Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

There’s been a huge increase in the last decade of applications and services that rely on real-time notifications and other alerts as a core part of how they operate, and today one of the companies that powers those notifications is announcing a growth round. PubNub — an infrastructure-as-a-service provider that provides a real-time network to send and manage messaging traffic between companies, between companies and apps and between internet-of-things devices — has raised $23 million in a Series D round of funding to ramp up its business internationally, with an emphasis on emerging markets.

The round adds another strategic investor to PubNub’s cap table: Hewlett Packard Enterprise is coming on as an investor, joining in this round previous backers Sapphire Ventures (backed by SAP), Relay Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, Bosch and Ericsson.

Todd Greene, the CEO of PubNub (who co-founded it with Stephen Blum), said the startup is not disclosing its valuation with this round except to say that “we are happy with it, and it’s a solid increase on where we were the last time.” That, according to PitchBook, was just under $155 million back in 2016 in a small extension to its Series C round. The company has raised around $70 million to date.

PubNub’s growth — along with that of competing companies and technologies, which includes the likes of Pusher, RabbitMQ, Google’s Firebase and others — has come alongside the emergence of a number of use cases built on the premise of real-time notifications. These include a multitude of apps; for example, for on-demand commerce (e.g. ride hailing and online food ordering), medical services, entertainment services, IoT systems and more.

That’s pushed PubNub to a new milestone of enabling some 1.3 trillion messages per month for customers that include the likes of Peloton, Atlassian, athenahealth, JustEat, Swiggy, Yelp, the Sacramento Kings and Gett, who choose from some 70 SDKs to tailor what kinds of notifications and actions are triggered around their specific services.

Greene said that while some of the bigger services in the world have largely built their own messaging platforms to manage their notifications — Uber, for example, has taken this route — that process can result in “death by 1,000 paper cuts,” in Greene’s words. Others will opt for a PubNub-style alternative from the start.

“About 50 percent of our customers started by building themselves and then got to scale, and then decided to turn to PubNub,” Greene said.

It’s analogous to the same kind of decision businesses make regarding public cloud infrastructure: whether it makes sense to build and operate their own servers, or turn to a third-party provider — a decision that PubNub itself ironically is also in the process of contemplating.

Today the company runs its own business as an overlay on the public cloud, using a mixture of AWS and others, Greene said — the company has partnerships with Microsoft Azure, AWS, and IBM Watson — but “every year we evaluate the benefits of going into different kinds of data centres and interesting opportunities there. We are evaluating a cost and performance calculation,” he added.

And while he didn’t add it, that could potentially become an exit opportunity for PubNub down the line, too, aligning with a cloud provider that wanted to offer messaging infrastructure-as-a-service as an additional feature to customers.

The strategic relationship with its partners, in fact, is one of the engines for this latest investment. “Edge computing and realtime technologies will be at the heart of the next wave of technology innovation,” commented Vishal Lall, COO of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, said in a statement. “PubNub’s global Data Stream Network has demonstrated extensive accomplishments powering both enterprise and consumer solutions. HPE is thrilled to be investing in PubNub’s fast-growing success, and to accelerate the commercial and industrial applications of PubNub’s real time platform.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | PubNub nabs M as its IaaS network hits 1.3T messages sent each month

Evan Spiegel has finally found a way to fight back against Mark Zuckerberg’s army of clones. For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook, with Spiegel claiming “Our values are hard to copy”. That inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accrue over 1 billion daily Stories users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook compared to Snapchat’s 186 million total daily users. Meanwhile, the whole tech industry scrambled to build knock-offs of Snap’s vision of an ephemeral, visual future.

But Snapchat’s new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social web that’s scared of being squashed beneath Facebook’s boot. It rearranges the adage of “if you can’t beat them, join them” into “to beat them, join us”. As a unified front, Snap’s partners get the infrastructure they need to focus on what differentiates them, while Snapchat gains the reach and entrenchment necessary to weather the war.

Tinder lets you use Snapchat Stories as profile photos

Snapchat’s plan is to let other apps embed the best parts of it rather than building their own half-rate copies.

Why reinvent the wheel of Stories, Bitmoji, and ads when you can reuse the original? A high-ranking Snap executive told me on background that this is indeed the strategy. If it’s going to invent these products, and others want something similar, it’s smarter to enable and partly control the Snapchatification than to try to ignore it. Otherwise, Facebook might be the one to platform-tize what Snap inspired everyone to want.

