Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

It seems obvious that the best way to advertise a game is to let people play the game itself — and we’ve covered other startups tackling this problem, such as AppOnboard and mNectar.

But Luna Labs co-founder and CEO Steven Chard said that for most developers, the creation of these ads involves outsourcing: “It might take weeks to make an ad, and the quality of the content at the end could be limited.”

The problem, Chard said, is that most games are built on the Unity engine, while the ads need to be in HTML5, which means that developers often have to build playable ads from scratch — hence the outsourcing.

“There’s this huge demand for playables, but the tech hasn’t caught up with it,” he said. “Our view — and I think why it’s really resonating with developers — we’re saying to developers: Use that same [Unity] editor to create a playable ad. You’re going to give the user a playable ad which genuinely feels like the game.”

In fact, while Luna is officially launching its service to developers this week, it’s already been working with a few partners like Kwalee and Voodoo. Luna says that in Kwalee’s case, the results were good enough that the company spent 60% more than they did on other playable ads, and the Luna playables drove more than 250,000 installs per day.

“Luna is solving a real pain point for our studio, and the initial results have been tremendous,” said Kwalee COO Jason Falcus in a statement. “Integrating the Luna service has allowed us to significantly scale our campaigns by a comfortable margin, to the best results so far.”

Luna’s investors include Ben Holmes (formerly of Index Ventures, backer of King and Playfish) and Chris Lee (who also invested in Space Ape and Hello Games).

Chard said the startup is currently focused on providing tools to developers, rather than getting involved in the ad-buying process. More generally, he said the company has been focused on the technology rather than the business model.

“We’re an early company with a very, very complex piece of technology — it’s taken a lot of time to get where we are,” he said. “We’re not doing it for free, but the focus isn’t on short-term profitability. It is, in the longer term, on creating a scalable product which can be used by developers.”

Chard added that eventually, he’s hoping Luna can become more involved in “at the content creation level.” For example, he suggested that developers could use the technology to test out playable concepts and see what resonates, before building a full game.

You can test it out for yourself on the Luna Labs website.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Luna Labs creates playable ads, directly from Unity

This morning Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent company) flipped the 5G switch on four additional cities. Washington, DC, Atlanta, Detroit and Indianapolis join Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Providence in getting coverage for the carrier’s growing next-generation network.

All of the usual caveats apply here. While the list of cities continues to grow, coverage varies from city to city to such a point where Verizon currently includes specific neighborhoods in these announcements. Here’s the breakdown:

In Washington, DC, consumers, businesses and government agencies can initially access Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband service in areas of Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle, Cardozo / U Street, Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Le Droit Park, Georgetown Waterfront, Judiciary Square, Shaw, Eckington, NOMA, National Mall and the Smithsonian, Gallery Place / Chinatown, Mt. Vernon Square, Downtown, Penn Quarter, Brentwood, Southwest Waterfront, Navy Yard, and nearby Crystal City, VA, as well as around landmarks such as the Ronald Reagan National Airport, United States Botanical Gardens, Hart Senate Building, National Gallery of Art, Lafayette Square, The White House, Freedom Plaza, Farragut Square, George Washington University, Capital One Arena, Union Station, Howard University Hospital, George Washington University Hospital, and Georgetown Waterfront Park.

In Atlanta, 5G Ultra Wideband service will initially be concentrated in parts of the following neighborhoods: Downtown, Midtown, Tech Square, and around such landmarks as The Fox Theater, Emory University Hospital Midtown, Mercedes Benz Stadium, Home Depot Backyard, Centennial Olympic Park, Georgia Aquarium, World of Coca Cola, and parts of Renaissance Park.

In Detroit, 5G Ultra Wideband service will initially be concentrated in parts of the following areas: Dearborn, Livonia, and Troy, including areas around the Oakland-Troy Airport.

