption.”
- Despite Its Dominance, Analysts See A Murky Road Ahead for Android: Android is now not just the globe’s most popular smartphone operating system but the most popular operating system of any kind. More than a billion Android devices were sold in 2014, a c cording to the research firm Gartner. That’s about five times the number of Apple iOS devices sold, and about three times the number of Windows machines sold. Yet all is not well on planet Android. On the eve of Google IO, the company’s annual developer conference that starts Thursday, where Android will once again be a primary topic of discussion, cracks are emerging in Google’s hold over the operating system. Google’s version of Android faces increasing competition from hungry rivals, including upstart smartphone makers in developing countries that are pushing their own heavily modified take on the software. There are also new threats from Apple, which has said that its recent record number of iPhone sales came, in part, thanks to people switching from Android. Hanging over these concerns is the question of the bottom line. Despite surging sales, profits in the Android smartphone business declined 44 percent in 2014, according to one estimate. Over the holidays last year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business. The stark numbers prompted a troubling question for Android and for Google: How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android? Google faces several major Android-related headaches. First, while Google makes most of its revenue from advertising, Android has so far been an ad dud compared with Apple’s iOS. iOS users tend to have more money and spend a lot more time on their phones (and are, thus, more valuable to advertisers). Because Google pays billions to Apple to make its search engine the default search provider for iOS devices, the company collects much more from ads placed on Apple devices than from ads on Android devices. A recent analysis by Goldman Sachs estimated that Google collected about $11.8 billion on mobile search ads in 2014, with about 75 percent coming from ads on iPhones and iPads. A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play. For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly. But how long Google can expect Play to keep paying remains an open question, thanks to the second Android-related headache. Google’s strategy of giving Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China. Because Xiaomi and others don’t make much of a profit by selling phones, they’re all looking for other ways to make money — and for many, the obvious business is in apps offering mail, messaging and other services that compete with Google’s own moneymaking apps. Android has always been a tricky strategy; now, after finding huge success, it seems only to be getting even trickier.
- Twitter Is Giving Advertisers More User Data In The Hope That They Spend More: Twitter is hoping to help marketers better understand their Twitter audience by adding a tool that will give them deeper user behavior around organic tweets. The audience insights dashboard tool adds some similar insights as the Facebook advertising platform with aggregate information on user demographics, interests, and purchasing behavior as well as what television shows users watch and their mobile usage. These new insights are expected to help advertisers identify a more relevant audience for upcoming campaigns on the platform. Will these new insights help boost advertising on Twitter? The company needs it right now. It had slower than expected growth in advertising sales this last quarter and even die-hard fans and early investors think the company needs some help. Early investor Chris Sacca recently scribed a blog post warning Twitter that he would soon be sharing a few thoughts on what the company needs to do now. Offering more profound insights about organic user behavior may be an answer to some of this frustration and may help to lure brands to spend more ad dollars on the platform. The audience insights tool is now available to all Twitter advertisers and analytics users. Twitter-specific information can be accessed within the U.S., with plans to roll this out more broadly over the next few months.
- Cisco Predics that in 5 years, 80 percent of Internet Traffic will be online video: We already know that Netflix accounts for one-third of Internet traffic at peak hours. Toss in YouTube, and that figure rises to roughly half of all bandwidth consumed. But even that's small potatoes compared with what's coming. In five years, 80 percent of the entire world's Internet consumption will be dominated by video. That number will be even higher in the United States, approaching 85 percent. That's according to the latest projections from Cisco, which publishes an annual study peering into the near future of the Web. The newest report, out Wednesday, predicts that by 2019, the Internet will have become more or less a big video pipe. Part of the growth will come from adding new people to the Internet — for the first time, over half the world's population will be digitally connected. But individual Internet users are also expected to consume more video over time, and at a higher quality, which will put tremendous new burdens on the world's Internet infrastructure. When you see the Internet as a huge distribution channel for video, it puts virtually everything that tech and communications companies are doing into perspective. Telecom firms like Verizon are racing to expand their cellular networks so that they can deliver video over LTE. Cable companies are fleshing out their public WiFi hotspots so users can watch videos outside their homes. Content providers like HBO and CBS are putting their programming on the Internet so that customers don't have to be tethered to their television sets. Implicit in this idea is that mobile devices will be the primary way users will access all this video. And researchers agree on that point. Five years ago, Americans were spending less than an hour a day on mobile devices. Today, it's more like three hours a day, accounting for more than half of the time we spend consuming digital media in general, according to the latest in an annual report released Wednesday by Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker.
