Snapchat will launch Bitmoji TV, a personalized cartoon show

Snapchat’s most popular yet under-exploited feature is finally getting the spotlight in 2020. Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV. It’s a massive evolution for Bitmoji beyond the chat stickers and comic strip-style Stories where they were being squandered to date.

Creating original in-house shows for its Discover section that can’t be copied could help Snapchat differentiate from the plethora of short-form video platforms out there ranging from YouTube to Facebook Watch to TikTok. Bitmoji TV could also up the quality of Discover, which still feels like a tabloid magazine rack full of scantly clad women, gross-out imagery, and other shocking content merely meant to catch the eye and draw a click.

With Bitmoji TV, your avatar and those of your friends will appear in regularly-scheduled adventures ranging from playing the crew of Star Treky spaceship to being secret agents to falling in love with robots or becoming zombies. The trailer Snapchat released previews an animation style reminiscent of Netflix’s Big Mouth.

TechCrunch asked Snap for more details, including how long episodes will be, how often they’ll be released, whether they’ll include ads, and if the company acquired anyone or brought on famous talent to produce the series. A Snap spokesperson declined to provide more details, but sent over this statement: “Bitmoji TV isn’t available in your network yet, but stay tuned for the global premiere soon!”

The Snapchat Show page for Bitmoji TV notes it is coming in February 2020. Users can visit here on mobile to subscribe to Bitmoji TV so it shows up prominently on their Discover page, or turn on notifications about its new content.

Snap realizes Bitmoji’s value

Snap has had a tough few years as many of its core features have been ruthlessly copied by the Facebook family of apps. Instagram Stories killed Snap’s growth for years and effectively stole the broadcast medium from its inventor. Facebook also ramped up it augmented reality selfie filters, added more ephemeral messaging features, and launched Watch as a competitor to Snapchat Discover.

Two years ago I wrote that Facebook was crazy not to be competing with Bitmoji too. Six months later we were first to report Facebook Avatars was in the works, and this year they launched as Messenger chat stickers in Australia with plans for a global release in 2019 or early 2020. But Facebook’s slow movement here, Google’s half-assed entry, and Twitter’s lack of an attempt have given Snapchat’s Bitmoji a massive headstart. And now Snap is finally leveraging it.

“TV” is actually a return to Bitmoji’s roots. The startup Bitstrips originally offered an app for customizing the face, hair, clothes, and more of your avatar and then creating comic strips for them to appear in. Snap acquired Bitstrips back in 2016 for just $64.2 million — a steal not far off from Facebook snatching Instagram for under a billion. The standalone Bitmoji app blew up as soon as Snapchat began offering the avatars as chat stickers. It had over 330 million downloads as of April according to Sensor Tower despite Snapchat now letting you create your avatar in its main app.

Eventually, Snap began expanding Bitmoji’s uses. In 2017 Bitmoji went 3D and you could start overlaying them as augmented reality characters on your Snaps. The next year Snap improved their graphics, then launched the Snap Kit developer platform and Bitmoji Kit. This allows apps to build atop Snapchat login and use your Bitmoji as a profile pic. Soon they were appearing as Fitbit smart watch faces, alongside your Venmo transaction, and on Snapchat-sold merchandise from t-shirts to mugs. It’s part of a wise strategy to beat copycats by allowing allies to use real thing rather than building their own knock-off. That’s fueled the “Snapback” comeback which has seen Snap’s share price climb out of the gutter at $5.79 at the start of 2019 to $16.09 now.

To stop copycats, Snapchat shares itself

One of Snap smartest innovations was Bitmoji Stories — the ancestor to Bitmoji TV. These daily Stories let you tap frame-by-frame through short comic strip-style interactions starring your avatar. Occasionally Bitmoji Stories would include rudimentary animation, but most frames were still images with text bubbles. Bitmoji could once again drive a narrative, rather than just being a communication tool. Still, they seem underutilized.

In 2019, Snapchat wised up. Bitmoji have become nearly ubiquitous amongst teens and Snapchat’s 210 million daily users. They’re the Google or Kleenex of cartoonish personalized avatars. Their goofy nature is also a perfect fit for Snapchat, and a reason they’re tough for stiffer and older tech giants to convincingly copy.

In April, Snap announced its new games platform inside its messaging feature that let you play as your Bitmoji against friends’ avatars in games ranging from Mario Party ripoff Bitmoji Party to tennis, shoot-em ups, and cooking competitions. Snap injects ads into the games, making Bitmoji key to its efforts to monetize its central messaging use case. Last month it launched custom and branded clothing for Bitmoji, which could open opportunities to earn money selling premium outfits or showing off brand sponsorships.

To truly take advantage of Bitmoji’s unique popularity, though, Snap needed to build longer-form experiences with the avatars at the center that . Stickers and Stories and games were fun, but none felt like must-see content. With Bitmoji TV, Snap may have found a way to get users to drag their friends into the app. Since everyone sees their own Bitmoji as the star, the cartoons could be more compelling then ones with impersonal characters you might find elsewhere around the web.

But Bitmoji TV’s success will depend largely on the quality of the writing. If your avatar is constantly getting into funny, meme-worthy situations, you’ll keep coming back to watch. But Snap’s teen audience has a keen nose for inauthentic bullsh*t. If the Shows feel forced, too childish, or boring, Bitmoji TV will flop. Snap would be savvy to invest in great Hollywood talent to produce the episodes.

High quality Bitmoji TV shorts could rescue Snapchat Discover from its own mediocrity. There are a few strong brands like ESPN SportsCenter on the platform, and Snap has several original Shows with over 25 million unique viewers. It’s also greenlit additional seasons of Shows like Dead Girls Detective Agency and new biopic clips from Serena Williams and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Still, a scroll through the Discover and Shows sections reveals plenty of trashy clickbait that surely scares away premium advertisers.

