The Next Web |
- Find’Em Tracking could be the world’s thinnest Bluetooth tracker
- BoxTV is sharpening its focus on Indians in the UK with new mobile payment options
- Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba plans a mobile version of its annual shopping festival
- EE and Wembley want to create ‘the most connected stadium in the world’
- Google partners with ‘Russia’s Google’ Yandex in a reciprocal advertising deal
- Mobile push messaging expert Urban Airship unveils new marketing solution with iBeacon targeting
- Chat app Line will soon let you sell your own stickers, unveils plans for cheap call service
- MasterCard survey finds that nearly 60% of Chinese online shoppers made purchases via smartphones
- OpenX launches the first global exchange for real-time bidding on native mobile advertising
- Chinese Vine-like app Weishi, built by the firm behind WeChat, chalks up 160m views in a day
| Find’Em Tracking could be the world’s thinnest Bluetooth tracker Posted: 26 Feb 2014 04:51 AM PST  There's no shortage of gadgets designed to help you never lose your belongings. Take the Cobra Tag for instance, a Bluetooth-enabled fob that you can clip to anything and connects with your phone to tell you if either the phone or the fob-connected object move out of range of each other. There are other similar contraptions too, such as the the Elgato Smart Key which not only helps you find your keys, but remember where you parked your car. The latest entrant to the increasingly-saturated space is Find'Em Tracking, which claims to be the thinnest Bluetooth tracking device on the market. Indeed, at only 2.4mm thick, you will struggle to find any others that are as thin. But how thin does one need their Bluetooth tracker to be? We went hands-on with the device to see what it brings to the table. It's worth noting here that the device doesn't start shipping until March, and there will likely be some upgrades pushed out ahead of launch. More on that at the bottom of this post, but for now here's what you can expect. Find'Em Tracking: The LowdownThe key USP behind Find'Em Tracking is that it's thin enough to slip inside your wallet or similar tight compartment. That it does, and it does well.
When setting up, you'll need to download the accompanying app for Android or iOS, and then sync the card with the app. Now, at this juncture what I would say is that the Find'Em Tracking device needs to ship with clearer instructions for setting up. Or at least have a better FAQ on the website – as things stand, under the key question "How do I set up my Find'Em Tracking card?", the answer is given as: "Download the app on App Store or Google Play." Unfortunately, it's not as simple as that. But it is simple – like anything when you know how. It turns out that the little, innocuous white switch on the bottom is the on/off switch – there's no wording to suggest that though. Indeed, it could equally have been a switch for opening the back of the case to replace the battery. Similarly, once you've figured out that this is the on/off switch, you have to hit the sync button – except there is no obvious sign of a button next to where the 'Sync' wording is. There is a little hole which I had initially assumed was for a pin to reset the device, but it turns out this is actually a light indicator for when you hit the Sync button. If you press the flat surface where 'Sync' is, you'll discover that this is in fact a button – though it would greatly benefit from having a raised surface that feels like a button. It's probably a little too subtle as things stand.
These may seem like minor issues, and perhaps they are. But often it's little design niggles like this that can frustrate users – first impressions count for a lot. Hopefully the Find'Em Tracking team can improve and iterate on this in future versions. Once you've hit the Sync 'button', launched the app and pressed 'scan', you'll see a list of compatible devices spring up. Strangely, it also detected my Bluetooth Elgato Smart Key – I would've assumed it would only be compatible with the Find'Em Tracking device. At any rate, select the card, and you'll be asked to place it where it will normally be housed (e.g. your wallet) and position it to the left edge "of your iPhone". Within the app, you can change the name, alert options and alarms. Though the apps are currently prototypes and only display three options – 10-15 ft, 15-20 ft and 25-30 ft, eventually you will be able to set the distance up to 150 ft, and receive an instant alert once you leave that range. It's also worth adding here that, as things stand, the app is quite confusing given that it doesn't stipulate what the '5-10′, '10-15′ and '15-25′ numbers refer to. Hopefully this will be remedied in the more consumer-friendly version that's touted to launch before the devices start shipping to consumers.
Based on my tests, the Find'Em Tracking device worked, and it worked well. When I walked out of range, my phone would buzz and flash. It would stop when I moved back towards the card, which I could hear had also been beeping when I left the vicinity, which is helpful for when you walk away with your wallet in-hand, but forget your phone. If you didn't notice the alert go off or the wallet is no longer within tracking distance, you can also tap the Google Maps integration to discover the last known GPS location of the card.
