Category: Percolate

How Facebook Is Using Beacons To Launch Place Tips

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: VentureBeat

Facebook is looking to take on Yelp and Foursquare with a new feature for its mobile app that delivers useful info about your location right into the News Feed. Dubbed “Place Tips”, this new feature will show you things like posts and photos your friends have shared about a certain place or business nearby, should you choose to opt in.

Moreover, the company is planning to test out beacons with small local businesses in order to make its tips as geographically accurate as possible. The pilot program has started for users in New York City, marking Facebook’s first entry into the hyperlocal market, just as our creative director Scott Varland predicted months ago.

What We Learned From The Digiday Retail Summit

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Digiday

Last week we closely followed the coverage of the Digiday Retail Summit, where executives from the retail world came together to talk about the future of retail and the challenges facing the industry. A lot was discussed, but two themes stood out for us:

Attribution technology still needs work

With the growing number of devices and the dizzying array of ad types, cross-channel attribution keeps fracturing ad measurements. Insiders from the retail industry are increasingly impatient for the attribution technology to be precise enough to pinpoint exactly where their sale is coming from, but it looks like we might still need a few years for it to fully catch up.

Digital retail starts to converge with physical stores

As online commerce starts to circle back into physical space and converge with brick-and-mortar, how to efficiently make both work together poses an ongoing challenge for retailers today. Some are willing to experiment with cutting-edge technologies to tackle the challenge. Lowe’s, for instance, is using 3D virtual-reality rooms in their physical stores that allow customers to see a 3D model of their renovation projects.

 

Snapchat Makes Super Bowl Ad Debut; 50% Feature Hashtags

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Marketing Land

Among all 56 commercials aired nationally during last night’s Super Bowl, hashtags made an appearance in half of them. From Budweiser’s #BestBuds to Nationwide Insurance’s #MakeSafeHappen, marketers are putting the universal search tag across major social platforms into good use, as social activities on second screen continue to rise.

Moreover, Snapchat made its Super Bowl debut with a featured nod at the end of trailer for Pitch Perfect 2, whose target demo matches with the messaging app’s young user base quite well. Overall, Facebook still takes the top spot as the most mentioned social media with 4 mentions, with Twitter closely behind with 3 nods.

What’s Next For Apple

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Verge

Coming off its record-breaking fiscal quarter thanks to massive holiday sales and huge growth in China, Apple is gearing up for its upcoming Apple Watch release. According to CEO Tim Cook, Apple’s much-anticipated smartwatch will start shipping in April. He also commented that Apple is encouraged by the positive response from developers so far.

Besides prepping for the launch of Apple Watch, the Cupertino company is also continuing to push Apple Pay into new territories. Over 200,000 vending machines, kiosks, paid parking, and other self-serve locations nationwide will soon start supporting Apple’s mobile payment system, which marks yet another step in its steady expansion in market coverage.

 

Snapchat Experiments With Original Web Series

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdAge

We reported last week that Snapchat is venturing into original content with its new Discovery feature, and now the company is taking that foray one step further. On Tuesday, Snapchat announced a “scripted series” of mini-movies made by social media stars and sponsored by AT&T. Dubbed “SnapperHero”, the soon-to-debut 12-episode original web series marks an important step in Snapchat’s continuing evolution from messaging app to media platform.

Sony Adds Spotify Integration

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Wired

Sony announced that it’s replacing its existing streaming music service, Sony Music Unlimited, with a new Spotify-powered service called PlayStation Music. With the Spotify partnership, Sony acquires not only an immense library of music, but also the infrastructure to infiltrate the increasingly competitive streaming music market. The new service is set to launch some time this spring on the PS4 and PS3 game consoles, as well as on Sony’s Xperia smartphones and tablets.

Here’s How Marketers Are Using Mobile At This Super Bowl

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Street Fight

The National Retail Federation estimates that the average American will spend $77.88 on Super Bowl-related spending this year. And this year, mobile, specifically location-based mobile ads, is playing an important role. Unlike the winter holidays where consumers often turn to online shopping, the bulk of the Super Bowl spending is centered on in-store CPG purchases such as food and beverages, where mobile-enabled hyperlocal marketing shines.

Besides using the data collected from devices to measure effectiveness of television advertising, mobile can also be utilized by brands to cash in on the awareness generated by a television spot by serving users more targeted ads in the days after the game.

 

Beware Of The Privacy Threats Posed By IoT Devices

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: New York Times

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Tuesday reported that Internet-connected devices presented “serious data security and privacy risks”, urging companies to make data protection a top priority. The announcement came just after Verizon’s supercookie—embedded unique user identifiers that are undeletable—made headlines last week for the privacy threats it poses for customers.

In both cases, the main security and privacy threats originate from non-consented access to and sale of personal data by third-party devices or apps. As estimated by Gartner Research, around 4.9 billion connected devices for consumers, enterprises, and utilities will be in use this year, generating a vast amount of personal and company data that need to be properly protected and regulated.

Update 1/30/2014: NYT reports that Verizon Wireless has decided to make a major revision to allow users to completely opt-out of its “supercookies”.

By The Numbers: A Stats Breakdown Of Apple’s Monster Quarter

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Charts courtesy of ben-evans.com

Apple just had the most profitable quarter of any company, ever. The Cupertino company announced on Tuesday the financial report for its fiscal 2015 first quarter ending December 2014, and the results are staggering.

The tech giant posted record quarterly revenue of $74.6 billion and record quarterly net profit of $18.04 billion. To put it in perspective, that means Apple makes around $8.3 million per hour in profit.

AppleUnitSales

Thanks partly to the holiday shopping season, a record number of 74.5 million iPhones was sold in Q1, which saw a 46% year-to-year increase.

One side effect of the rising popularity of “phablet”-sized iPhone 6 Plus is a 21% drop in iPad sales compared to year ago, but at 21.4 million, tablet sales are still holding strong.

AppleRevChina

Another source for Apple’s record quarterly revenue comes from its aggressive retail expansion in China, its third biggest global market following the US and Europe. The company reports $16.1 billion in revenue from the greater China region, up 70% from the same period a year ago.

 

Why Loyalty Programs Are The Next Step for Mobile Payment

Posted on by Lab Team

Read the original story on: WSJ Blog

Few major mobile wallet providers, save maybe for LevelUp, have done a great job integrating into store loyalty programs. For now, Apple Pay doesn’t work with corporate credit cards or certain co-branded cards tied to loyalty programs. It is crucial for the mobile payment industry to figure out how to combine those elements in order to create a seamless and rewarding shopping experience on mobile that customers actually love to use.