Category: Percolate

What Brands Are Learning By Looking At Your Selfies

Posted on by Lab Team

Numerous marketing campaigns have deployed the “send-us-your-selfie” gimmick, but few have realized how much valuable information brands can get by analyzing those shared photos. Ditto Lab offers a platform that specializes in image analytics. By gathering those image-based data about brands, valuable intelligence such as consumer interest and brand affiliation could be made available to advertisers, potentially adding a new dimension to the acquisition of big data.

Update: Tumblr has reportedly started working with Ditto Lab to gather data on brand affiliation.

Why Piracy Surges In Times Of Sudden Demand

Posted on by Lab Team

Since the sad news of Robin Williams’ untimely death broke, the Internet has been coping in its own ways. Amazon has seen a sharp rise in sales of DVD titles featuring the nationally beloved comedian. More interestingly, however, a large portion of the grieving Internet has turned to piracy in honor of the late Academy Award winner, highlighting how digital media can meet sudden spikes of demand. 

Amazon Challenging Square With New Payment Service

Posted on by Lab Team

Amazon new credit card processing service for small businesses, known as Amazon Local Register, marks Amazon’s continued expansion into mobile payments following its recent Amazon Wallet launch. This could seriously undercut Square’s current market dominance by offering a lower processing rate and a $10 smartphone cardreader. As the payment war heats up, more competitors can be expected to join.

How Shotclock Stands Out With Gamified Messaging

Posted on by Lab Team

In light of the surprising success of Yo, could a new messaging app with gamified features stand out from the crowd? That’s the question Shotclock is out to answer. At first glance, it might seem like a Snapchat copycat, with its self-destructing messages and one-tap-to-send interface. But its unique clocking system adds a twist: the time the ephemeral messages exist is proportionally linked to the “likes” and “shares” they get. Essentially a quantified popularity contest, Shotclock allows the messages with best content to last the longest and therefore gain maximal exposure.

What’s New About Twitter’s New Promoted Video Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

Today Twitter launched a beta of Promoted Video ads, a service that will give brands a new set of video tools for uploading and distributing video on its platform. Interestingly, Twitter opted for a Cost Per View (CPV) ad buying model, only charging the advertisers by the play counts of branded videos. While the jury is still out on whether promoted videos will effectively create a more engaging brand experience on Twitter, advertisers will no doubt welcome this fair pricing model.

Shift Debit Card: The Future Of Payment?

Posted on by Lab Team

Shift Payments, a Y Combinator-backed startup, is testing a new breed of debit card that aims to make it easier to use digital currencies, cryptocurrencies and loyalty points in real life. Currently integrated with both Coinbase and Ripple accounts, and with plans to add support for regular money and loyalty points soon, Shift aims to develop a truly universal payment solution for both online and offline. Although several domestic banks has raised concerns about its practicality, this debit card by Shift points to a possible future where virtual currency converges with the existing monetary system.

What Happens When You “Like” Everything You See On Facebook

Posted on by Lab Team

Facebook recently received a considerable amount of flak for conducting experiments on its users, so it is only fair that Mat Honan from Wired ran an experiment on Facebook by indiscriminatingly “liking” everything that the platform served up. The result reveals just how much Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes branded content, especially so on the mobile app, while implicitly underscoring how greatly its business model depends on it.

The number of “Likes” on Facebook and Instagram, along with their counterpart “Favorites” on Twitter and Tumblr, has long served as a fundamental metric in measuring the success of brand campaigns on social media. It offers a direct and frictionless way for the audience to express their sentiments and an easy and quantified measurement for marketers. By messing with the data acquisition, this experiment rendered Facebook’s algorithm useless and raises concerns on the dependency of this easily manipulated metric.

The Quantified Sports Fan: Yell at Your TV and Be Counted

Posted on by Lab Team

Watching live sports can get very emotional, even for the fans sitting in front of their TVs. That’s why Fanmode, a London-based startup, is developing an app to help the audience express their feelings and be heard. The company even has plans to integrate the app into wearables for easier reaction tracking. By aggregating real-time sentiment data during live sport events, Fanmode’s platform would be transformed into a virtual arena, where all fans are connected to the action. It could also potentially open up a feedback loop between the fans and their teams, essentially revolutionizing the way we watch live sports.

How Amazon Is Testing Its New Original Shows

Posted on by Lab Team

When it comes to producing original content, Amazon is often overshadowed by its major competitor Netflix, but it’s quickly catching up. Their populist method of letting the audience decide the fate of its new pilots, for instance, points to an innovative way for the entertainment industry to give audiences what they want. Another new thing Amazon is trying this year is to take a page out of the Netflix playbook by attaching big Hollywood names to its original contents. How these efforts measure up to the dominance of Netflix, however, remains to be seen.