In Indianapolis, 5G Ultra Wideband service is initially available in parts of the following neighborhoods, Arsenal Heights, Bates Hendricks, Castleton, Crown Hill, Fountain Square, Grace Tuxedo Park, Hawthorne, Historic Meridian Park, Lockerbie Square, Ransom Place, Renaissance Place, St. Joseph Historic Neighborhood, Upper Canal and Woodruff Place and around such landmarks and public spaces as Garfield Park, and Indiana University School of Medicine.

The carrier adds that service will be expanded within the above cities “in the months to come.” But hey, the White House is covered, which means even more rapid tweet storms. Verizon is adding a bunch more cities by the end of the year, including Boston, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Des Moines, Houston, Kansas City, Little Rock, Memphis, Phoenix, San Diego and Salt Lake City.

That will bring the total up to 30 for 2019.

The device selection is still limited, for the moment. Verizon currently offers the LG V50 ThinQ 5G, Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and the Moto Z, which has an optional 5G mod. There’s a 5G MiFi from Inseego available, as well.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Verizon adds Washington, DC, Atlanta, Detroit and Indianapolis to list of 5G cities

Snapchat is hoping to attract new advertisers (and make advertising easier for the ones already on the platform) with the launch of a new tool called Instant Create.

Some of these potential advertisers may not be used to creating ads in the smartphone-friendly vertical format that Snapchat has popularized, so Instant Create is designed to make the process as simple as possible.

Executives at parent organization Snap discussed the tool during last week’s earnings call (in which the company reported that its daily active users increased to 203 million).

“Just this month we started testing our new Instant Create on-boarding flow, which generates ads for businesses in three simple steps from their existing assets, be it their app or their e-commerce storefront,” said CEO Evan Spiegel.

Now the product is moving from testing to availability for all advertisers using Snapchat’s self-serve Ads Manager.

Those three steps that Spiegel mentioned involve identifying the objective of a campaign (website visits, app installs or app visits), entering your website address and finalizing your audience targeting.

You can upload your creative assets if you want, but that’s not required, as Instant Create will also import images from your website. And Snap notes that you won’t need to do any real design work, because there’s “a streamlined ad creation flow that leverages our most popular templates and simplified ad detail options, enabling you to publish engaging creative without additional design resources.”

The goal is to make Snapchat advertisers accessible to smaller advertisers who may not have the time or resources to try to understand new ad formats. After all, on that same earnings call, Chief Business Officer Jeremi Gorman said, “We believe the single biggest driver for our revenue in the short to medium term will be increasing the number of active advertisers using Snapchat.”

Instant Create is currently focused on Snapchat’s main ad format, Snap Ads. You can read more in the company’s blog post.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Snapchat launches ‘instant’ tool for creating vertical ads

Let’s start with the good news. LG actually had a pretty good quarter (on the strength of appliance sales). The LG Home Appliance & Air Solution division made $5.23 billion for Q2. Anyone who’s been following the company for the past several years can guess where the bad news comes.

Smartphone sales dipped 21.3% year over year for the South Korean company. The culprits are as you’d expect: an overall slowing of the smartphone market, coupled with aggressive undercutting from Chinese manufacturers. Huawei seems to lead the pack on that front, with a big increase in sales, in spite of a confluence of external factors.

The smartphone unit saw an operating loss of $268.4 million, in spite of a 6.8% increase in sales from the quarter prior. LG chalks up the loss to higher marketing on new models and April’s move from Seoul to Vietnam for smartphone production for longer-term cost cutting.

In spite of this, the company says it’s still bullish about smartphone sales for Q3. “The introduction of competitive mass-tier smartphones and growing demand for 5G products are expected to contribute to improved performance in the third quarter,” it writes in an earnings release.

LG is, of course, among the first companies to release a 5G handset, with the V50 ThinQ. The next-gen wireless technology is expected to increase stagnating global smartphone sales, though much of that will depend on the speed with which carriers are able to roll it out. It seems unlikely that 5G in and of itself will be a quick or even longer-term fix for a struggling category.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | LG’s smartphone sales dropped another 21%

The media has largely bought into Huawei’s “strong” half-year results today, but there’s a major catch in the report: the company’s quarter-by-quarter smartphone growth was zero.

