Read original story on: TechCrunch
Instagram is now claiming over 300 million monthly active users, surpassing Twitter’s reported 284 million active users as of six weeks ago. Also impressive is its rapid growth rate, as the news came just nine month after Instagram hit 200 million users earlier this year. As marketers always follow where the audience goes, it looks like Instagram will be moving up on the priority list.
Read original story on: TechCrunch
Nearly six months after striking a partnership deal, Apple and IBM are finally releasing the first batch of ten IBM MobileFirst iOS apps for enterprises, including Citi Bank, Air Canada, Sprint, and Banorte this week. While the apps are clearly focused on specific industries, they’re just the beginning of Apple’s battle for enterprise market. More apps are schedule to debut in 2015, as both Apple and IBM look to push iOS into the business world that’s currently dominated by Windows.
Read original story on: Gizmodo
This week, Oscar Insurance launched a new program: the company is giving away Misfit fitness trackers in hope of motivating its clients to exercise more and stay healthy. If users reach a daily step count determined by their current health stats, they get $1 credit, which they can later use on Amazon gift cards. As the health insurance starts focusing on preventative health, this seems like a great win-win solution.
Read original story on: The Verge
Back in October, HBO announced plans to soon launch a “standalone, over-the-top” HBO Go subscription, and now some surprising new details are emerging. HBO is reportedly aiming for an April 2015 launch, just in time for the new season of Game of Thrones. This makes perfect sense, considering the HBO flagship series is the most pirated show in the world.
Moreover, HBO has opted not to build the standalone OTT service in-house, but instead will use external technology from MLB Advanced Media, which already provides white-label streaming technology for clients like WWE Network. As long as they can build a platform capable of handling the huge streaming volume brought in by the quality content, the audience couldn’t care less who is delivering the content.
Read original story on: Re/code
Nearly two year after launching Graph Search on its desktop site, Facebook is finally bringing its powerful search engine to mobile. On Monday, the company unveiled Facebook Search, a rebranded version of Graph Search that lets users search to locate specific Facebook posts and photo captions via keywords, while previously, a keyword search would only return relevant names or pages.
This new search engine is currently only available on its iOS app, with plans to roll out to other platforms in coming week. As mobile search is predicted to surpass desktop search in 2015, Facebook’s shift to focus on mobile search seems quite timely.
Read original story on: VentureBeat
It’s only Tuesday, but Amazon has already unveiled a trifecta of new services with one-hour delivery in NYC, 4K Streaming for Amazon Instant, and a new price-negotiation feature.
Read original story on: NYTimes
Uber is having a terrible week. After being sued in Portland and India, banned in Spain and Thailand, and hassled in Rio, the popular on-demand car service received yet another blow when New York Times published an opinion piece titled “We Can’t Trust Uber”, criticizing the way Uber has been handling data generated by Uber rides.
With numerous incidences of data breaches exposed in recent years, consumers have become increasingly aware of the privacy concerns and are therefore looking to take back the control of their personal data. One possible solution to Uber’s data woes would be to do what we have suggested in our POV on the data dilemma: be transparent, be helpful, and get well-informed consent from users.
Read original report on: magnaglobal.com
Our sibling agency MAGNA GLOBAL released their annual Global Ad Forecast for 2015 earlier today. Here are the top five statistical highlights:
Globally, media owner advertising revenues are forecast to grow by +4.8% in 2015 to reach $536 billion, surpassing the half-trillion milestone. MAGNA forecast global digital revenues to reach 30% market share globally in 2015 (+15.1% to $163 billion).
Domestically, media owners advertising revenues grew by +4.0% this year to $165 billion in the US – an acceleration compared to 2013 (+2.4%) but below previous expectations.
Digital media grew strongly again this year (+17.2% to $142 billion) driven by mobile campaigns (+72%) and social formats (+64%). Based on long-term forecasts, digital media will catch up with television in 2019, when both account for 38% of global advertising revenues.
Digital media is already the #1 media category in 14 of the 73 markets analyzed by MAGNA GLOBAL in this update, including the UK (highest share in the world: 47%), Australia, Canada, Germany, China, Sweden and the Netherlands. In the US, digital will outgrow television revenues by 2017.
Most other media categories suffered from the competition of television and digital in 2014. Newspaper ad sales decreased by an average -4.3% while magazines ad revenues shrank by -7.3%. Radio was flat (+0.1%) and out-of-home media grew by +3.4%.
Read original story on: NiemanLab
With its newly launched mobile app, The Daily Beast is spearheading the transition of Quantified Self movement from health and fitness into digital news. The app tracks what users are reading and skipping, offering these news-reading stats in its “daily breakdown” feature for users to see.
Moreover, the app uses that reading data to personalize news recommendations to its readers. It can mine the data to learn your most-read news category or writer, and suggests items accordingly to nudge readers to stories of their interests.
The app has seen some early success so far as a vital engagement driver, with the site’s page consumption per session up 2 to 3 times since it launched in August. If this kind of individually quantified news reading catches on, we can soon expect similar quantifying efforts across sites, tracking our entire news intake.
Read original story on: PSFK
Checking weather just got a lot more fun. Made by UK creative agency Uniform, Weather Systems is a set of three charmingly designed gadgets that display real-time weather information wirelessly transmitted via the Internet. The three gadgets showcased include a block of pins that movs as it rains, a wheel that changes color depending on temperature, and a weather vane that spins according to wind direction.