The “Camera company” corrected course and took back control of its destiny this week at its first ever Snap Partner Summit in its hometown of Los Angeles. Now it’s a camera platform thanks to Snap Kit. Its new Story Kit will implant Snapchat Stories into other apps later this year. They can display a more traditional carousel of your friends’ Stories, or lace them into their app in a custom format. Houseparty’s Stories carousel shares what your buddies are up to outside of the group video chat app. Tinder will let you show off your Snapchat Story alongside your photos to seduce potential matches. But the camera stays inside Snapchat, with new options to share out to these App Stories.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel presents at the Snap Partner Summit

This is how Snapchat colonizes the native app ecosystem similarly to how Facebook invaded the web with the Like button. Snap’s strong privacy record makes these partners willing to host it where now they might fear that Facebook and its history with Cambridge Analytica could tarnish their brand.

Instead of watching these other apps spin up mini competitors that further fragment the Stories world, Snap saves developers the slow and costly hassle while instantly giving them best-in-class tools to boost their own engagement. Each outpost makes your Snapchat account a little more indispensable, grants its camera new utility, and reminds you to visit again. It’s another reason to stick with Snap rather than straying to other versions of Stories.

If Spiegel knows what’s up, he’ll douse the Story Kit partnerships team with resources so they can sign up as many apps as possible before Facebook can copy this idea too. For now, Snap isn’t injecting ads into App Stories, but it could easily do so and split the cash with its host. This would attract partners, generate revenue, and give Snap’s advertisers more reach.

Houseparty embeds Snapchat Stories

Either way, Snap will score those benefits with its new Ad Kit. Later this year the Snapchat Audience Network will launch allowing partners to host Snap’s full-screen vertical video ads and earn an as-yet-undisclosed revenue share. They won’t have to build up an ad sales force or build an auction and delivery system, but just drop in an SDK to start displaying ads to both Snapchat users and non-users. The company’s message again is that it’s becoming easier to cooperate with Snapchat than copy it.

Snap’s new ad network

Giving its advertisers more reach and reusability for Snap’s somewhat proprietary ad unit format helps Snap address its core challenge: scale. Snap’s 186 million total users can look small in comparison to Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube, especially since that count sank in Q2 and Q3 before stabilzing in Q4 of last year. That makes it tougher for advertisers to justify the chore of spending on Snapchat. Ad Kit and potentially Story Kit give Snap more reach even without user growth.

Added size could tip the cards in Snap’s favor given it’s already popular with an extremely important demographic. Snapchat now reaches 75 percent of 13 to 34-year olds in the US, and 90 percent of 13 to 24-year olds there. It claims to now reach more of that younger age group than Facebook in the most lucrative countries: the US, Canada, UK, France, and Australia.

Facebook has massively neglected this segment. Case in point: Facebook Messenger’s Stickers feature that’s popular with kids has hardly improved since its launch in 2013, which I hear was a fight to get approved internally. Meanwhile, Snapchat keeps growing its lead on virtual identity with Bitmoji. Now Snap will let you put your personalized Bitmoji avatar on your FitBit smart watch face, use them to joke about Venmo purchases, and even represent yourself with one in Snap’s new multiplayer games platform.

Again, Snap wants partners to integrate the real thing rather than try to build some half-assed facsimile of Bitmoji. Surprisingly, Facebook’s Avatars have been mired in development for over a year and Apple’s Memoji can’t escape iMessage and FaceTime yet. That’s why Snapchat would be wise to double-down on trying to make Bitmoji the ubiquitous way to represent yourself without a photograph. Facebook’s lack of design cool and Bitmoji’s massive head start with this differentiated product is a powerful way for Snap to wedge itself into partnerships.

Snap needs all the help it can get if the underdog is going to carve out a substantial and sustainable piece of social networking. Teaming up was the theme of the rest of the Snap Partner Summit. It’s built ways for Netflix, GoFundMe, VSCO, and Anchor to share stickers and for publishers like the Washington Post to share articles back to Snapchat. It’s got Zynga and ZeptoLab building real-time multiplayer Snap Games that live inside chat and are a clever way of slipping ads into messaging.

