Monday October 27, 2014

• Facebook’s Audience Targeted News Feed is fundamentally changing the news business (including in India): Facebook is increasingly becoming to the news business what Amazon is to book publishing — a behemoth that provides access to hundreds of millions of consumers and wields enormous power.  It drives up to 20 percent of traffic to news sites - even more on mobile devices, the fastest-growing source of readers. Roughly once a week, Facebook adjusts the complex computer code that decides what to show a user when he or she first logs on to Facebook. The code is based on “thousands and thousands” of metrics, Mr. Marra said, including what device a user is on, how many comments or likes a story has received and how long readers spend on an article. The goal is to identify what users most enjoy, and its results vary around the world. In India, he said, people tend to share what the company calls the ABCDs: astrology, Bollywood, cricket and divinity. Analysis here and here

• Tencent invests in Blink a Chinese Snapchat variant; investment in a potential rival could be to pre-empt competition: Tencent has made a new social play in the same vein as Snapchat to appease China’s “post-90s” youths. The web giant made a fresh US$20 million series A investment into Blink, a new photo sharing and messaging app out of China. Sequoia Capital, H Capital, ZhenFund, and Innovation Works also participated in the round, according to Techweb.Tencent became king of China’s online social messaging sphere with the mass adoption of QQ Messenger and kept the throne when it unleashed WeChat. But even though QQ earlier this year boasted a record 200 million concurrent users and WeChat’s growth is only now starting to show signs of saturation, the web giant is actively looking for the next big thing for young people who no longer think WeChat is cool.

• Just Dial plans slew of new products, announces Q3 earnings: Rev INR 147 Crore (30.8% Y/Y) Net Profit INR 32 Crore (9% Y/Y): Revenues growth was driven by a strong 24.1% rise in paid campaigns and 5.5% increase in revenue per campaign (after a recent price rise), over the year-ago quarter. Listings increased 44 % year-on-year (y-o-y), to 14.5 million.The company's product Search Plus offers 20 live services currently and has not been monetised so far. The firm plans to launch many new products such as ‘Just Dial Cash’, On-line cab booking, ‘Just Dial Guaranteed’, amongst others, which will start contributing to revenues from FY16. The firm hopes these will help it improve monetization and to translate its strength in voice to online.