However, when the app wasn't open and active on my screen, the loud blaring alert from the Find'Em Tracking app didn't always work – all I received was very subtle notifications, which you can see in the image above on the right. Also, if my phone was on silent, well, it's impossible to hear the blare. For this to be truly effective, it really needs all the bells and whistles regardless of whether the app is open on your device or not. It's still early days though, and we're hoping many of these issues will be ironed out ahead of the shipping date next month. Indeed, the next version of the Find'Em Tracking App will let users track more than ten cards simultaneously and log-in through the Web to see the last-known location, for starters. Plus, the unit itself will sport an upgraded, stronger battery frame. That said, the current one doesn't seem particularly flimsy. The units are available on pre-order now for an affordable $24.99 (this is a limited-time offer though), which is roughly half the price of StickNFind, a competing device that's also very small. StickNFinds are a little thicker, but they still fit inside an average-sized wallet. Find'Em Tracking shows potential, but we hope the early-stage issues we encountered are solved soon. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| BoxTV is sharpening its focus on Indians in the UK with new mobile payment options Posted: 26 Feb 2014 03:48 AM PST
This means that from now onwards, customers of Virgin Mobile, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3 and O2 in the UK will be able to purchase BoxTV mobile packs online or through BoxTV's Android app and charge the payment to their phone bills, with the help of BoxTV's mobile billing partner Fortumo. The UK is the second region to get this feature — BoxTV introduced mobile-enabled payment mode in India last October. BoxTV has more than 14,000 hours of content — primarily Bollywood and regional content that includes movies, TV shows and documentaries — in nine languages for customers outside India. The service currently claims more than half a million registered users worldwide and Times Internet has plans to expand it "aggressively" in the coming months. Read - BoxTV comes out of beta aiming to dominate India and become the world's 'Netflix for Bollywood' Thumbnail image via testing / Shutterstock This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba plans a mobile version of its annual shopping festival Posted: 26 Feb 2014 03:22 AM PST  Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is known for holding an annual 11.11 Shopping Festival – China's answer to America's Cyber Monday shopping bonanza. Last year, Chinese shoppers splurged a jaw-dropping record CNY35.01 billion ($5.7 billion) during the festival in just 24 hours, and about 21 percent of orders were placed via mobile devices. Now, Alibaba is planning another 24-hour sale, touted as a mobile version of the 11.11 Shopping Festival, in a bid to boost transactions made via mobile devices. Set for March 8, the "Mobile Taobao 3.8 Life Festival" will feature discounts for merchandise, meals, movies and other products when users shop via Alibaba's Mobile Taobao app. To snag these discounts, consumers need to pre-order goods and services in the days leading up to March 8, when they can then redeem their purchases. The company says its Mobile Taobao app currently has over 400 million users — and it is "trying to ride the wave of Chinese smartphone users who are increasingly using their mobile devices instead of PCs to shop online." Throughout 2013, Alibaba already took steps to woo consumers to shop on their mobile devices. In October last year, Alibaba announced that it would give certain mobile users free access of up to 2 gigabytes of data in November and December, when they shop with Alibaba's apps for the company's Taobao Marketplace, Tmall.com, Juhuasuan, Laiwang and Alipay. Subsequently in November, the e-commerce giant launched a scheme to give away free smartphones as part of its efforts to encourage merchants to shift from PC-based online shopping to shopping via mobile phones — by helping them work better on this new platform. Headline image via Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| EE and Wembley want to create ‘the most connected stadium in the world’ Posted: 26 Feb 2014 03:01 AM PST
Wembley National Stadium Ltd. (WNSL), or 'Wembley' to you and me, is teaming up with UK mobile network operator EE in a six-year deal that they hope will make the stadium 'the most connected in the world'. The multi-million pound deal comes into play with immediate effect, with the first event taking place on March 2 – the Capital One Cup Final. Though the real fruits of this tie-up won't be seen for a while yet, EE customers will start benefiting from "exclusive ticketing and marketing initiatives" from late March.
Technology roadmapThe deal will see some interesting initiates comes to fruition over the next six years. The so-called 'technology roadmap' will herald 'enhanced' 4G coverage, superfast WiFi and mobile payments integrated across the stadium. As anyone who has tried using their mobile phones within busy sporting arenas will attest to, perennial 3G issues in and around the stadium due to the mass concentration of mobile phones often restricts what fans can actually do with their devices. So this move will be good news for fans. The deal also includes the launch of a new co-branded mobile app for Android and iOS, which displays the latest events, the view from your (potential) seat, a travel planner and even a ticket-buying feature.