Snapchat’s new Scan augmented reality utility platform has signed up Giphy and Photomath as well as former partners Shazam and Amazon to let you squeeze extra interactivity out of your surroundings. And since the physical world is too vast for any one developer to fill with AR experiences, Snap beefed up its Lens Studio platform with new templates and creator profiles so developers add to its warchest of 400,000 special effects. Facebook may be able to clone Snap’s features, but not its developer army.

“If we can show the right Lens in the right moment, we can inspire a whole new world of creativity” says Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy . From partnerships to utilities to toys, all the new announcements drive attention back to Snapchat’s camera. That makes it ripe to become the augmented reality browser of the world.

It all feels like a coming of age moment for Snapchat, punctuated by the glitzy press event where media bigwigs noshed on Chinese steak buns and played with AR art installations in West Hollywood.

Spiegel has discovered a method of capitalizing on his penchant for inspiring mobile product design. With this strategy in place and Snap’s reengineered Android app and new languages rolling out now, I believe Snapchat will grow again, at least in terms of deeper engagement if not also total user count. Perhaps it will need a little bit more funding to get it over the hurdle, but I expect it will reach profitability before the end of 2020. 

During a pre-event press briefing with a dozen Snap executives including Spiegel and Murphy (that was on ‘background’ so we can’t quote or specify who said what), one Snap higher-up joked that Facebook has been copying it for seven years so it’s started to feel normal. Zuckerberg recently declared he wanted to reorient Facebook around privacy, ephemerality, and messaging — the core tenets of Snapchat. But a Snap leader used some colorful language to describe how they don’t care what Facebook says its philosophy is until it fixes the 2 billion-user product that keeps doing harm.

Subtly throwing shade from the stage, Spiegel concluded that “Our camera lets the natural light from our world penetrate the darkness of the Internet . . . as we use the Internet more and more in our daily lives, we need a way to make it a bit more human.” That apparently means making other apps a bit more Snapchat.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | To stop copycats, Snapchat shares itself

Photo-editing app-maker VSCO has filed a lawsuit against competitor PicsArt.

The suit focuses on 19 PicsArt filters that were supposedly “reverse engineered from VSCO’s filters,” with VSCO alleging it has become a legal issue involving false advertising and violations of the app’s terms of service.

“VSCO has invested significant time and resources in developing its presets [a.k.a. filters], which represent valuable intellectual property of VSCO,” the company writes.

In a statement, PicsArt denied the suit’s claims:

VSCO is not a direct competitor, but they clearly feel threatened by PicsArt. VSCO’s claims are meritless. It’s disappointing that they have made these false claims against us. PicsArt will vigorously defend itself against these baseless claims and all options are under consideration.

Specifically, VSCO says that at least 17 PicsArt employees created VSCO accounts — probably not an uncommon competitive practice, but the suit claims they used those accounts to reverse engineer the filters, thus violating the terms in which users “agree not to sell, license, rent, modify, distribute, copy, reproduce, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, publish, adapt, edit or create derivative works from any VSCO Content.”

In addition, the suit accuses PicsArt of engaging in false advertising by describing the filters in its PicsArt Gold subscription as “exclusive” and “only for [PicsArt] Gold users.”

Why is VSCO so sure that the PicsArt filters were based on its own? The suit says:

VSCO’s color scientists have determined that at least nineteen presets published by PicsArt are effectively identical to VSCO presets that are only available through a VSCO account. Specifically, VSCO determined that those PicsArt filters have a Mean Color Difference (“MCD”) of less than two CIEDE2000 units (in some cases, far less than two units) compared to their VSCO counterparts. An MCD of less than two CIEDE2000 units between filters is imperceptible to the human eye and cannot have been achieved by coincidence or visual or manual approximation. On information and belief, PicsArt could have only achieved this degree of similarity between its filters and those of VSCO by using its employees’ VSCO user accounts to access the VSCO app and reverse engineer VSCO’s presets.

The suit goes on to claim that VSCO’s lawyers sent PicsArt a letter in February demanding that the company identify and remove any filters that were reverse engineered or copied from VSCO. The letter also demanded “an accounting of all profits and revenues generated from such filters” and that PicsArt identify any employees who had created VSCO accounts.

In VSCO’s telling, PicsArt then responded that it was “in the process of replacing certain underperforming filters and modifying others,” including the 19 filters in question, but it only removed 17 — and supposedly two of the new filters “were similarly reverse engineered from VSCO’s proprietary presets.” The suit also says PicsArt has failed to provide the information that VSCO demanded.

