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.
Summary: More positive press for Pinterest; and the sad coda for two once-hot startups of 2011 that lost their way:Twitpic will shut down, and 2011 darling Tagged has officially shelved IPO plans and changed its name and business model
Twitpic will shut down on October 25th: Twitpic started as one of the only ways to share photos on Twitter, allowing users to upload pics and get a URL they could post. It filled the permalinked photo pages with ads to But then in mid-2011, Twitter revealed it would launch its own photo-hosting service, making Twitpic largely unnecessary. Despite claiming it had found an acquirer to save it from death following a trademark complaint from Twitter, the photo sharing service today announced that didn’t happen and it’s game over on October 25th. Users can now export their photos until the 25th, at which point they’ll vanish into the void.
Social networking site Tagged is no longer going for an IPO. Instead it’s renamed itself if(we), acquired little known messaging app startup Tinode for an undisclosed amount and has completely changed direction to become a social app incubator. If(we) is essentially a brand new company, now acting as a parent brand to Tagged and social gaming site Hi5. Tagged was on a high growth course for a number of years and the money had been rolling in. According to some accounts, revenue was up 30 percent year-over-year. We reported the site was projected to grow to $45 million in revenue back in 2011. The company founders were reportedly aiming for a $1 billion IPO. Then everything shifted away from Facebook gaming and desktop sites to mobile. This is when both users and revenue began to drop off, according to sources. Co-founders Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith tried at first to shift into going mobile first, but that didn’t seem to work either. Revenue slid from $57 million last year to a projected $51 million this year, according to the San Francisco Business Times. The numbers were no longer where they needed to be for an IPO to make sense. Tagged canned the idea of going public and instead has refocused the company to mobile only. It also decided to completely rebrand with a the new name and logo and make Tagged a product offering rather than as a standalone company.
More positive press for Pinterest - which rivals Facebook in some engagement metrics and is just starting to monetize: A visual social network where people create and share image collections of recipes, hairstyles, baby furniture and just about anything else on their phones or computers, Pinterest isn’t yet five years old, but among women, who make up over 80% of its users, it’s already more popular than Twitter, which has a market capitalization of more than $30 billion. Pinterest’s U.S. user base is projected to top 40 million this year, putting it in a league with both Twitter and Instagram domestically, and it’s moving fast to catch up with them overseas, opening offices in London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo over the past year. International users now make up nearly half of new sign-ups, according to the research firm Semiocast. Pinterest even doubled the number of active male users in the past year. To date, Pinterest’s users have created more than 750 million boards made up of more than 30 billion individual pins, with 54 million new ones added each day. During the 2013 holiday season Pinterest accounted for nearly a quarter of all social sharing activity. Among social networks, only Facebook, with its 1.3 billion users, drives more traffic to Web publishers. All that activity sounds big, but it understates the moneymaking opportunity in front of Pinterest, which will ultimately be judged by how much revenue it can wrest from its users. While it’s the earliest of days still, many analysts and observers believe that, on the basis of average revenue per user, it’s only a matter of time before Pinterest blows past Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social pack. “They’re going to bring in billions of dollars a year,” says Dave Weinberg, founder of the social marketing company Loop88.
Location targeting is becoming mainstream: Beacons, tiny low-powered radio transmitters that send signals to phones just feet away, have quickly become a new front in the advertising industry’s chase to find you whenever, and exactly wherever, you are. Although most consumers are just learning about these devices, tens or even hundreds of thousands of them have been installed across the country: outdoors on buildings, inside stores and even at National Football League and Major League Baseball stadiums.
Smart notifications based on location targeting worked spectacularly well for American Eagle: American Eagle Outfitters — an early adopter of beacon technology — used push notifications delivered through the Shopkick app to successfully draw more customers into fitting rooms this summer. For nearly two months the retailer sent a push notifications to select customers as they entered the 100 of the company’s 929 stores that are outfitted with beacons. The message offered 25 kicks — Shopkick’s rewards currency — if they tried something on in a fitting room. American Eagle found that customers that received the offer were more than twice as likely to try on clothing as those who didn’t. “That’s incredible. It’s way beyond anything I anticipated,” said Joe Megibow, chief digital officer at American Eagle Outfitters. American Eagle Outfitters placed a beacon at the front entrance and in the fitting room of each trial store. When a customer with the Shopkick app entered the store, the beacon sensed their smartphone’s presence via Bluetooth, and triggered Shopkick to display a message offering 25 extra kicks. The beacon in the fitting room determined if the same customer had approached it, and awarded the 25 extra kicks. More than 10,000 customers took part in the trial.
Location Targeting Startups in India: AdNear secured $19 million in its Series B Location targeting: Bangalore and Singapore-based AdNear Pte Ltd, a Big Data company that helps brands reach out to audiences by analysing location data over a period of time, has secured $19 million in its Series B round of funding from Telstra Ventures and Global Brain Corp., with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Canaan Partners. AdNear will use the capital to expand into multiple new markets. As part of the deal, Mark Sherman, MD of Telstra Ventures, will join AdNear’s board. “Our proprietary technology enables us to help major brands across Asia Pacific fine-tune their consumer targeting by having access to real-time location intelligence. Location data-driven insights are powerful and marketers can use these data points to understand consumer behaviour and also build customised campaigns as per their target audience,” said Anil Mathews, CEO of AdNear. “We are constantly experimenting with location data-sets for various use-cases and will be productising some of these in the coming months,” he added.