Launched in 1923, Wembley Stadium is probably best known as the home of England's national football team, but it's also used for cup competitions (including the FA Cup Final) and concerts. The original stadium was demolished in 2000, and was replaced by a 90,000-seater behemoth which opened in 2007. While we're starting to see more stadiums go 'connected', we're still in the early stages of a widespread transition. League Two's Wycombe Wanderers has been offering WiFi for a while already, while Liverpool FC announced its own intentions last April. Elsewhere in Europe, Real Madrid has been making in-roads on the hi-tech stadia front, as is Barcelona, but WiFi is still a relatively rare beast in the European soccer scene. The US is making small strides on this front too – The New England Patriots (American Football) has previously gone WiFi, deploying the NFL's first stadium-wide, free WiFi network. And to counteract lagging attendances, the NFL is dangling a giant WiFI carrot in front of fans across the country, as it looks to have full connected stadiums in place by 2015. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Google partners with ‘Russia’s Google’ Yandex in a reciprocal advertising deal Posted: 26 Feb 2014 01:01 AM PST  Yandex is typically known as 'Russia's Google' but it has now teamed up with Google itself so their respective advertising clients will be able to access each other's networks. The agreement is expected to "dramatically increase" advertising inventory available to the customers of both companies, Yandex says in a blog post. Through its DoubleClick subsidiary, Google's clients will have access to the advertising inventory offered by publishers in Yandex's Advertising Network, while Yandex's clients will be able to bid for ad displays in the global inventory of DoubleClick AdExchange partners. Both systems are powered by a real-time bidding technology, which helps to mediate ad marketing between buyers and sellers. Yandex notes that the deal is aimed at giving their advertising clients more value when they carry out real-time bidding, which benefits from a larger number of bidders and sellers. This is because the more conditions taken into account by a system when matching ads to publishers, the more fine-tuned the ad targeting is and the better optimized the bids are.
The company also says that the deal is expected to give a "new kick" to competition and boost the quality of advertising space in the digital marketing world. The current arrangement, however, only relates to display advertising and does not cover text-based contextual advertising. Yandex and Google are now at the technical stage of implementing this project, and it is expected to roll out to their clients soon. Yandex has been inking partnerships with major tech firms including Facebook and Twitter — as it seeks to boost its search results with popular topics that are circulating on the social networks. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Mobile push messaging expert Urban Airship unveils new marketing solution with iBeacon targeting Posted: 26 Feb 2014 12:00 AM PST  Mobile push messaging specialist Urban Airship took the wraps off a new product today at the Mobile World Congress, which is squarely targeted at marketers. Urban Airship has made a name for itself by providing push-messaging features for other companies' apps. Its new solution, which is available this quarter, combines push messaging with real-time mobile marketing automation and iBeacon targeting. Urban Airship says:
With this new solution, marketers and product teams can set up their own automated programs for real-time messaging, design and deep-link to landing pages anywhere in their apps or on the mobile Web, manage and analyze these campaigns through message response reports, and have the data connected into existing analytics systems including Google Analytics. Urban Airship's new solution intends to help marketers be less reliant on developers to deliver responsive experiences at scale. It means marketers can react more easily to campaign responses and other customer behavior with real-time triggers for push messages, in-app messages and deep-linked landing pages. In a bid to avoid bombarding customers, Urban Airship's new solution also features timing delays and frequency limits for subsequent messages beyond customers' responses or non-responses. For example, a business may trigger a free shipping offer two days after a customer abandons his/her shopping cart, but avoid sending it more than once per month to each customer. Urban Airship's new focus on marketing comes after it eyed up Apple Passbook and Google Wallet as the next big growth market, launching a cross-platform digital wallet solution called Wallet Studio, which enables businesses to easily create, launch and manage campaigns that integrate with Passbook and Google Wallet. By going into marketing, the company is no doubt hoping for a stickier ecosystem that gets customers spending their money at these businesses as well. Headline image via Shutterstock This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Chat app Line will soon let you sell your own stickers, unveils plans for cheap call service Posted: 25 Feb 2014 11:23 PM PST  Stickers have been all the rage on messaging services for some time — and now Japanese chat app Line is taking the sticker craze to a new level by letting all of its 360 million registered users sell their original stickers on its Web store.