VSCO does not appear to be suing for a specific monetary value, but the suit asks for “disgorgement of any proceeds obtained from PicsArt’s use of VSCO filters,” as well as injunctive relief, compensatory damages and “the costs of corrective advertising.”

You can read the full complaint below.

VSCO Complaint by on Scribd

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | VSCO sues PicsArt over photo filters that were allegedly reverse engineered

About half a year ago, Google gave the Assistant on phones a major visual refresh. Today, the company is following up with a couple of small but welcome tweaks that’ll see the Assistant on Android provide more and better visual responses that are more aligned with what users already expect to see from other Google services.

That means when you ask for events now, for example, the response will look exactly like what you’d see if you tried the same query from your mobile browser. Until now, Google showed a somewhat pared-down version in the Assistant.

Also — and this is going to be a bit of a controversial change — when the Assistant decides that the best answer is simply a list of websites (or when it falls back to those results because it simply doesn’t have any other answer), the Assistant used to show you a couple of boxes in a vertical layout that were not exactly user-friendly. Now, the Assistant will simply show the standard Google Search layout.

Seems like a good idea, so why would that be controversial? Together with the search results, Google will also show its usual Search ads. This marks the first time that Google is showing ads in the Assistant experience. To be fair, the Assistant will only show these kinds of results for a very small number of queries, but users will likely worry that Google will bring more ads to the rest of the Assistant.

Google tells me that advertisers can’t target their ads to Assistant users and won’t get any additional information about them.

The Assistant will now also show built-in mortgage calculators, color pickers, a tip calculator and a bubble level when you ask for those. Also, when you ask for a stock quote, you’ll now see a full interactive graph, not just the current price of the quote.

These new features are rolling out to Android phones in the U.S. now. As usual, it may take a bit before you see them pop up on your own phone.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | The Google Assistant on Android gets more visual responses

Amazon is ready to challenge Apple with a cheaper, Alexa-powered set of wireless earbuds. If successful, it would carve out a space for the popular digital assistant, and its deep connections to the rest of Amazon’s ecosystem, in the mobile world Amazon has hitherto largely failed to penetrate. But that’s a big if.

A report from Bloomberg details the upcoming hardware, which sounds a lot like AirPods (and the handful of other wireless sets that have appeared): a pair of small wireless in-ear buds, a case that doubles as a charger and built-in controls and a mic so you can control your music, talk to friends and ask Alexa things on the go.

Of course, the obvious question is how exactly this will work, given that AirPods have special privileges as first-party Apple hardware that let them perform tasks others can’t yet do. If your phone is locked, non-AirPod headphones (for instance Galaxy Buds) can’t connect through their associated app to look stuff up or provide services. You can of course set up a “Hey Siri, OK Google” situation, but that’s a bit sad.

Bloomberg’s report says that the Alexa headphones let you “order goods, access music, weather and other information,” but it isn’t clear under what circumstances. If you have to have the phone unlocked and an app open for it to work, the whole thing is a non-starter. And it seems unlikely that Apple would grant Amazon some kind of clearance to do the kind of things only AirPods can do.

It’s conceivable that the headphones will, when possible, connect instead on detection of a command to a compatible Alexa device nearby with an internet connection — and there’s no shortage of those in many a tech-savvy home. But if you’re walking down the street and need to ask directions, you may have to pull the phone out, which rather negates the already somewhat limited convenience of owning a pair of wireless headphones.

These difficulties, plus those associated with simply making such a sophisticated piece of hardware for relatively cheap, explain why the headphones have reportedly had a bit of trouble getting shipped.

A cheaper price tag and potentially better audio quality may not be enough to make this particular endeavor a winner, but we’ll know more if and when Amazon goes official.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Amazon reportedly readying its Alexa-powered answer to AirPods

Bumble is the latest digital brand to try to extend its reach through a print publication. The dating app maker today announced the launch of Bumble Mag, a lifestyle publication it produced in partnership with Hearst that offers stories and advice about dating, careers, friendship and more to Bumble’s over 50 million users.

On the cover of the 100-page premiere issue is Lauren Chan, a fashion entrepreneur behind the plus-size workwear line called Henning.

