<span>Monthly Archives</span><h1>May 2019</h1>
    Startups

    RedCircle’s latest feature makes it easy to tip podcast creators

    May 8, 2019

    A group of former Uber employees unveiled their podcasting startup RedCircle last week, and now they’re already launching new features — specifically the ability for listeners to make small tip payments to podcasters.

    RedCircle has created a web-based podcast player of its own, but CEO Michael Kadin (previously an engineering manager at Uber) said the mission isn’t to compete with other podcast apps. Instead the team aims to create the tools podcasters need to build a real business.

    In fact, RedCircle is already offering some of those tools — like hosting and analytics — for free, and it also launched a cross-promotion marketplace where those podcasters can team up to try to grow each others’ audiences.

    As for the new tipping feature, it appears as a button on the RedCircle player, allowing users to pay $2, $5 or a custom amount with just a few clicks (you’ll also need to enter your credit card info, of course). The startup can also automatically insert a tipping link into a podcast’s show notes, so listeners will find out about it regardless of the player they use.

    Co-founder Jeremy Lermitte (a former Uber product manager) added that tipping provides a way for fans to compensate a podcaster for an episode they particularly enjoyed without making the long-term commitment of, say, signing up for a Patreon subscription.

    “This allows you to engage at your own pace,” Lermitte said.

    Podcasters can and do accept one-time payments via PayPal or Venmo, but Kadin said RedCircle offers more data about who’s making the payments, while also providing a 1099 form for taxes and “all the other things you want to turn this into a real thing, versus something casual.”

    “The first thing podcasters say they need is to grow their audience,” he added. “The second thing is to make money from it. Now we’re working on both of those problems. Just give us another week and a half and we’ll make even more progress.”

    RedCircle has raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Roy Bahat at Bloomberg Beta .

    Acast launches Acast Access to make paywalled podcasts available on any player


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | RedCircle’s latest feature makes it easy to tip podcast creators

    Tech News

    Google Play is changing how app ratings work

    May 8, 2019

    Two years ago, Apple changed the way its app store ratings worked by allowing developers to decide whether or not their ratings would be reset with their latest app update — a feature that Apple suggests should be used sparingly. Today, Google announced it’s making a change to how its Play Store app ratings work, too. But instead of giving developers the choice of when ratings will reset, it will begin to weight app ratings to favor those from more recent releases.

    “You told us you wanted a rating based on what your app is today, not what it was years ago, and we agree,” said Milena Nikolic, an engineering director leading Google Play Console, who detailed the changes at the Google I/O Developer conference today.

    She explained that, soon, the average rating calculation for apps will be updated for all Android apps on Google Play. Instead of a lifetime cumulative value, the app’s average rating will be recalculated to “give more weight” to the most recent users’ ratings.

    With this update, users will be able to better see, at a glance, the current state of the app — meaning, any fixes and changes that made it a better experience over the years will now be taken into account when determining the rating.

    “It will better reflect all your hard work and improvements,” touted Nikolic, of the updated ratings.

    On the flip side, however, this change also means that once high-quality apps that have since failed to release new updates and bug fixes will now have a rating that reflects their current state of decline.

    It’s unclear how much the change will more broadly impact Google Play Store SEO, where today app search results are returned based on a combination of factors, including app names, descriptions, keywords, downloads, reviews and ratings, among other factors.

    The updated app ratings was one of numerous Google Play changes announced today, along with the public launch of dynamic delivery features, new APIs, refreshed Google Play Console data, custom listings and even “suggested replies” — like those found in Gmail, but for responding to Play Store user reviews.

    End users of the Google Play Store won’t see the new, recalculated rating until August, but developers can preview their new rating today in their Play Store Console.

    Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Google Play is changing how app ratings work