Bitmoji TV could offer video that’s not only fun and snackable, but out of reach for competitors who don’t have a scaled avatar platform of their own. As with the recent launch of Snapchat Cameos, the company has realized that the most addictive experiences center on its users’ own faces. Snapchat turned the selfie into the future of communication. Bitmoji TV could make an animated recreation of your selfie into the future of content.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/28/bitmoji-tv-snapchat/

Fyre Festival meets Mr. Bone Saw

Social media influencers have been known to promote events around the world for the right price — decisions that sometimes prove to be mistakes. Bella Hadid, who’d promoted the failed Fyre Festival with a gaggle of other models who’d vacationed in the Bahamas for a video designed to help sell tickets, later apologized for her involvement.

Not everyone is apologizing for what’s widely seen as a new misstep in the world of influencer marketing: the paid attendance of celebrities and other social media influencers this past weekend to the three-day-long MDL Beast Festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The country billed the event as its largest arts, culture and music festival — one attended by “150,000 eager fans from across the region and further afield.”

Among those being called out for dropping onto the scene are models Alessandra Ambrosio and Romee Strijd; actors Ryan Phillippe, Wilmer Valderrama and Armie Hammer; DJ Steve Aoki; and social media stars Sofia Richie and Scott Disick, all of whom were photographed at the event and some of whom also posted pictures to Instagram and other social media outlets, singing the region’s praises and including the hashtag #mdlbeast.

The festival aims to promote the efforts of its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS), to reform the conservative kingdom, which is well-known for its oppression of women’s rights and ethnic and racial minority rights. Indeed, the country has been aggressively trying to polish its image amid growing concern over the years-long, Saudi-led civil war in Yemen that has led to mass starvation and more than 100,000 fatalities; the gruesome, state-directed assassination of Saudi Arabian dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was reportedly dismembered with a bone saw; and the kingdom’s many other efforts to stifle dissent.

In just one example of how far the kingdom is willing to go, it staged the first-ever WWE women’s match in Riyadh on Halloween, an effort that Amnesty International’s advocacy director for the Middle East and North Africa called “sportswashing.” The MDL Beast Festival is another attempt to highlight how progressive Saudi Arabia has ostensibly come.

Some have pushed against the kingdom’s charm offensive. Hip-hop star Nicki Minaj canceled a planned performance in Saudi Arabia in July at a separate new international music festival there, after the nonprofit Human Rights Foundation asked her to back out of the gig.

At the time, Minaj issued a statement, saying, “I want nothing more than to bring my show to fans in Saudi Arabia, [but] after better educating myself on the issues, I believe it is important for me to make clear my support for the rights of women, the LGBTQ community and freedom of expression.”

Model Emily Ratajkowski also turned down a paid invitation to attend this past weekend’s festival, citing Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. “It is very important to me to make clear my support for the rights of women, the LGBTQ community, freedom of expression and the right to a free press. I hope coming forward on this brings more attention to the injustices happening there.”

Philippe is meanwhile defending on Instagram his decision to accept the trip to this past weekend’s extravaganza, writing: “i had a magical day with wonderful people. i love travel. i love different cultures. i love how we can find ways to connect through our human oneness, the pure desire for love and freedom. no matter where in the world. hoping those connections help to bring even more positive change and progress.”

It’s a decision that’s likely to earn Phillippe — and other high-wattage attendees — more bad publicity in the coming days. While more than a year ago, the CIA concluded that MBS ordered Khashoggi’s assassination, the kingdom has continued to deny any involvement in his murder, alleging instead that it was a last-minute decision by Saudi agents on the ground. (This narrative, notes The New York Times, “contradicts ample evidence that the agents came with an intent to kill and the tools to do so.”)

Now, in a court today in Saudi Arabia, following a trial that was shrouded in secrecy, five men were sentenced to death and three others to prison terms totaling 24 years over Khashoggi’s killing, while a former top adviser to MBS and a former deputy intelligence chief were both cleared.

The sentences are subject to appeal, notes the Times, which also notes that in Saudi Arabia, death sentences typically involve beheadings in public squares. Either way, the sentencing seems poised to further complicate Western relations with the kingdom, for influencers and a lot of others in the position of having to decide whether or not to accept its money. The verdict, said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s Middle East research director, in a statement, is a “whitewash.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/23/fyre-festival-meets-mr-bone-saw/

TikTok’s national security scrutiny tightens as US Navy reportedly bans popular social app

TikTok may be the fastest-growing social network in the history of the internet, but it is also quickly becoming the fastest-growing security threat and thorn in the side of U.S. China hawks.

The latest, according to a notice published by the U.S. Navy this past week and reported on by Reuters and the South China Morning Post, is that TikTok will no longer be allowed to be installed on service members’ devices, or they may face expulsion from the military service’s intranet.

It’s just the latest example of the challenges facing the extremely popular app. Recently, Congress, led by Missouri senator Josh Hawley, demanded a national security review of TikTok and its Sequoia-backed parent company ByteDance, along with other tech companies that may share data with foreign governments like China. Concerns over the leaking of confidential communications recently led the U.S. government to demand the unwinding of the acquisition of gay social network app Grindr from its Chinese owner Beijing Kunlun.

The intensity of criticism on both sides of the Pacific has made it increasingly challenging to manage tech companies across the divide. As I recently discussed here on TechCrunch, Shutterstock has actively made it harder and harder to find on its stock photography platform photos deemed controversial by the Chinese government, a play to avoid losing a critical source of revenue.

In wake of Shutterstock’s Chinese censorship, American companies need to relearn American values

We saw similar challenges with Google and its Project Dragonfly China-focused search engine, as well as with the NBA.