Inside, the magazine is organized into four sections that align with the Bumble app’s different modes: “You First,” “You + BFFs,” “You + Dating” and “You + Bizz.” Here, readers will find celebrity interviews, features, advice, product guides, “daily mantras” and more.

Contributors in this month’s debut issue include Bumble advisor and the star of the brand’s first Super Bowl campaign, Serena Williams; writers, actresses and Bumble Creative Directors Erin and Sara Foster; Man Repeller founder Leandra Medine; jewelry designer Jennifer Meyer; and Away luggage co-founder Jen Rubio.

A digital brand taking to print is no longer a unique occurrence.

Airbnb has Airbnb Magazine, which arrives in the mail; Unilever’s Dollar Shave Club runs Mel Magazine; mattress brand Casper created Woolly Magazine in partnership with McSweeney’s; luggage brand Away has Here Magazine; Uber has rolled out several print magazines, including Vehicle, Arriving Now and Momentum; and even Facebook launched a print magazine, Grow, aimed at business leaders.

For Bumble, the magazine offers the company a way to introduce its brand to new customers as well as extend its relationship with existing users out in the real world. This is part of Bumble’s larger efforts in developing an offline component to its business. The company also runs pop-ups, hosts events and has spoken of plans to launch more physical locations — “Hives,” in Bumble lingo — sometime this year.

These moves also speak to Bumble’s aspiration to be more than just another dating app and Tinder rival.

The company instead wants to be known more broadly as a women-centric lifestyle brand where its users can network online and off, in all aspects of their lives — not just dating. For example, its Bumble BFF service helps women make new friends, while Bumble Bizz  is focused on business networking.

The company says the new magazine will be distributed by its 3,000+ brand ambassadors — marketers and event hosts who work with Bumble to promote its brand. Users can also request a free copy of the first issue within the app.

For Hearst, print efforts from online brands like Bumble represent a new line of business at a time when print is being challenged by digital solutions, like Kindle Unlimited or Apple News+, which are trying to transition print magazine subscribers to go digital-only.

“Bumble is at the forefront of inspiring women to make connections and take initiative in all aspects of their lives with its positive message of empowerment,” said HearstMade Editorial Director Brett Hill in a statement. “The magazine is a perfect example of how HearstMade is changing the face of custom publishing with hyper-targeted content that reflects the brand’s ethos in the most authentic way.”

Bumble Mag becomes available nationwide on Friday, April 5, says Bumble.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Bumble goes to print with its new lifestyle magazine, Bumble Mag

Snap is unlocking a new revenue stream while giving you something to do between chats and Stories. Today Snapchat debuts its Snap Games platform that lets you play real-time, multiplayer games while texting and talking with your friends. The platform is based on Snap’s secret late-2017 acquisition of PrettyGreat, an Australian game studio with talent from HalfBrick (which built Fruit Ninja). That team built Bitmoji Party, a Mario Party-style mini-game fest, to show off the platform that includes five games from developers like Zynga and ZeptoLab. The games are rolling out worldwide on iOS and Android starting today.

To monetize the platform, Snapchat will let users opt in to watching six-second unskippable commercials that reward them with a power up or bonus in-game currency. Snapchat will share revenue from the ads with developers, though it refused to specify the split. It could be a little weird watching ads to more easily beat your friends. But down the line it’s easy to imagine Snapchat selling cosmetic upgrades via in-app purchases akin to Fortnite.

Snap announced the new Snap Games platform at its first-ever press event, the Snap Partner Summit in Los Angeles, where it also announced an augmented reality utility platform called Scan, an ads network and a way to put its Stories in other apps. “We wanted to build something that makes us feel like we’re playing a board game with a family of over a long holiday weekend. Something that makes us feel like we’re sitting with friends, controllers in hand, looking at the same screen,” says Snap’s head of gaming, Will Wu. The Information’s Tom Dotan and Amir Efrati first reported Snap was building a gaming platform and Cheddar’s Alex Heath reported it would end up launching today.

Snap Games could be considered a real-time spin on Facebook Messenger’s Instant Games platform, which has focused on porting to HTML5 well-known asynchronous games like Pac-Man and other arcade titles. Similarly, Snap Games don’t have to be downloaded separately, as they’re piped in from the web. Users can browse available games by tapping a new rocket ship button in the chat bar.