The telecom equipment and smartphone giant announced on Tuesday that its revenue grew 23.2% to reach 401.3 billion yuan ($58.31 million billion) in the first half of 2019 despite all the trade restrictions the U.S. slapped on it. Huawei’s smartphone shipments recorded 118 million units in H1, up 24% year-over-year.

What about quarterly growth? Huawei didn’t say, but some quick math can uncover what it’s hiding. The company clocked a strong 39% in revenue growth in the first quarter, implying that its overall H1 momentum was dragged down by Q2 performance.

The firm shipped 59 million smartphones in the first quarter, which means the figure was also 59 million units in the second quarter. As tech journalist Alex Barredo pointed out in a tweet, Huawei’s Q2 smartphone shipments were historically stronger than Q1.

And although Huawei sold more handset units in China during Q2 (37.3 million) than Q1 (29.9 million) according to data from market research firm Canalys, the domestic increase was apparently not large enough to offset the decline in international markets. Indeed, Huawei’s founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei himself predicted in June that the company’s overseas smartphone shipments would drop as much as 40%.

The causes are multi-layered, as the Chinese tech firm has been forced to extract a raft of core technologies developed by its American partners. Google stopped providing to Huawei certain portions of Android services, such as software updates, in compliance with U.S. trade rules. Chip designer ARM also severed business ties with Huawei. To mitigate the effect of trade bans, Huawei said it’s developing its own operating system (although it later claimed the OS is primarily for industrial use) and core chips, but these backup promises may take some time to materialize.

Consumer products are just one slice of the behemoth’s business. Huawei’s enterprise segment is under attack, too, as small-town U.S. carriers look to cut ties with Huawei. The Trump administration has also been lobbying its western allies to stop purchasing Huawei’s 5G networking equipment.

In other words, being on the U.S.’s entity list — a ban that prevents American companies from doing business with Huawei — is putting a real squeeze on the Chinese firm. Washington has given Huawei a reprieve that allows American entities to resume buying from and selling to Huawei, but the damage has been done. Ren said last month that all told, the U.S. ban would cost his company a staggering $30 billion loss in revenue.

Huawei chairman Liang Hua (pictured above) acknowledged the firm faces “difficulties ahead” but said the company is “fully confident in what the future holds,” he said today in a statement. “We will continue investing as planned – including a total of CNY120 billion in R&D this year. We’ll get through these challenges, and we’re confident that Huawei will enter a new stage of growth after the worst of this is behind us.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | What Huawei didn’t say in its ‘robust’ half-year results

There are a lot of reasons to assume Huawei’s numbers would be on the decline. Even without getting caught smack in the middle of increasing trade tensions between two superpowers, the smartphone market has been trending down for some time now. A confluence of factors have contributed, including slowed upgrade cycles and stagnate economies in both China and abroad.

The market continues to “soften” in China as early adopters await the launch of 5G before jumping on with a new handset. In spite of everything, however, Huawei appears to be the one company currently bucking the trend. And not just by a little bit, either. New numbers from Canalys put the company at a 31% year on year grown for the second quarter — a stark contrast to the 6% global decline for the category.

The company shipped 37.3 million handsets in China for Q2, with China accounting for 64% of that number. Unsurprisingly, its home market has become an increasingly important sales driver as trade blacklists and the like have barred it from sales in some overseas markets.

An interesting, if unsurprising, factor in that growth is a kind of hometown pride for the embattled brand, which sported a 38% market share for the quarter.

“[T]he US-China trade war is also creating new opportunities. Huawei’s retail partners are rolling out advertisements to link Huawei with being the patriotic choice, to appeal to a growing demographic of Chinese consumers willing to take political factors into account when making a purchase decision,” Canalys’ Mo Jia said in a release tied to the news. “Huawei itself has also been eager to give more exposure to its founder and CEO, Ren Zhengfei, to enhance its brand appeal to local consumers. At the same time, Huawei’s internal chipset and modem technologies will give it an edge over its competitors as 5G is commercialized by Chinese operators.”