From the NBA to Sequoia to TikTok and more, a week of national security concerns with China

What’s interesting here though is that companies on both sides are struggling with policy on both sides. Chinese companies like ByteDance are increasingly being targeted and stricken out of the U.S. market, while American companies have long struggled to get a foothold in the Middle Kingdom. That might be a more equal playing field than it has been in the past, but it is certainly a less free market than it could be.

While the trade fight between China and the U.S. continues, the damage will continue to fall on companies that fail to draw within the lines set by policymakers in both countries. Whether any tech company can bridge that divide in the future unfortunately remains to be seen.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/21/tiktoks-national-security-scrutiny-tightens-as-u-s-navy-reportedly-bans-popular-social-app/

TikTok’s national security scrutiny tightens as U.S. Navy reportedly bans popular social app

TikTok may be the fastest-growing social network in the history of the internet, but it is also quickly becoming the fastest-growing security threat and thorn in the side of U.S. China hawks.

The latest, according to a notice published by the U.S. Navy this past week and reported on by Reuters and the South China Morning Post, is that TikTok will no longer be allowed to be installed on service members’ devices, or they may face expulsion from the military service’s intranet.

It’s just the latest example of the challenges facing the extremely popular app. Recently, Congress led by Missouri senator Josh Hawley demanded a national security review of TikTok and its Sequoia-backed parent company ByteDance, along with other tech companies that may share data with foreign governments like China. Concerns over the leaking of confidential communications recently led the U.S. government to demand the unwinding of the acquisition of gay social network app Grindr from its Chinese owner Beijing Kunlun.

The intensity of criticism on both sides of the Pacific has made it increasingly challenging to manage tech companies across the divide. As I recently discussed here on TechCrunch, Shutterstock has actively made it harder and harder to find photos deemed controversial by the Chinese government on its stock photography platform, a play to avoid losing a critical source of revenue.

In wake of Shutterstock’s Chinese censorship, American companies need to relearn American values

We saw similar challenges with Google and its Project Dragonfly China-focused search engine as well as with the NBA.

From the NBA to Sequoia to TikTok and more, a week of national security concerns with China

What’s interesting here though is that companies on both sides are struggling with policy on both sides. Chinese companies like ByteDance are increasingly being targeted and stricken out of the U.S. market, while American companies have long struggled to get a foothold in the Middle Kingdom. That might be a more equal playing field than it has been in the past, but it is certainly a less free market than it could be.

While the trade fight between China and the U.S. continues, the damage will continue to fall on companies that fail to draw within the lines set by policymakers in both countries. Whether any tech company can bridge that divide in the future unfortunately remains to be seen.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/21/tiktoks-national-security-scrutiny-tightens-as-u-s-navy-reportedly-bans-popular-social-app/

Daily Crunch: Facebook acquires a cloud gaming startup

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Facebook acquires Madrid-based cloud gaming startup PlayGiga

Facebook is building out its gaming business — earlier this year, the company added its Gaming hub to the main navigation menu. And last month, it agreed to buy Beat Games, developer of popular virtual reality title Beat Saber.

PlayGiga, meanwhile has been working with telcos to create streaming game technology for 5G. It also developed a gaming-as-a-service platform, using Intel’s Visual Cloud platform, that will enable telcos and communication service providers to offer streaming games to their customers.

2. TiVo merges with technology licensor Xperi in $3 billion deal

Earlier this year, TiVo said it was preparing to split itself into two — a product and IP business — in order to make itself more attractive to buyers. Today, the company announced those plans have been put on hold as it has instead merged with technology licensor Xperi Corporation, in a $3 billion deal.

3. Spotify prototypes Tastebuds to revive social music discovery

Tastebuds (discovered by reverse engineering master Jane Manchun Wong) is designed to let users explore the music taste profiles of their friends. It will live as a navigation option alongside your Library and Home/Browse sections.

4. Uber’s ride-hailing business hit with ban in Germany

In Germany, Uber’s ride-hailing business works exclusively with professional and licensed private-hire vehicle companies — so the court ban essentially outlaws Uber’s current model in the country.

5. Snackpass snags $21M to let you earn friends free takeout

Sending people Snackpass rewards became a new way to flirt or show gratitude at Yale. And through the Venmo-esque Snackpass social feed, users could keep up with a fresh form of gossip while discovering restaurants.

6. PayPal completes GoPay acquisition, allowing the payments platform to enter China

Though China’s payment market today is led by local players, including eWallet providers like AliPay and WeChat Pay, there’s room for PayPal to grow in a market where digital payments per year are counted in the trillions, not billions, of dollars.

7. Tesla’s record stock price shows its investment in energy storage is finally paying off

A little over a year after sparking a legal firestorm for musing that he would take Tesla private for $420, Elon Musk is probably glad he didn’t. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/daily-crunch-facebook-acquires-playgiga/

Subscription-based social network MeWe launches premium features and a business product

MeWe, the subscription-based social network that emphasizes privacy and bills itself as the anti-Facebook, is launching a premium tier of its service and spinning up a business-focused product to take on enterprise networking and communication tools like Slack.

Founded by Mark Weinstein, a gregarious serial entrepreneur who credits himself with being an early developer of the social media concept, MeWe has amassed several million users in its drive to be the alternative to Facebook.

Launching after Ello, Weinstein says the challenges he witnessed that company going through provided some invaluable lessons for how he wanted to build out his own challenge to Facebook’s social media dominance.

“We were engineering when Ello had their shot at the moon and then crashed back to earth. They may have motivated 21 million people, but their servers couldn’t handle it, they were desktop only and the project was too soon,” Weinstein said. 

The company operates under a freemium model, where its newsfeed, custom camera, ephemeral content, 8 gigs of storage, life voice and video and custom stickers are all free. Businesses can pay for additional features for $1.99 per month.