With Bitmoji Party, your avatar competes with up to seven friends simultaneously in a series of mini games where you have to stay balanced on a giant record as a DJ scratches it, or avoid getting knocked in the pool. You also can have another 24 friends spectate and rotate in. Winners earn coins they can use to buy dances to stunt on their competition. And with an ever-present chat bar, users can use text or voice to talk trash.

Rather than port in known IP, Snap recruited developers to build games exclusively for its vertical, real-time multiplayer format. These include:

• Alphabear Hustle from SpryFox – a fast-paced word puzzler
• C.A.T.S. (Crash Arena Turbo Stars) Drift Race from ZeptoLab – a cutesy racing game
• Snake Squad from Game Closure – a reimagining of the classic Snake game set in outer space
• Tiny Royale from Zynga – a top-down battle royale shooter game that feels like a Game Boy version of Fortnite  top-down battle royale game
• Zombie Rescue Squad from PikPok – a zombie shooter

Snapchat’s partner games (from left): Tiny Royale, Snake Squad, C.A.T.S. Drift Race

Snap’s game platform has huge potential to boost time spent in the app and the ads views that generates because gaming is perfect for its demographic. “In the United States, Snapchat now reaches nearly 75 percent of all 13 to 34-year-olds, and we reach 90 percent of 13 to 24-year-olds. In fact, we reach more 13 to 24-year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the U.K., France, Canada and Australia,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed today. This is the age group with the free time and dense social graphs to make use of multiplayer real-time games.

The big question is whether Snap’s reward-incentivized video ad views will generate enough cash to keep developers coming to the platform. If not, a limited line of titles could get old quick. Snap has entirely avoided in-app purchases since shutting down its Lens Store in early 2016. There’s understandable concern that kids could rack up huge bills on their parents’ credit cards. But given how Fortnite has normalized paying for no-utility cosmetic upgrades for this same demographic, with the right controls Snapchat could do the same to make itself and its partners a lot more money. And given you’re always playing with your friends, not strangers, there’s an even deeper urge to buy funny costumes and dances to impress them.

Snapchat’s overarching strategy right now is to build an orbit of time-wasters surrounding chat. What began with Stories now includes Discover publications, premium Shows, augmented reality toys and now games. It may never become a favorite with the 35+ age group. But since messaging is the top mobile behavior, Snap can use it to keep people coming back and then distract them while they’re waiting for a reply or need a social alternative to small talk.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Snapchat launches Mario Party-style multiplayer games platform

Snapchat has found an answer to the revenue problem stemming from its halted growth: it will show its ads in other apps with the launch of Snapchat Ad Kit and the Snapchat Audience Network. And rather than watching as other apps spin up their own knock-off versions of its camera and Stories, it will let apps like Tinder and Houseparty host Stories inside their own products that users can share to from the Snapchat camera with Stories Kit. They’ll both be launching later this year, and developers interested in monetization and engagement help can apply for access.

Snapchat debuted the big new additions to its Snap Kit at its first-ever press event in Los Angeles, the Snap Partner Summit, where it also announced a new augmented reality utility platform called Scan, and its new multiplayer games platform. More than 200 apps have already integrated the privacy-safe Snap Kit that lets users log in to other apps with Snapchat, bring their Bitmoji, view Our Stories content and share stickers back to Snapchat.

But later this year, developers will be able to earn money off of Snap Kit with Ad Kit. Developers will integrate Snapchat’s SDK, and then Snap’s advertisers will be able to extend their ad buys to reach both Snapchat users and non-users in other apps. Snapchat will split the ad revenue with developers, but refused to hint at what the divide will be, as it’s still gauging developer interest. The move is straight out of Facebook’s playbook, essentially copying the functionality and name of Facebook’s Audience Network.

There are still big questions about exactly how Snapchat will reach and track ad views of non-users, and how it will be able to provide brands with the analytics they need while maintaining user privacy. But simply by making Snapchat’s somewhat proprietary vertical video ad units reusable elsewhere, it could prove it has a scale to be worth advertisers’ time. The lack of scale has often scared buyers away from Snapchat. But Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says that “In the United States, Snapchat now reaches nearly 75 percent of all 13 to 34-year-olds, and we reach 90 percent of 13 to 24-year-olds. In fact, we reach more 13 to 24-year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the U.K., France, Canada and Australia.”