That last bit means that Huawei will almost certainly see more growth in the coming years as 5G begins to roll out in China, starting this fall. This is, of course, as long as a ban on the use of American software and components don’t hamper the company entirely in the meantime.

Huawei was cautiously optimistic reporting its quarterly earnings this week. “Given the foundation we laid in the first half of the year, we continue to see growth even after we were added to the entity list,” Chairman Liang Hua said on a call. “That’s not to say we don’t have difficulties ahead. We do, and they may affect the pace of our growth in the short term.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Huawei is shipping a lot more phones in spite of it all

Africa’s mobile phone industry has in recent times been dominated by Transsion, a Shenzhen-based company that is little known outside the African continent and is gearing up for an initial public offering in China. Now, its Chinese peer Vivo is following its shadow to this burgeoning part of the world with low-cost offerings.

Vivo, the world’s fifth-largest smartphone maker, announced this week that it’s bringing its budget-friendly Y series smartphones into Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt while the line of products is already available in Morocco.

It’s obvious that Vivo wants in on an expanding market as its home country China experiences softening smartphone sales. Despite a global slowdown, Africa posted annual growth in smartphone shipments last year for the first time since 2015 thanks in part to the abundance of entry-level products, according to market research firm IDC.

Affordability is the key driver for any smartphone brands that want to grab a slice of the African market. That’s what vaulted Transsion into a top dog on the continent where it sells feature phones for less than $20. Vivo’s Y series smartphones, which are priced as little as $170, are vying for a place with Transsion, Samsung and Huawei that have respective unit shares of 34.3%, 22.6%, and 9.9% in Africa last year.

The Middle East is also part of Vivo’s latest expansion plan despite the region’s recent slump in smartphone volumes. The Y series, which comes in several models sporting features like the 89% screen-to-body ratio or the artificial intelligence-powered triple camera, is currently for sale in the United Arab Emirates and will launch in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in the coming months.

Vivo’s new international push came months after its sister company Oppo, also owned by BBK, made a similar move into the Middle East and Africa by opening a new regional hub in Dubai.

“Since our first entry into international markets in 2014, we have been dedicated to understanding the needs of consumers through in-depth research in an effort to bring innovative products and services to meet changing lifestyle needs,” said Vivo’s senior vice president Spark Ni in a statement.

“The Middle East and Africa markets are important to us, and we will tailor our approach with consumers’ needs in mind. The launch of Y series is just the beginning. We look forward to bringing our other widely popular products beyond Y series to consumers in the Middle East and Africa very soon,” the executive added.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | China’s Vivo is eyeing smartphone users in Africa and Middle East

When Stackin’ initially pitched itself as part of the Techstars Los Angeles accelerator program two years ago, the company was a video platform for financial advice targeting a millennial audience too savvy for traditional advisory services.

Now, nearly two years later, the company has pivoted from video to text-based financial advice for its millennial audience and is offering a new spin on lead generation for digital banks.

The company has launched a new, no-fee, checking and savings account feature in partnership with Radius Bank, which offers users a 1% annual percentage yield on deposits.

And Stackin’ has raised $4 million in new cash from Experian Ventures, Dig Ventures and Cherry Tree Investments, along with supplemental commitments from new and previous investors including Social Leverage, Wavemaker Partners and Mucker Capital.

“Stackin’ has a unique and highly effective approach to connect and communicate with an entire generation of younger consumers around finance,” said Ty Taylor, group president of Global Consumer Services at Experian, in a statement.

Founded two years ago by Scott Grimes, the former founder of Uproxx Media, and Kyle Arbaugh, who served as a senior vice president at Uproxx, Stackin’ initially billed itself as the Uproxx of personal finance.

It turns out that consumers didn’t want another video platform.

“Stackin’ is fundamentally changing the shape and context of what a financial relationship means by creating a fun, inclusive and judgement free environment that empowers our users to learn and take action through messaging,” said Scott Grimes, CEO and co-founder of Stackin’, in a statement. “This funding allows us to build out new features around banking and investing that will enhance the relationship with our customers.”

