Foursquare is making a fairly drastic shift in approach, splitting its service in two to account for recent developments and checkin’s slow descent. The plan is to split the service into one app, called Swarn, and another app retaining all the familiar Foursquare branding. Swarm will encapsulate the part of the business that lets users broadcast their information to friends and family, allowing people to gather around geo-tagged spots. The traditional Foursquare app will relaunch this summer as a discovery-focused app, designed to provide users with discovery options for new bars, hangout spots, and the like. The latter app is expected to relaunch this summer, and it signals a larger push to maintain the company’s attention to personalization, with the realization that consolidation was necessary around what the app does well itself.
Category: Percolate
Snapchat Takes On Messaging
Snapchat has become popular in large part because of its massive teen population base. Now, as teens as a demographic continue to shift towards third party messaging apps, Snapchat is expanding its platform to keep up. Snapchat today announced a new live video option that allows users to communicate as long as they are holding down the button to do so. Unlike Google Hangouts, the video is active as long as the button is held down. As well, this live video function will be part of text conversations as a whole – but the texts share the same ephemerality that made the app popular, as they too disappear once a user leaves the conversation. It’s the immediacy of the app that truly sets it apart – merely sending pictures and text that disappear doesn’t set it too far apart from its rivals – and now that Snapchat is venturing into third party messaging, the space feels likely to continue to heat up.
Tinder Warms To Advertising
Though Tinder has had little promise for advertisers, they are now part of IAC, and are slated to begin generating revenue for the conglomerate. IAC executives reported today that they want the dating app to begin to generate revenue and are expecting to experiment with different types of monetization strategies in the near future. The obvious idea is to run ads on the service – it presents many intriguing prospects for differing ways of bringing content to different types of consumers specific to the platform. Indeed, Fox has already advertised on the service with fake profiles to promote their program “The Mindy Project.” IAC executives are making the pitch, in part, because of user numbers on Tinder, which continue to increase. It will be interesting to hear how they think of advertising on the platform, and is worth keeping an eye on.
Hulu Will Offer Free Mobile Viewing
This summer, Hulu wants to ramp up its subscription numbers by offering free viewing for mobile device this summer. It’s part of a broader effort to keep up with Netflix, and to encourage multi-device viewing on the platform that is increasingly being configured to be watched on both mobile and desktop. Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins said that they’re backing this effort up with the campaign this summer – and it strikes the casual observer as a fairly transparent way to hook new users. In conjunction with this effort a new, redesigned iPhone app will be released this summer. As well, Hopkins reiterated that Hulu is in talks with traditional paid-TV providers to integrate with existing cable boxes, which would be a huge win for the on-demand network.
Australian Restaurant Delivers Grilled Cheese By Parachute
In a perfect mashup of viral marketing, mobile payments, and out-of-home advertising, an Australian grilled cheese shop has figured out a way to deliver their sandwiches by parachute to eager customers below. People just stand on the street at a spot marked with an X, and out of the sky floats a grilled cheese tied to a parachute. Customers pay in advance via PayPal, and the creators of the scheme say that about 500 sandwiches have been delivered over the air. The owners plan to expand to New York, but they don’t have a location in mind yet. Nevertheless, it’s a clever blend showcasing what technology, married to a good idea, can facilitate.
Facebook Debuts Business Manager Tool
Marketers have a new way to use Facebook. Called the Business Manager, Facebook’s new tool allows marketers an agencies to manage multiple campaigns across one interface. Facebook has been rolling the tool out over the past month, and it allows users to assign roles to people working across different campaigns. it will also allow agencies and clients share campaign materials within the platform. The ultimate goal is to make marketing and advertising workflow easier on the platform, and to allow more people to use Facebook to monetize campaigns. Furthermore, as these privileges had been previously limited to Preferred Marketing Developers, this seems like a move to get a much broader swath of people onto Facebook for use as a marketing and monetization tool.
BBC iPlayer Records Best Ever Month
BBC’s iPlayer is a leader in cord cutting content service; it’s an Internet-based TV and radio service that serves its content to those in the UK. The iPlayer just recorded its best ever month, reaching new highs for both requests and plays. Over the month, requests for TV and radio content rose to 320 million, breaking the old high of 315 million recorded in January. It’s an 18% year over year increase on content requests, signaling the burgeoning desire to stream content over the Internet rather than over cable. This is corroborated by looking at TV request data more specifically, which to rose to 248 million requests over the month, topping January’s record of 242 million requests. The top performing show? Top Gear, followed by The Voice. The data continue to point to the fact that people want specific content on their own schedules, over the Internet.
Amazon Launches Wearable Technology Store
Amazon today announced the launch of a new Wearable Technology store, which will function as a one-stop shop for customers looking to compare and discover the latest in wearable technology like fitness trackers, smart watches, cameras, and the like. Amazon additionally announced partnerships with top brands to deliver the latest technology, including established wearable technology brands like Samsung, Jawbone, and GoPro, in addition to up-and-comers like Basis, Misfit, and Narrative. As the burgeoning category of consumer technology continues to excite and prove popular, Amazon is offering a “learning center” which includes product videos and detailed buying guides, as well as an “Editor’s Corner” to find information about wearable technology news and reviews. It signals wearable technology’s advance into the main stream – and codifies it as a category that’s here to stay.
Video Ads Coming To Instagram
The image network with 200 million users has begun testing video ads on their platform. Like their image offerings, Instagram is being quite selective about the advertisers and creative, encouraging more lifestyle imagery opposed to traditional product shots and ads. The same will likely be the case for the 15 second video, so don’t expect to see repurposed video ads. While Instagram has a highly engaged audience, one has to wonder how long this tailor-made approach will last. With programmatic on the rise, one wonders when Instagram will go self-service.
NBCUniversal: Social Media Does Not Yet Boost TV Viewership
According to new research coming out of NBCUniversal, social media is not yet a “game changer” in influencing television viewing – according to traditional Nielsen metrics. NBCUniversal used its Sochi Winter Olympics data on Comcast for the study, with over 1,500 hours of coverage to sit through across both broadcast and cable television, Internet, and mobile. According to NBCU, the social media activity around the Olympic coverage paled in comparison those who tuned in for regular prime-time coverage – on Twitter, there were 10.6m Olympic-related messages and 23m people saw tweets about the Olympics, while on Facebook 20m people posted, commented, shared, or liked something related to the Olympics, reaching a total of 150m users. Although those numbers are not stellar for such a huge, worldwide event, many have also cautioned that the data were skewed by a mass audience tuning in to the sporting event irrespective of social media input, and that for more niche dramas (like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones) social media still plays a big role.