To keep those users engaged even outside of Snapchat, it’s adding App Stories through Story Kit. Snapchat users will see an option to share to integrated apps after they create a photo or video. Those Stories will then appear in custom places in other apps. You’ll see Snaps injected alongside people’s photos when you’re browsing potential matches in Tinder. You can see what friends on group chat social network Houseparty are doing when they are not on the app. And you can see video recommendations from explorers on AdventureAide.

For now, Snapchat won’t run ads between Stories in other apps, but that’s always a possibility. We’ll have to see how long it takes Instagram and Facebook to try to copy Stories Kit and distribute their own versions to other apps.

Snap also has some other fun new integrations and big-name partnerships. Bitmoji Kit will bring your personalized avatar off your phone and onto Fitbit’s smart watches and Venmo transactions. Netflix will let you share preview images (but not trailers) from its shows to your Snapchat Story. A new publisher-sharing button for the web will let you share articles from The Washington Post and others to your Story.

By colonizing other apps with its experience, Snapchat decreases the need for them to copy it. Instead they get the original, and a lot less development work. And the platform makes your Snapchat account more valuable around the web. These integrations might not grow Snapchat too much, but it could help it keep its existing users happy and squeeze more cash out of them.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Snapchat will power Stories & ads in other apps

Point and shoot? No, point and interact. Snapchat can now help with your homework. The app’s camera is becoming the foundation of an augmented reality developer platform known as “Scan.” Snap today announced partnerships with Photomath to add the ability to solve math problems, and Giphy for detecting objects, which then spawn related GIFs onscreen. Scan will roll out to all Snapchat users soon, and developers interested in joining the platform can contact Snap.

Snapchat Scan spawns Giphy GIFs based on what’s around you

Previously, Snapchat’s camera could identify songs with Shazam and recognize objects so you could buy them on Amazon. But now instead of just offering a few scattered tools, Snapchat is crystallizing its plan to let you reveal hidden information about the world around you.

“Our camera lets the natural light from our world penetrate the darkness of the internet . . . as we use the internet more and more in our daily lives, we need a way to make it a bit more human,” said Snap CEO Evan Spiegel at the company’s first-ever press event, the Snap Partner Summit. There it also announced it would launch an ad network, power Stories in other apps and launch a real-time multiplayer games platform.

Scan with Photomath solves math problems

Others like Blippar have tried to build AR utility platforms, but they lacked the community and daily use necessary to already be top of mind when people want to scan something. But Snap CEO Evan Spiegel today revealed that, “In the United States, Snapchat now reaches nearly 75 percent of all 13 to 34-year-olds, and we reach 90 percent of 13 to 24-year-olds. In fact, we reach more 13 to 24-year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the U.K., France, Canada and Australia.”

The comparison data comes from Facebook’s ad manager estimates, which aren’t always totally accurate. Still, the stats demonstrate that amongst the audience likely to explore the world via augmented reality, Snapchat is huge. Even if Facebook wanted to build this behavior, it can’t, because the Facebook Camera isn’t the heart of its social network.

When users tap and hold on the Snapchat camera, they’ll start to Scan their surroundings. Answers to math equations will magically appear. If you view a $10 bill, Hamilton will come alive and sing a song from the musical. Scan a slice of pizza and a dancing Giphy pizza slice appears. Users will also see the new Snapchat AR Bar with dedicated buttons to Scan, create a lens or explore the 400,000 AR Lenses created by Snapchat’s community. Indeed, 75 percent of Snap’s 186 million daily users play with Lenses each day, combining into 15 billion total plays to date. Scan was built off the acquisition of a startup called Scan.me, which until now has powered Snap’s QR Snapcodes that let people add friends or unlock Lenses.

Snap’s new AR Bar

Outside of utility, Snapchat is also adding a slew of new creative AR features to keep that audience entertained and loyal. For example, it’s launching Landmarkers, which uses point cloud data from user-submitted Our Stories of major landmarks to power animated AR transformations of famous places. Now the Eiffel Tower, Buckingham Palace, LA’s Chinese Theater, DC’s Capitol Building and NYC’s Flatiron Building can spew rainbows, shoot lightning and more.