Pinterest has engagement; wants to monetize with its 'Promoted Pins' ad format. The site - that lets users create bulletin boards based on themes like sports, travel or food - has 2 formidable strengths that justify its $5B valuation: 75 percent of its usage is mobile and it has a largely female demographic. It has partnered with a few big brands—including Target, Unilever and Procter & Gamble—to work with Pinterest on its "Promoted Pins" advertising format. Link here
Facebook monetizes spectacularly well, but worries about engagement: a pretty dramatic new report out from Piper Jaffray — an investment bank with a sizable research arm — rules that the kids are over Facebook once and for all, having fled Mark Zuckerberg’s parent-flooded shores for the more forgiving embraces of Twitter and Instagram. Between fall 2014 and spring 2014, when Piper Jaffray last conducted this survey, Facebook use among teenagers aged 13 to 19 plummeted from 72 percent to 45 percent. In other words, less than half of the teenagers surveyed said “yes” when asked if they use Facebook. Link here
NetFlix: TV News :: Tomorrow:Yesterday: ~50% of millenials in the US are Netflix subscribers, while median viewers of TV news are ~60 years old. A Comscore survey shows Netflix's dominance: ~50% of American millenials subscribe to Netflix; 19% percent to Hulu, and 9% to Amazon Prime. Among all surveyed users (not just millenials) 32% subscribed to Netflix. In the US, TV news channels have median viewer age of ~60. Netflix demographics here; TV demographics here.
Kotak launched a Facebook-based payment system, the first day that France's second largest bank launched a virtually identical service based on Twitter: "Kotak Mahindra Bank Launches KayPay - World’s First Bank Agnostic Instant Funds Transfer Platform Using Facebook: ""World’s first Any Bank to Any Bank funds transfer platform via Facebook powered by a Bank: * Login to KayPay directly using Facebook credentials * Instant funds transfer - Rides on IMPS platform of NPCI * No bank details of recipient required * Pay anyone on Facebook friends List * Safe & Secure Transaction: Two level authentication - Facebook user id & password, and One Time Password". Twitter + French bank link here. Kotak+FB link here
The Snapchat data theft was real after all - but it was not Snapchat's fault: A third party site, Snapsaved.com, a website which allows users to save images sent via Snapchat, claimed on Monday that hackers had breached its servers and made off with some 500 megabytes of photographs. SnapChat last week blamed third-party apps, which can be downloaded separately and used in conjunction with its service, for any photos that may have been stolen or leaked.Link here
Audience Data-Mining startups are mining Instagram, Pinterest and Flickr: Photo-mining startups are searching and analyzing Instagram, Pinterest and Flickr to give advertisers a new kind of data. One is Massachusetts-based Ditto Labs, which offers a “Photo Insight Service” that can access a staggering 750 million photos daily via social media to identify brands, logos, products, clothing and even "smiles" to measure consumer sentiment. Another service called Piqora stores thousands of images on its servers to identify trends; it passes these insights along to clients who may want to design targeted marketing campaigns. One of Piqora's clients is clothing and accessory maker Fossil, which tracks its products and competing brands. Link here
Monday October 13
Jabong net revenues more than tripled, from Rs 143.3 crore to Rs 438.5 crore in the year ended March 31, 2014. net loss declined to Rs 293.4 crore from Rs 318.7 crore in the previous year.Private labels account for every fifth item shipped by the firm.Tier II and III cities, generated approximately 62 per cent of its net revenues in Q2 2014 (Apr-Jun). Link
Amazon is going to open an actual bricks-&-mortar retail store in New York. The Manhattan space will contain a selection of inventory to accommodate local same-day delivery and shoppers who want to pick up products bought online, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed sources. Amazon was also mulling over the idea of using the space as a showroom for its gadgets, such as Kindle e-readers and Fire smartphones, the report said. A successful trial could persuade the company to open stores in other cities around the country, the Journal said. The retailer has set up metal lockers around the country in places like 7-Eleven stores so people can conveniently pick up packages. Link
Samsung Electronics' smartphone business is sagging badly, and it issued a profit warning for the September quarter. Link
Truecaller, a mobile social app that builds a social number directory, raised $60m and has 85m (active?) users. Tools that rethink how to make those old-fashioned voice call things are getting very interesting right now. Link
Line recorded $177M in Q2 (April-June) 2014 revenue (mostly from game-related purchases); also Line finally reveals its monthly active user count: 170 million monthly active users, out of a current count of 560 million registered users. (Japan: 54 million registered users, Thailand: 33 million, Indonesia: 30 million, Spain: 18 million, Taiwan: 17 million) The company originally intended to IPO this autumn, but has since postponed with an eye towards next year. Link