Later this fall the company said it would launch a new investment feature that will encourage Stackin’ users to participate in the stock market. It’s likely that this feature will look something like the Acorns model, which encourages users to invest in diversified financial vehicles to get them acquainted with the stock market before enabling individual trades on stocks.

According to Grimes, the company made the switch from video to text in March 2018 and built a custom messaging platform on Twilio to service the company’s 500,000 users.

“In a short time, we have built a large customer base with a demographic that is typically hard to reach. Having financial institutions like Experian come on board as an investor is a testament that this model is working,” Grimes wrote in an email.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Mobile messaging financial advisory service Stackin’ adds banking features and raises cash

Google’s Pixel 4 is coming out later this year, and it’s getting the long-reveal treatment thanks to a decision this year from Google to go ahead and spill some of the beans early, rather than saving everything for one big, final unveiling closer to availability. A new video posted by Google today about the forthcoming Pixel 4 (which likely won’t actually be available until fall) shows off some features new to this generation: Motion control and face unlock.

The new “Motion Sense” feature in the Pixel 4 will detect waves of your hand and translate them into software control, including skipping songs, snoozing alarms and quieting incoming phone call alerts, with more planned features to come, according to Google. It’s based on Soli, a radar-based fine motion detection technology that Google first revealed at its I/O annual developer conference in 2016. Soli can detect very fine movements, including fingers pinched together to mimic a watch-winding motion, and it got approval from the FCC in January, hinting it would finally be arriving in production devices this year.

Pixel 4 is the first shipping device to include Soli, and Google says it’ll be available in “select Pixel countries” at launch (probably due to similar approvals requirements wherever it rolls out to consumers).

Google also teased “Face unlock,” something it has supported in Android previously — but Google is doing it very differently with the Pixel 4 than it has been handled on Android in the past. Once again, Soli is part of its implementation, turning on the face unlock sensors in the device as it detects your hand reaching to pick up the device. Google says this should mean that the phone will be unlocked by the time you’re ready to use it, as it does this all on the fly, and works from pretty much any authentication.

Face unlock will be supported for authorizing payments and logging into Android apps, as well, and all of the facial recognition processing done for face unlock will occur on the device — a privacy-oriented feature that’s similar to how Apple handles its own Face ID. In fact, Google also will be storing all the facial recognition data securely in its own dedicated on-device Titan M security chip, another move similar to Apple’s own approach.

Google made the Pixel 4 official and tweeted photos (or maybe photorealistic renders) of the new smartphone back in June, bucking the trend of keeping things unconfirmed until an official reveal closer to release. Based on this update, it seems likely we can expect to learn more about the new smartphone ahead of its availability, which is probably going to happen sometime around October, based on past behavior.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Google’s Pixel 4 smartphone will have motion control and face unlock

Huawei on Friday announced the upcoming release of its first 5G handset in its home market. Following on the heels of its U.K. debut, the Mate 20 X is currently up for pre-order, with an expected China arrival of August 16.

The handset beats the foldable Mate X to market, in spite of that handset having made its debut way back at Mobile World Congress in February. Of course, companies are understandably cautious about foldables in the wake of the mess with the Samsung Galaxy Fold, which finally got an approximate release date last week.

China Mobile flipped the switch on its Huawei-powered 5G transport network late last month, with commercial rollout expected to begin in October. In June, China Telecom and China Unicom were also granted licenses to operate commercial 5G networks, after some delay. Last week, ZTE’s Axon 10 Pro 5G went up for pre-sale in its native China, as well.

Until 5G rollout begins, those purchasing 5G handsets will have to rely on older networks like the rest of us, putting the U.S. and China in similar boats on that front. Of course, security concerns have put both Huawei and ZTE in the cross-hairs internationally, particularly North America.

Huawei has reportedly been looking to build much of its own hardware and software in-house, particularly in the wake of a ban on its use offerings from U.S. companies. Notably, it also announced a $436 million investment in building out an ecosystem around its Arm-based Kunpeng server chip.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Huawei’s first 5G phone goes on sale in China next month