3D printing is one of the most buzzed about tech developments in the last year. From 3D printing candy to guns, it seems that the possibilities are endless. Yet, a new report titled Consumer 3D Printing & Scanning: Service Models, Devices & Opportunities 2014-2018 estimates sales of consumer 3D printers to not exceed one million units until 2018, up from the roughly 44,000 estimated sales by the end of this year. Like most nascent tech, consumer education and a lower price point will be critical to adoption. While we’ve seen some novel executions from the likes of Hasbro and Hershey’s which let consumers print their own versions of toys and chocolates respectively, more utilitarian use cases will catalyze uptake.
Category: Percolate
Beats Comes To Apple’s Store
Beats’ new streaming service has, for the most part, stayed clear of traditional app stores. Today, though, they’re reversing that policy in what amounts to a concession that Apple’s app store has a reach beyond that of Beats’ present capabilities. With that reach and power, though, comes a hefty fee: Apple usually keeps about 30% of the purchase price on whatever users buy. For Beats, whose subscription is $10/month, it means giving $3 of that fee to Apple every month for every subscription sold through iTunes. Nonetheless, it opens Beats up to a market presently occupied by Rdio and Rhapsody, and to an app store that attracts millions of eyeballs and potential customers. The goal, here, is clearly to boost subscriber numbers as quickly as possible. It’s not to ultimately say that Beats music is failing, or that streaming music is going downhill – it’s simply to say that Beats is looking to expand its numbers to compete with bigger competitors like Spotify.
Twitter’s MoPub Showcases Native Ads To All Publishers
Four months after initially putting support for native advertising into beta, Twitter’s mobile exchange, MoPub, is putting the solution up for all publishers to leverage. The idea is for MoPub’s native product to serve as a complete solution for native ads; including a native ads SDK and a publisher-side ad server. The former can be used to create a customized ad unit inside of an app, and the latter allows publishers to traffic their own ad campaigns into native areas, complete with integrated reporting. However, nothing from this post necessarily suggests that data from Twitter will be integrated as a targeting feature. It’s a sign, though, that Twitter is very intentionally expanding bit by bit into this increasingly monetarily viable space.
Facebook To Debut Ad Network
In what comes as little surprise to those who have been watching Facebook’s general trend towards advertising, Facebook will announce a full fledged Mobile Ad network at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco at the end of this month. The goal, of course, is to get publishers and developers to leverage the social network’s giant database of user information for the purpose of expanding ad reach more broadly. Now, Facebook will be able to make money off of its users beyond the confines of the Facebook platform. Facebook’s been trying out different models for different types of ad networks, but with $1.24 billion in mobile ads generated in the last three months of 2013, it’s clear that Facebook understands that it’s going to need this network to move forward financially. It’s also going to allow mobile advertisers to market to mobile phone users in an extremely granular fashion, in the very near future.
Nike To Potentially Leave FuelBand Behind
In somewhat surprising news, Nike has announced that it fired the majority of its FuelBand team, and is pivoting its business away from wearable hardware and into exclusively software. That means that all FuelBands will likely not be produced in the relatively near future, and the slimmer model planned for this fall will not make it to production. For now, though, the present generation of FuelBand will continue to be sold. It seems as though this move isn’t necessarily because the wearable market is faltering; indeed, wearables and fitness tracking more broadly continue to boom. This has more to do with the fact that Nike’s digital app ecosystem continues to out-perform its physical hardware like, and as Apple and Google stand poised to join the battle for consumers’ wrists, Nike likely simply decided now was the time to re-focus the business plan.
Google And Apple Fight For Mobile Games
New reports indicate that both Apple and Google are trying hard to get exclusive games into their mobile stores. According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple and Google are rewarding outlets like Electronic Acts, Gameloft, and ZeptoLabs prominent placement atop their respective app stores for loyalty and exclusive content. The companies haven’t been offered direct financial incentives, but they essentially have been by extension; prominent placement in the app store is the equivalent of many more purchases and, by extension, financial success. The joint push by Apple and Google comes on the heels of increasing awareness of each others’ app store successes by trying to get exclusives and continuously being aware of what the other offers. In the end, both are pushing hard to break through as the clear leader in the mobile gaming space, and neither are winning just yet.
Fire TV’s Voice Search Expands
One of the major complaints about Amazon’s Fire was not that its voice search feature was ineffective – rather, many wished it worked across all the services and platforms available on the device. Amazon is working to meet these demands, and today announced that the voice search feature will be expanded to include Hulu Puls, Crackle, and Showtime Anytime. At present, the voice search only supports Fire TV’s content and VEVO’s music videos. Amazon says that the services should probably arrive sometime this summer, and should help make the voice search more of a practical – and indeed desirable – feature for all Fire TV owners.
LinkedIn Hits 300 Million Users
LinkedIn has been heavily broadcasting its mobile traffic numbers this week, but the company is also growing in other ways: since the start of the year the company has grown by 33 million users – from 277 million members at the start of the year to 300 million registered users today. That comes out to a staggering 6.6 million new members per month over the past 15 months. According to LinkedIn’s metrics, LinkedIn and Slideshare (which was bought by LinkedIn in 2012) combined for an average of 187 unique monthly users in Q4. LinkedIn only expects these numbers to grow as its mobile app for Slideshare will launch in the Android store soon. With an active and growing user base, LinkedIn is sure to start cashing in – it’s really just a matter of when.
New Study: Cord Cutting Population Grows
Many suggest that more and more cable users are cutting the cord, and moving towards other streaming solutions to satisfy their TV content needs. Now, a new report from Experian Marketing Services looks at exactly how far that trend has progressed, and the answer is actually farther than most would think. Experian defines cord cutters as people with high-speed Internet who have never subscribed – or stopped subscribing – to cable or satellite. That number has risen by 44% in just three years. In 2013, 6.5% of total households across the country could be classified as cord cutting in this way, up from 4.5% in 2010. The most telling statistic, though, is for houses who have Netflix or Hulu; nearly one fifth of Americans who subscribe to these streaming services don’t subscribe to cable at all. And of households within the age bracket of 18-34 who subscribe to Netflix or Hulu, one quarter of those don’t pay for TV. As far as trends go, this one, then, is pretty well defined as young Internet users – i.e. Millennials – who are finding their services online, rather than on TV. As these young adults age, they could very well become the ruling majority rather than an increasing minority.
New Tracking App Targets Non-Athletes
Many athletic types – and people who just want to track their daily activities – are already familiar with wearables like FitBit, and Nike’s several offerings. RunKeeper is amongst these apps as well, as an app designed to target runners who want to know more details about their habits and running statistics. But RunKeeper is targeting non-athletes with its newest offering, called Breeze, which launches on Thursday. The app tracks all daily activity – from steps, to food eaten – through the smartphone itself, without additional wearables. It promises the convenience of many of the wearables before it, but without the purchase of additional devices to keep track of your activity. It works through the iPhone’s M7Coprocessor, which allows the app to pull location and accelerometer data without putting undue strain on the phone’s battery. As phones themselves become more advanced, expect to see tracking apps like this pop up more frequently, as there is a proven desire on the part of consumers to learn more about their daily habits and lives with this additional data.