“Social media wasn’t invented for surveillance capitalism,” says Weinstein. And while MeWe is relatively permissive when it comes to speech, Weinstein says it has rules around posting hate speech, inciting violence and bullying. That said, “we’re not going to censor you because you’re talking about a political view we do or don’t agree with.”

Alongside the premium MeWe product for social networking, the company is also launching a separate business line for enterprise collaboration.

Weinstein says there are already several thousand users on the enterprise toolkit, which is out of beta and includes end-to-end encrypted chat, integrations with Windows 360 and features for tagging, polls, a custom camera and voice and video conferencing embedded in its suite of services.

MeWe’s premium tier will cost $4.99 per month and the company’s professional service has a two-tiered approach, with a $3.99 and $7.99 price point.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/subscription-based-social-network-mewe-launches-premium-features-and-a-business-product/

Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android

Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus and Portal to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT named Mark Lucovsky with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according the The Information’s Alex Heath.

“We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us” says Facebook’s VP of hardware Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth. “We don’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case. And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.”

By moving to its own OS, Facebook could have more freedom to bake social interaction — and hopefully privacy — deeper into its devices. It could also prevent a disagreement between Google and Facebook from derailing the roadmaps of Oculus, Portal, or future gadgets. We’ve asked Facebook for more details on its homegrown operating system.

One added bonus of moving to a Facebook-owned operating system? It could make it tougher to force Facebook to spin out some of its acquisitions, especially if Facebook goes with Instagram branding for its future augmented reality glasses.

Facebook has always been sore about not owning an operating system and having to depend on the courtesy of some of its biggest rivals. Those include Apple, who’s CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly thrown jabs at Facebook and its chief Mark Zuckerberg over privacy and data collection. In a previous hedge against the power of the mobile operating systems, Facebook worked on a secret project codenamed Oxygen circa 2013 that would help it distribute Android apps from outside the Google Play store if necessary, Vox’s Kurt Wagner reported.

Now Facebook is ramping up its hardware efforts with a new office for the team in Burlingame, 15 miles north of the company’s headquarters. The 70,000-square-foot space is designed to house roughly 4,000 employees.

Interested in potentially controlling more of the hardware stack, Facebook held acquisition talks with $4.5 billion market cap semiconductor company Cirrus Logic, which makes audio chips for Apple and more, The Information reports. That deal never happened, and it’s unclear how far the talks went given tech giants constantly keep their M&A teams open to discussions. But it shows how serious Facebook is taking hardware, even if Portal and Oculus sales have been slow to date.

That could start to change next year, though, as flagship virtual reality experiences hit the market. I got a press preview of the upcoming Medal Of Honor first-person shooter that will launch on the Oculus Quest in 2020. An hour of playing the World War 2 game flew by, and it was one of the first VR games that felt like you could enjoy it week after week rather than being just a tech demo. Medal Of Honor could prove to be the killer app that convinces gamers they have to get a Quest.

Facebook has also been working on hardware experiences for the enterprise. Facebook Workplace video calls can now run on Portal, with its smart camera auto-zooming to keep everyone in the board room in frame or focus on the action. The Information reports Facebook is also prototyping a VR videoconferencing system that Boz has been testing with his team.

The hardware initiatives meanwhile feed back into Facebook’s core ad business. It’s now using some data about what people do on their Oculus or Portal to target them with ads. From playing certain games to accessing kid-focused experiences to virtually teleporting to vacation destinations, there’s plenty of lucrative data for Facebook to potentially mine.

Facebook even wants to know what’s on our mind before we act on it. The Information reports that Facebook’s brain-computer interface hardware for controlling interfaces by employing sensors to recognize a word a user is thinking has been shrunk down. It’s gone from the size of a refridgerator to something hand-held but still far from ready for integration into a phone.

Selling Oculus headsets, Portal screens, and mind-readers might never generate the billions in profits Facebook earns from its efficient ads business. But they could ensure the social network isn’t locked out of the next waves of computing. Whether those are fully immersive like virtual reality, convenient complements to our phones like smart displays, or minimally-invasive sensors, Facebook wants them to be social. If it can bring your friends along to your new gadgets, Facebook will find some way to squeeze out revenue while keeing these devices from making us more isolated and less human.

Facebook is building brain-computer interfaces for typing and skin-hearing

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/facebook-operating-system/

Snackpass snags $21M to let you earn friends free takeout

“We were in the back washing blenders so they could keep taking Snackpass orders” recalls co-founder and CEO Kevin Tan. The team from order-ahead food startup Snackpass was willing to get their hands dirty to keep up with demand at one of their first restaurant partners, Tropical Smoothie Cafe on the Yale college campus.

Why were people so eager to pay for takeout through Snackpass? Because it lets them earn loyalty points to redeem for free food — both for themselves and as gifts for their friends. Sending people Snackpass rewards became a new way to flirt or show gratitude at Yale. And through the Venmo-esque Snackpass social feed, users could keep up with a fresh form of gossip while discovering restaurants.

“Anywhere someone is standing in line to order something, we can solve that with Snackpass” says Tan. “Consumer spending will be social in the future.”

That future is already taking hold. Two years after launch, Snackpass is on 11 college campuses across the US, often boasting a 75% penetration rate amongst students within 6 months. It takes a cut of every order and keeps margins high since users pick up the food themselves rather than waiting for delivery. While other food ordering startups battle to offer discounts as marauding users deal-hop between apps, Snackpass keeps users coming back through its loyalty program.

Its momentum, retention, and opportunity to expand from colleges to dense cities has now won Snackpass a $21 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz partner Andrew Chen. The round was joined by other heavy hitters like Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Inspired Capital, and First Round plus angels including musician Nas, NFL star Larry Fitzgerald, and legendary talent agent Michael Ovitz. Building on Snackpass’ $2.7 million seed, the cash will go towards hiring up with the goal of reaching 100 campuses in 2 years.

