As messaging continues to introduce a myriad of functions, Japan’s LINE has added a flat-rate voice calling service called LINE Call. LINE already provides calling for free via the messaging app, but the new voice calling service is a move to enlist others who might not be keen on downloading an entire messaging suite to utilize the company’s products. It also puts LINE in direct competition with the likes of Skype and Google for cheap, in-app calling services that use mobile data instead of traditional minutes via regular phone service. It also stacks LINE against Facebook’s WhatsApp, who have made noises about releasing a voice service but who haven’t actually gone about doing it yet. With 340 million users on LINE, the move to offering calling signals that messaging apps are working towards making themselves full service centers of communication. Whether users stick with them through their transformation from simple text messengers to monetized suites, however, remains to be seen.
Category: Percolate
Apple’s Healthbook Will Work Beyond Traditional Fitness
Apple’s Healthbook is the fitness and health tracking app that will, reportedly, interface with an Apple smart device. Many have speculated that Apple are working on an all-in-one smart-watch plus fitness tracker, and the latest Healthbook leaks serve to confirm those rumors. Resembling the Passbook design, the app appears to track almost all health parameters, from heart rate to blood sugar levels. Users will enter some of their own data – like what they’v eaten – but much of the data will have to come from third party sources (that, ideally in Apple’s world, use the M7 motion processor), which is where the speculation around an iWatch comes in. Rumors of the Healthbook started earlier in 2013 when Apple met with the FDA, and this serves, in large part, as confirmation that a full suite of tracking functions are coming to one of the most popular mobile operating systems in the near future. Fitness tracking is here to stay – and is only gaining momentum.
EE Aids Retailers With Digital Connectivity
When most marketers and brands talk about harnessing the power of the Internet in-store, you’re often likely to hear plans to target consumers, or to remake the shopping experience for the average person. EE, a UK mobile operator, is turning this notion on its head with its service called Connected Retail. Offered to shops in the UK, the program aims to help brick and mortar establishments compete with online shopping by, in part, cutting down on long lines in-store. According to the company’s data, retailers lose millions in revenue each year to long lines and impatient customers who would rather shop online – 73% of customers said they would abandon their purchases if they had to wait for more than 5 minutes in line. To help, EE offers retailers a combination of heat-mapping technology so that stores can anticipate and react to lines before they form, in-store Wifi to connect staff and customers, and send customers personalized offers and promotions via their smartphones. Such a full-service model could become common if successful, and points to a potentially fruitful way forward for technology in aiding the shopping experience
Google Introduces Unified Cookie
Google wants to do away with traditional cookies, and we’re finally getting an understanding of how that might happen. Google has developed a new type of technology that allows advertisers to target people who’ve visited their websites with ads on tablets and smartphones – while bridging the desktop and mobile gap. It works through something called a “hashed tag,” which allows advertisers to keep track of that individual person anonymously, without storing their email and phone data, an important caveat when consumers want continued emphasis on privacy. Once tagged, the advertiser can show ads to that tagged individual anywhere on Google’s network of third party sites and apps. It’s important to note that this works through tagging someone and targeting the tag, not targeting the person individually via a network of email addresses like Facebook has on file. Right now, Google is looking for advertisers that operate sites with registered user bases of over 100,000 or more to test the new hashed tags – but expect to see the technology in a fully fleshed version in the near future.
Facebook’s Wide Video Ads Finally Debut
Facebook is finally rolling out its video ads to a larger group of advertisers – in a wide format to try to directly compete with the TV ads. The 15 second “premium” video ads will play automatically when a user rolls past them, and if users click on the ads sound will start playing and the ad will expand. Facebook is ensuring that good, well-targeted ads work in users’ feeds by working with Ace Metrix, a response measurement tool that feeds Facebook information about user engagement potential via the ad’s creative, before it appears on Facebook, to weed out bad ads. Facebook wouldn’t say if there are any plans for specific campaigns, but this news today is one of the final moments before the social network launches the ad network after having dawdled for several years; the news first broke in 2012 that Facebook would launch video ads, and only now is it properly coming to fruition. Facebook is pitching video ads at $1 million per day for one of four broad demographics, and all four can be had for $2.4 million.