Snapchat’s new Landmarkers

For developers and Lens creators using Snap’s Lens Studio tools, Snap is launching new Creator Profiles where they can show off all the Lenses they’ve contributed. They’ll all have access to new AR templates for hand, body and pet effects that take care of all the hardcore computer science. Creators just add their graphical assets like a mustache for dogs, fireballs that shoot out of people’s hands or rainbows that appear over someone when they hold their arms out.

Snapchat’s new Lens Creator profiles

Snap will even surface relevant community Lenses in the Lens Carousel based on what its Scans pick up. One place it falls short, though, is there’s no direct monetization opportunities for independent Lens creators, beyond Snap occasionally connecting the best AR artists to brands for paid Lens development deals. Snapchat admits it will need to create better incentives long-term.

At a big press briefing yesterday, the company’s top execs explained that growth isn’t Snapchat’s success metric any more. That’s convenient, considering the launch of Instagram Stories cut Snap’s growth from 17 percent per quarter to it actually losing users and only stabilizing this quarter. Instead, Spiegel says, deepening user engagement, and thereby the ad revenue users generate, is Snap’s path forward.

The more Snap gets users playing with augmented reality filters and the better development tools it provides, the more brands and devs will pay to promote their Lenses in the Lens Carousel or through video ads where users swipe up to try a Lens.

But that engagement is also critical to beating Facebook and Instagram to the next phase of AR. Instagram Stories might have 500 million daily users, but they’re mostly applying AR to their faces, not to interact with the world. Snapchat needs as many fun AR entertainment experiences like Landmarkers as possible to normalize AR exploration, which will unlock the potential of the Scan platform. That could one day fuel affiliate fees from AR commerce sales and other revenue streams.

Plus, Snapchat says Lenses are coded to be compatible with not just iOS and Android, but future AR hardware platforms. To build the biggest repository of AR experiences, Snapchat needs help, as I wrote two years ago that Snap’s anti-developer attitude was an augmented liability. Now it’s finally building the tools and platform to harness a legion of developers to fill the physical world with imaginary wonder. “If we can show the right Lens in the right moment, we can inspire a whole new world of creativity,” concludes Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Snapchat launches Scan, its AR utility platform

“We give them the power. That’s the bad part. We buy their products. We sign up for these websites. Delete Facebook, right?”

That’s WhatsApp founder Brian Acton’s most recent quote about his former employer, Facebook. Acton has seemingly been fueled by his experience running WhatsApp from within Facebook, which has been scrutinized for profiting from collecting data on users.

Which explains why now, two years after leaving Facebook, Acton has found a new groove as founder and executive chairman of the Signal Technology Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to doing the foundational work around making private communication accessible, secure and ubiquitous. Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start Signal Foundation in February of 2018.

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF in October, we’ll hear more from Acton about Signal Foundation and his predictions for the future of communication and privacy. And, of course, we’ll try to learn more about what Facebook was up to with WhatsApp, why he left and how it felt leaving $850 million on the table.

Though he was rejected for positions at Facebook and Twitter in 2009, Acton is actually a Silicon Valley veteran, working in the industry (mostly as a software builder) for more than 25 years at places like Apple, Yahoo and Adobe before founding WhatsApp.

The chat app he built with co-founder Jan Koum grew to 1.5 billion users and, eventually, saw a $19 billion buyout from Mark Zuckerberg in 2014. But when Facebook wanted to lay the basis for targeted ads and commercial messaging within the encrypted chat app he’d spent years building, he walked away.

The Signal Foundation is all about ensuring people have access to private communication that doesn’t cost their own personal data.

“We believe there is an opportunity to act in the public interest and make a meaningful contribution to society by building sustainable technology that respects users and does not rely on the commoditization of personal data,” Acton wrote when it was first announced. In many ways, the Signal Foundation is a symbol and a continuation of Acton’s most expensive moral stand.

We’re thrilled to hear from Acton about what’s next at Signal Foundation. We’ll also try to learn more about his exit at Facebook and his feelings about the products he spent so much time building there.

After all, unsavvy regulators, legions of competitors and user backlash have all failed to compel Facebook to treat people better. But the real power lies with the talent that tech giants fight over. When people like Acton speak up or walk out, employers are forced to listen.

“No filter” is Acton’s style, so get ready for some fireworks when we sit down with him onstage at Disrupt SF.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center. Tickets are available here.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | WhatsApp’s Brian Acton to talk Signal Foundation and leaving Facebook at Disrupt SF