“Takeout is an important market because it’s huge — also in the hundreds of billions — and fragmented” writes Chen. “The opportunity complements the food delivery market in a big way: For the average restaurant, there are 6 takeout orders for every delivery order!”

“It’s Own Language”

Like many of the best startup ideas, Snackpass was born out of the founders’ own needs at Yale. Slow and expensive food delivery services didn’t make sense for smaller orders like a coffee, ice cream, or a pepperoni slice on campuses small enough for customers to walk or bike to the restaurant. Tan says “I was dabbling in several side projects, including helping a friend who managed a local pizza shop build a website to help better reach the local student community.” He realized how tough it was for restaurants around colleges to retain and reward customers, especially as regulars graduated.

Tan joined up with neuroscience student and Thiel Fellow Jamie Marshall, who became Snackpass’ COO. “I had grown up calling in every order” Marshall tells me. “Waiting in line didn’t make sense for me. I used every order-ahead platform and thought this was the future.” Jonathan Cameron, a serial entrepreneur who’d built his own order-ahead app called Happy Hour, rounded out the founding team.

Snackpass founders (from left): Jamie Marshall and Kevin Tan

Snackpass offers users a list of nearby restaurants they can order ahead from, with special tags for ones offering deals. Menu items include counts of how many people have ordered them and how many rewards points you’ll earn buying them. You pay in the app, skip the line at the restaurant, and grab your order from the counter. Each restaurant can configure their own rewards system with how much items earn and cost, such as giving you a free coffee for every 10 you buy.

Users can then spend their points to get themselves free menu items, or send a virtual Snackpass gift card to any of their phone contacts or people they find via search. This gives Snackpass a way to grow virally that most food apps lack. Thankfully, you can block people on Snackpass if they get creepy showering you with gifts.

Each purchase and gift on Snackpass shows up in its social feed unless you make it private. “That’s become its own language. People use it to flirt with each other, or bond and connect with someone new” Tan tells me. “There’s some drama or intrigue there seeing who’s sending gifts to who. People even look at the feed in the way they look at someone’s Instagram to see what’s going on with them.”

Snackpass has also done some integration work specifically for the college market that sets it apart from other order-ahead and delivery services. It can sync with students’ campus meal plans so they can spend them through the app. And student groups from clubs to fraternities can pre-load and replenish accounts for their members. Snackpass works with the same organizations to launch on new campuses. “We host parties, sponsor tailgates, and make it feel like a student-led effort so it grows organically across campus communities” Tan explains. “These efforts, combined with the social feed which would give anyone FOMO if they’re not in the app.”

Network Effect Commerce

With all the competition in the space, restaurants can be inundated with apps to manage, some of which just exacerbate spikes in demand that overwhelm kitchens. “There is certainly a risk that local restaurants will start to get platform fatigue, finding that using some apps will take too big of a bite out of their margins” says Tan. That’s why Snackpass built features that let restaurants batch orders and control how many come in at a certain time so dine-in patients and non-app users aren’t stuck with unreasonable delays.

Snackpass has recruited talent from Uber Eats and an advisor from Yelp’s executive team to help it navigate the tricky SMB sales process. One ace up its sleeve is that it can offer to send push notifications to announce recently signed partners or specials they’re launching, driving the new customers restaurants are desperate for. Tan says his startup is considering if it could charge for this kind of promotion down the line. Most customers who walk into restaurants are effectively in incognito mode, but Snackpass provides its partners with analytics to help them improve their own businesses.

“At the surface level there is a lot of competition in this space” Tan admits. “The social aspect of the app has been the key differentiator for us. Other companies have been focused on creating the fastest, cheapest, most efficient delivery service, but it’s really hard to make those margins work and consumers are trained to shop around on different apps to get
the best deal or fastest delivery time . . . Eating food is supposed to be fun and social,
and our generation grew up online and in social networks. We’re combining the social aspect of eating with the utility of order ahead, which has helped us build loyalty and enable retention
amongst our users.”

It will still be a battle to overtake long-running competitors like Allset, Level Up, and Ritual, plus incumbents that offer takeout pickup like Uber and Grubhub. Logistics is a cut-throat business, and plenty of startups have already failed in the restaurant loyalty space.

Having Andreessen Horowitz’s support could give Snackpass some extra fire power. “A16z has better support and services for their portfolio companies than any other VC we’ve come across and they’ve delivered” Tan tells me. “We knew that Andrew Chen understands growth and marketplaces from his blog and his Twitter.” That’s critical in a crowded space where such a precise balance of customer acquisition and lifetime value is necessary.

Snapchat, TikTok, and Fortnite have all tapped into the youth market with a lighthearted nature that keeps users coming back until they develop network effect. Snackpass is managing to do the same not with a messaging app or game, but a commerce platform. “We play up creativity, silliness and delight in areas where most companies focus on utility and convenience” Tan concludes. “We built Snackpass for ourselves and our friends. We’ve carried on this philosophy: if something makes us laugh, we put it in the app.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/snackpass/

Spotify prototypes Tastebuds to revive social music discovery

Spotify is prototyping a new way to see what friends have been listening to, called “Tastebuds”. Despite how discovering music is inherently social, Spotify has no features for directly interacting with friends within its mobile app after axing its own inbox in 2017 and keeping its Friend Activity ticker restricted to desktop.

It seemed like Spotify was purposefully restricting social features to force users to rely on the company’s own playlists and discovery surfaces. This gave Spotify the power to play king-maker, massively influencing which artists got featured and rose to stardom. This in turn gave it leverage in its combative negotiations with record labels, which worried their artists might get left off playlists if they don’t play nice with Spotify in terms of sustainable royalty rates and access to exclusives.