Why Facebook Bought WhatsApp
Surely you’ve heard by now: Facebook owns the immensely popular messaging app WhatsApp. On a surface level, the purchase might seem excessive, as Facebook Messenger is fairly popular in the United States. But looking a little bit closer at the global data reveals that the purchase might be more shrewd than it appears on the surface. Facebook is now a global company, and for many with feature phones with Facebook Home is the portal to the Internet. But for messaging on a global scale, Facebook trails heavily. In Europe, WhatsApp is the messaging app of choice by, in the most extreme example in Spain, 97% of mobile users. Similarly, WhatsApp is at 83%, 84$ and 81% in the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, respectively. Beyond Europe, WhatsApp can claim 71% of Brazilian mobile users, and in Canada, WhatsApp and Facebook are tied with 16% of mobile users. It paints a dire picture for Facebook: though the company might have users looped into their social network, mobile users aren’t using Facebook to communicate. But with the acquisition of WhatsApp, Facebook just bought their way into a very commanding position over the global messaging market. Though it still remains unclear whether Facebook will keep WhatsApp’s strict no advertising policy, what is clear is the fact that if you want to access the global messaging ecosystem, Facebook is now your major bottleneck.
Declara Uses Big Data To Help Us Learn
Big Data has been on the fore of many minds lately, and Declara is yet another example of how data can be used to do good. An app that came out of personal tragedy, Declara is the result of Ramona Pierson’s run in with a drunk driver. During her recovery she developed the idea to make an app that would gather data to help design custom learning programs. Pierson’s psychology background combines machine learning with algorithms that tailor information gathered about a specific person’s situation into a series of lessons that would help them in their specific situation. Taking data and putting it to use to help others is always going to be well received – for brands, it’s a lesson in how to use big data well: Declara is a perfect example that providing utility for the user is important if you want engaged consumers.
Google Gets Serious About Wearables
Wearables have been a hot topic since the new year, with CES featuring wearables a-plenty. Until now, most were powered by third party operating systems, all with different standards and functionalities. Google has decided that Wearables are a potent enough market to expand the Android operating system into, and have announced that they are developing a new wearable SDK for Android. The tools will be available to all in roughly two weeks, and will look to get Google’s interface into smart watches, fitness bands, and others to enable seamless sync between devices and phone operating systems. So although Apple beat Google to the car, it looks as though Google is taking the lead on wearables and connected devices as they continue to flourish.
NYT Now Competes With Yahoo & Others
At SXSW, The New York Times announced a new app called NYT Now that looks set to compete with short-form, curated news apps like Yahoo’s Digest, Flipboard, and others. It’s an app that will, much like Yahoo, have a dedicated staff responsible for picking stories and editing them down for mobile consumption. The Times suggests that the stories will be more visual than their web content, featuring short paragraphs and bullet points to get the the meat of the story in fewer words. As well, the app will have an “Our Picks” tab that highlights other, editor-chosen content from around the web. There is also a Pocket-like “Save for Later” section that’s fairly self explanatory. The ultimate goal of the app is to get to a younger, mobile crowd that might not otherwise consider NYT as a news source. That said, the app is subscription based, with all this content available for $8/month, which includes access to full versions of stories featured on the app. Whether the price is too steep remains to be seen, but what’s clear is that publishers are responding to consumer demand for elegant mobile solutions to getting news – and, at its core, content – on the go.
Privacy Chat App Omlet Launches At SXSW
With both Assange and Snowden speaking at SXSW this year, privacy and surveillance have usurped much else at the Austin conference. It’s a fortuitous set of circumstances for Omlet, an app developed by Stanford PhD students and professors that gives users control over where the content they create is stored, controlled, and monetized. The idea is that the app decentralizes the location of the content, allowing users to manage their data in a granular fashion. It does this by linking with users’ Box and Dropbox accounts, accessing data from these available sources. Omlet does have some ideas about monetization, such as deals with these other storage services, but for now the app remains focused on usability and privacy before all else. It’s a sign of the times that, in the congested world of messaging apps, a new product has carved out an important space for itself by putting privacy first.