That strategy seems to have paid off with Spotify improving its licensing deals and becoming a critical promotional partner for the labels, paving the way to its IPO. Spotify’s shares sit around $152, up from its direct listing price of $132 though down from its first day pop that saw it rise to $165. More comfortable in its position, now Spotify seems ready to relinquish more control of discovery and enable users to be better inspired by what friends are playing.

Tastebuds is designed to let users explore the music taste profiles of their friends. Tastebuds lives as a navigation option alongside your Library and Home/Browse sections. Anyone can access an non-functioning landing page for the feature at https://open.spotify.com/tastebuds. The feature explains itself with text noting “What’s Tastebuds? Now you can discover music through friends whose taste you trust.

The prototype feature was discovered in the web version of Spotify by reverse engineering sorceress and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong, who gave us some more details on how it works. Users tap the pen icon to “search the people you follow”. From there they can view information about what users have been playing most and easily listen along or add songs to their own library.

Without Tastebuds, there are only a few buried ways to interact socially on Spotify. You can message friends a piece of music through buttons for SMS, Facebook Messenger, and more or post songs to your Instagram or Snapchat Story. Spotify used to have an in-app inbox for trading songs but removed it in favor of shuttling users to more popular messagin apps. On the desktop app but not mobile or web, you can view a Friend Activty ticker of songs your Facebook friends are currently listening to. Or you can search for specific users and follow them or view playlists they’ve made public, though Spotify doesn’t promote user search much.

Spotify has a few other social features it’s experimented with but never launched. Those include a Friends Weekly playlist spotted last year by The Verge’s Dani Deahl. Then this May, we reported Wong had spotted a shared-queue Social Listening feature that let you and friends play songs simultaneously while apart. Back in 2014, I wrote that Spotify should move beyond blog-esque browsing to create a “PlayFeed” playlist that would dynamically update with algorithmic recommendations, new releases from your top artists, and friends’ top listens. It’s since launched Discovery Weekly and Release Radar, and Tastebuds could finally bring in that final social piece.

Spotify’s simultaneous social listening prototype

The result is that you can only see either a myopic snapshot of friends’ current song, the few and often outdated playlists they manually made public, or you message them songs elsewhere. There was no great way to get a holistic view of what a friend has been jamming to lately or their music preferences overall.

We’ve reached out to Spotify seeking more information about how Tastebuds works, how privacy functions around who can see what, and if and when the feature might launch. We’re also interested to see if Spotify has any deal in place with a music dating startup called Tastebuds which launched way back in 2010 to help people connect and flirt through song sharing. Neither of the companies responded to requests for comment.

Social is a huge but undertapped opportunity for Spotify. Not only could social recommendations get users listening to Spotify for longer, thereby hearing more ads or becoming less likely to cancel their subscription. It also helps Spotify lock in users with a social graph they can’t find elsewhere. While competitors like Apple Music or YouTube might offer similar music catalogs, users won’t stray from Spotify if they become addicted to social discovery through Tastebuds.

How Spotify is finally gaining leverage over record labels

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/18/spotify-tastebuds/

UK’s competition regulator asks for views on breaking up Google

The UK’s competition regulator has raised concerns about the market power of digital ad platform giants Google and Facebook in an interim report published today, opening up a consultation on a range of potential inventions — from breaking up platform giants, to limiting their ability to set self-serving defaults, and enforcing data sharing and/or feature interoperability to help rivals compete.

Breaking up Google by forcing it to separate its ad server arm from the rest of the business is one of a number of possible interventions it’s eyeing, along with enforcing choice screens for search engines and browsers that use non-monetary criteria to allocate slots — vs Google’s plan for a pay-to-play offering for EU Android users (which rivals argue does not offer relief for the antitrust abuse the European Commission sanctioned last year).

The UK regulator is also considering whether to require Facebook to interoperate specific features of its current network so they can be accessed by competitors — as a fix for what it describes as “strong network effects” which work against “new entrant and challenger social media platforms”.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched the market study in July — a couple of weeks after the UK’s data watchdog published its own damning report setting out major privacy and other concerns around programmatic advertising.

It is due to issue a final report next summer — which will set out conclusions and recommendations for interventions — and is now consulting on suggestions in its interim report, inviting contributions before February 12.

Since beginning the study the CMA says it has received several requests to open a full-blown market investigation, which means it has a statutory duty to consult on making such a reference.

Based on initial findings from the study it says there are “reasonable grounds” for suspecting serious impediments to competition in the online platforms and digital advertising market.

The report specifically flags three areas where it suspects harm — namely:

• the open display advertising market — with a focus on “the conflicts of interest Google faces at several parts of its vertically integrated chain of intermediaries”;
• general search and search advertising — with a focus on “Google’s market power and the barriers to expansion faced by rival search engines”;
• social media and display advertising — with a focus on “Facebook’s market power and the lack of interoperability between Facebook and rival services”;

Other concerns raised in the report include problems flowing from a lack of transparency in the digital advertising market; and the difficulty or lack of choice for consumers to opt out of behavioral advertising.

However the regulator is not making a market investigation reference at this stage — a step which would open access to the order making powers which could be used to enforce the sorts of interventions discussed in the report. Instead, the CMA says it is favors making recommendations to government to feed into a planned “comprehensive regulatory framework” to govern the behaviour of online platforms.

Earlier this year the UK government set out a wide-ranging proposal to regulate a range of online harms. Although it remains to be seen how much of that program prime minister Boris Johnson’s newly elected Conservative government will now push ahead with.

“Although it is a finely balanced judgement, we remain of the view that a comprehensive suite of recommendations to government is currently the best way forward and are therefore consulting on not making a market investigation reference at this stage,” the CMA writes, saying it feels it has further investigation work to do and also does not wish to “cut across” the government’s plans around regulating platforms.

“The concerns we have identified regarding online platforms such as Google and Facebook are a truly global antitrust challenge facing governments and regulators. Therefore, in relation to some of the potential interventions we may consider in a market investigation, and in particular any significant structural remedies such as those involving ownership separation, we need to be pragmatic about what changes could efficiently be pursued unilaterally by the UK,” it adds, saying it will “continue to work as closely as we can with our international counterparts to develop a coordinated position on these issues in the second half of the study”.

Antitrust regulators in a number of countries have been turning their attention on platform giants in recent years — including Australia and the US.

The new European Commission has also talked tough on platform power, suggesting it will further dial up scrutiny of tech giants and seek to accelerate its own interventions where it finds competitive harms.

Responding to the CMA report in a statement, Ronan Harris, VP, Google UK and Ireland, told us:

The digital advertising industry helps British businesses of all sizes find customers in the UK and across the world, and supports the websites that people know and love with revenue and reach. We’ve built easy-to-use controls that enable people to manage their data in Google’s services — such as the ability to turn off personalised advertising and to automatically delete their search history.  We’ll continue to work constructively with the CMA and the government on these important areas so that everyone can make the most of the web.

A Facebook spokesperson also sent us this statement:

We are fully committed to engaging in the consultation process around the CMA’s preliminary report, and continuing to deliver the benefits of technology and relevant advertising to the millions of people and small businesses in the UK who use our services.

We agree with the CMA that people should have control over their data and transparency around how it is used. In fact, for every ad we show, we give people the option to find out why they are seeing that ad and an option to turn off ads from that advertiser entirely.  We also provide industry-leading tools to help people control their data, like “Off Facebook Activity”, and to transfer it to other services through our Data Transfer tools.  We look forward to further engagement with the CMA on these topics.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/18/uks-competition-regulator-asks-for-views-on-breaking-up-google/

Introducing: The Content Marketing Hub, A Free Library of Content Resources

I’m PUMPED to announce the all-new Content Marketing Hub.

What is The Content Marketing Hub?

It’s a free library of 30+ resources that cover everything you need to know content marketing… including content promotion, copywriting, blog design, content repurposing, and more.

You can check out the brand new Content Marketing Hub right here:

Visit The Content Marketing Hub

This new resource library contains over 58,201 words, 600 screenshots, as well as 100+ profesionally-designed illustrations, visuals, charts and templates.

This is one of the biggest content projects my team and I have ever worked on. In fact, between finding topics, outlining, writing, editing, screenshots, design, and coding, The Content Marketing Hub took over 400 hours of work to make.

I’m super happy with how The Content Marketing Hub turned out.

And I hope you get a ton of value from it.

Check out The Content Marketing Hub.

Here’s What’s Included

The SEO Marketing Hub is broken down into 6 main categories:

• Content Marketing Fundamentals: Here’s where you’ll learn (or get a refresher) on the foundational elements of content marketing. You’ll learn how to develop a content strategy, the different types of content marketing you can use, and how to come up with topic ideas.
• Content Production: Learn how to produce content that people will want to read, link to and share. You’ll learn how to write compelling copy, develop a content calendar, design your content, and use repurpose content for more traffic.
• Blogging and Written Content: Here’s where you’ll learn how to publish blog posts that get results. In this section I cover how to create 10x content, listicles and posts that focus on content curation.
• Multimedia Content: Podcasts. Videos. Visuals. They’re all important (and growing) parts of content marketing. You’ll learn how to create the type of multimedia content that your audience wants to consume.
• Content Promotion and Distribution: Learn how to spread the word about the content that you publish using email outreach, social media, blog SEO and more.
• Content Marketing Tools: Here’s where you’ll learn how to use some of the most popular content marketing tools on the market, like HootSuite, Google Analytics and Buffer.

Visit The Content Marketing Hub

What Do You Think?

I want to give a shout out to Kyle Byers from GrowthBadger for helping me put this new resource together.

And I’d love to hear what you think about the new Content Marketing Hub.

Specifically, I’d like to know:

What’s the #1 thing you want to learn about content marketing right now?

Also, I plan on adding more even more helpful resources to the library soon.

So let me know if you have any topic ideas or suggestions.

The post Introducing: The Content Marketing Hub, A Free Library of Content Resources appeared first on Backlinko.

source https://backlinko.com/introducing-the-content-marketing-hub

Ubersuggest 7.0: The Ultimate Keyword Research Tool

Believe it or not, I’ve been working on Ubersuggest for almost 3 years now.

I bought it on February 13, 2017, for $120,000 dollars as a test to see if I could get more traffic from a tool than traditional content marketing or SEO.

Since then the tool has come a long way, in which I’ve added tons of features that competitors charge $100 a month or even more for.

But I’ve finally got Ubersuggest to a point where I can start releasing features that my competition don’t even have.

So before, you head on over to Ubersuggest to work on your SEO, make sure you read everything below because I’ve just changed up how you are going do keyword research (in a good way).

On top of that, I’ve also released a few other features as well related to link data and traffic estimations.

Here’s what’s new:

More keyword data

The biggest problem I had with keyword research was how to find the right keyword.

Sure, there are metrics like CPC data, SEO difficulty, or even search volume, but assuming you find keywords with a high CPC, low SEO difficulty, and high search volume, it still doesn’t mean it is a good keyword to go after.

And there are a few reasons why…

• Mobile searches aren’t worth as much – first off, if the keyword mainly gets searched from on mobile devices the conversion rate will be lower. It doesn’t mean mobile traffic is useless, it just typically means the keyword won’t be as valuable.
• High search volume doesn’t guarantee lots of organic clicks – what happens if the keyword gets a ton of searches but no clicks? This sounds crazy, but it actually happens a lot. For example, when people search for “weather” in the United States, roughly 60% of the people don’t click any results.
• Not all searchers are worth the same – some keywords get searched heavily by teenagers. Some keywords get searched heavily by people who are in their 30s or 40s. If the majority of the searches for a given keyword happen by a really young audience, chances are they won’t have a credit card and they won’t convert into a customer.

Because of all of this, I decided to change how the industry does keyword research.

Now when you type in a keyword like “marketing” into Ubersuggest, you’ll see this:

If you have been using Ubersuggest for the last year or so you may notice some differences… but if you haven’t let me break down what’s new.

First off, for any given keyword you will see what percentage of the searches are taking place from mobile devices or desktop devices.

For example, with the term “marketing” you can see that the majority of the searches are coming from desktop devices.

On the flip side, if you use Ubersuggest to look at the term “weather” you’ll notice that the majority of the searches happen on mobile devices.

And with any given keyword you can also see what percentage of the people even click on the SEO or paid results.

I love this bar chart because it tells me if I should even go after a specific keyword. Just because a term has tons of searches doesn’t mean you are going to get tons of clicks, even if you rank at the number 1 spot.

If you leverage paid ads, this bar chart is also helpful because it will give you a sense of how many people click on the paid ads as well.

Another chart that I’ve added is one that breaks down the age range of each searcher.

As you can see from the above image, Ubersuggest now shows what percentage of the searches take place between each age range.

This is really important if you know the persona of your ideal customer, as you only want to target keywords that your ideal buyer is searching for.

What’s also cool is this data is available for all countries within Ubersuggest and for almost all of the keywords within our database.

Now before you head off to Ubersuggest and test it out, there are a few more features that I’ve just released.

More backlink data

Over the last few months, I’ve gotten feedback that our link database isn’t as big as you would like, so we have been working on fixing this.

First off, whenever you do a backlink search in Ubersuggest, you’ll start seeing stats on historical backlink data.

This chart will quickly show you if a site is growing in backlink and referring domain count over time or if they are declining.

On top of that, we are even showing the daily new and lost link count for a given site.

I know the new and lost link count chart looks a bit off, but keep in mind we started having Ubersuggest crawl more pages around the web faster and more frequently. Hence you are seeing a big spike in new and lost links.

But over the next 4 weeks, it should normalize, and you’ll see an accurate representation of new and lost links.

This will help you identify new link opportunities more easily. Especially because you can now clearly see where your competitors are focusing their link building efforts.

Better traffic estimations

Lastly in Ubersuggest, you can also enter in a URL and get data on any given domain.

From its estimated monthly search traffic to the number of keywords a domain ranks for to even its top pages based on link and traffic count.

We haven’t fully finished creating our new algorithm when it comes to traffic estimations, but the chart you’ll see now is much more accurate than the older one.

Even though this is a big improvement from our older charts, give it another 3 months and it should be extremely accurate.

When you are using the traffic analyzer report in Ubersuggest, keep in mind that this will give you a directional guide on how you are doing versus your competition.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy the new changes to Ubersuggest.

I’ve made them in order to give you a leg up on your competition as the data in the tool is now something that most of you have never seen before.

And over the next two months, you’ll see some big launches in Ubersuggest. From a chrome extension to even more accurate traffic estimations to even an Alert system that will notify you when things are wrong with your site.

So, go to Ubersuggest and try out the new keyword features as well as traffic estimation and backlink features.

What do you think about the new features?

The post Ubersuggest 7.0: The Ultimate Keyword Research Tool appeared first on Neil Patel.

source https://neilpatel.com/blog/ubersuggest-keyword-research-tool/

Instagram hides false content behind warnings, except for politicians

Instagram is giving politicians the same free rein to spread misinformation as its parent company Facebook. Instagram is expanding its limited fact checking test in the US from May and will now work with 45 third-party organizations to assess the truthfulness of photo and video content on its app. Material rated as false will be hidden from the Explore and hashtag pages, and covered with an interstitial warning blocking the content in the feed or Stories until users tap again to see the post.

This goes an important step further than Facebook’s early attempts to append warnings on links alongside content but that still let users immediately consume the misinformation. In October Facebook announced it would use a similar interstitial warning system.

Instagram will use image matching technology to find additional copies of false content and apply the same label, and do this across Facebook and Instagram content. That could become a talking point for Facebook as it tries to dissuade regulators from breaking up the company and spinning off Instagram. On the other hand, it’s a valuable economy of scale for protecting the internet. Breaking up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp might lead to worse enforcement through fragmented resources, though it could lead the apps to compete for the best moderation.

Instagram is trying to beef up its safety practices across the board. Today it began alerting users that the caption they’re about to post on a photo or video could be offensive or seen as bullying, and offer them a chance to edit the text before they post it. Instagram started doing the same for comments earlier this year. Instagram is also starting to ask new users their age to make sure they’re 13 or over, which I’d previously written it needed to add since it was otherwise feigning ignorance to dodge Child Online Privacy Protection Act violation fines.

One group that’s exempt from the fact checking, though, is politicians. Their original content on Instagram, including ads, will not be sent for fact checks, even if it’s blatantly inaccurate. This aligns with Facebook’s policy that’s received plenty of backlash from critics including TechCrunch who say it could let candidates smear their rivals, stoke polarization, and raise money through lies. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has maintained that banning political ads could hurt challenger candidates in need of promotion, and that it would be tough to draw the lines between political and issue ads.

Instagram is luckily less dangerous in this respect because feed posts can’t directly link out to websites where politicians could raise money. But verified users can attach links to Stories, and everyone can have one link in the profile. That means false information could still be knowingly weaponized by politicians on the app further their campaigns at the expense of truth…and people’s perception that they can believe what they see on Instagram.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/16/instagram-fact-checking/