The Line Creators Market, a brand new platform launched today, will only start accepting submissions from April onwards. It is free for all users to register on the Line Creators Market. Creators can sell sets of 40 stickers at 100 yen (about $1) per set once the graphics are approved by Line, and they will receive 50 percent of the proceeds. Other than engaging its users further and adding another revenue stream, another impetus for the sticker market is global expansion. In a press statement, the company says it "looks forward to accelerating Line's global expansion with the further localization of stickers through this effort." Line previously noted in an earnings report that rolling out stickers is the first step it takes to introduce itself in new markets. The chat app brought in 34.3 billion yen ($338 million) of revenue for its parent company throughout the whole year of 2013, mainly due to in-game purchases — which made up about 60 percent of revenue. That's followed by sticker purchases, which accounted for 20 percent of revenue. Engadget also reports that Line announced a new data-based call service today, due to launch next month in Japan, US, Mexico, Spain, Thailand and the Philippines. This service, which will let Line users call people who don't use the chat app, is essentially taking on Skype, with prices lower than those offered on land-lines and mobile carriers. Line has recently benefited outside of the markets where it's strongest in, following WhatsApp's outage. Line says it netted two million new users and saw "record-breaking" growth outside of Asia within the 24 hours that followed WhatsApp's downtime. Line, however, goes way beyond a basic messaging app. It has long offered voice/video chat, Vine-like short video capture, stickers and more. Aside from those chat features, it also provides a games platform, an opt-in to get messages from brands, and is dabbling in e-commerce. The latest announcements make it clear that Line is well on its way to evolving into a social platform. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| MasterCard survey finds that nearly 60% of Chinese online shoppers made purchases via smartphones Posted: 25 Feb 2014 10:17 PM PST  There's more evidence that m-commerce is on the rise in China, after a recent MasterCard survey found that over half of Chinese consumers who shopped online did so via their smartphones. The annual e-commerce survey, which was conducted across 25 markets between November and December 2013, included interviews with 7,010 respondents from 14 Asia-Pacific markets. It found that two-thirds of consumers in the Asian region go online to shop. What's notable is that nearly 100 percent of respondents from China indicated they made at least one online purchase in the last three months — and 59.4 percent of them made their purchases via smartphones.
This comes as no surprise considering that in 2013, Chinese companies have been wooing consumers to shop on their mobile devices. Furthermore, the trend of shopping via messaging apps also emerged last year, which is especially pronounced in China with Tencent-owned popular messaging service WeChat. Recently, Tencent invested in 'China's Yelp' Dianping, as it seeks to up the ante of m-commerce and drive mobile shopping right within its communication platforms. MasterCard cites the "ubiquity of Internet-enabled mobile phones" as contributing to the rising popularity of m-commerce in Asia. Across the 14 APAC markets surveyed, 46.8 percent of consumers cited convenience as the most compelling reason for smartphone shopping, while 41.3 percent pinned it down to the ability to shop on the go, and 40.8 percent said it was due to the growing availability of apps that make it easier to shop. In Thailand, 51.2 percent of online shoppers made purchases via their smartphones, while that figure stood at 47.6 percent in Korea, 47.1 percent in India and 46.7 percent in Indonesia. The figure in Thailand comes despite recent information on chat app Line's flash sales showing how m-commerce is behind e-commerce in the region — and indicates that m-commerce could very well be on the rise there, but maybe not yet on Line. Interestingly enough, clothing and fashion accessories overtook apps for the first time ever to become the top category of items purchased via smartphones. Pierre Burret, the region head of Asia-Pacific, MasterCard Advisors, says that "this indicates a strong and successful shift by merchants to enhance the mobile experience to consumers to make it more convenient." Going forward, Burret notes that there is a strong need for e-commerce (and in turn m-commerce) providers to provide secure payment solutions to consumers in Asia — as the MasterCard survey also found that security remains a key consideration, with 85.3 percent of respondents citing it as a top concern when shopping online. Headline image via Lintao Zhang/Getty Images This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| OpenX launches the first global exchange for real-time bidding on native mobile advertising Posted: 25 Feb 2014 09:00 PM PST  Ad tech leader OpenX today announced Native O|X, a new ad exchange with an unprecedented combination of several of the most popular trends in the industry: mobile-first, real-time bidding and native advertising. While the new offering might sound like a pile of buzzwords to those outside the advertising space, Native O|X represents a natural next step for OpenX and the industry. The firm helped pioneer the rise of real-time bidding and programmatic advertising, which relies on software algorithms to automate the buying and selling of ad inventory. With its rich media and video content, Native O|X should result in a better overall ad experience on mobile for us consumers. Native advertising eschews the traditional banner ads found on mobile sites and apps in favor of a more contextual display that fits in with a publisher or developer's existing content. "The 320×50 banners that are cemented in mobile sites and apps are not that effective…What publishers are telling us is that those units just don't perform well," Rob Kramer, OpenX's general manager for mobile, said in an interview. Traditionally, OpenX's strength has been on the desktop, so Native O|X helps the company extend its dominance onto mobile devices. OpenX takes credit for opening the first private mobile ad exchange in 2012 and has existing partnerships with Airpush and Samsung. This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Chinese Vine-like app Weishi, built by the firm behind WeChat, chalks up 160m views in a day Posted: 25 Feb 2014 08:12 PM PST  Chinese Internet firm Tencent is best known for its popular messaging service WeChat, but one of its other products — a Vine-like app that features eight-second videos on loop — has been quietly gathering steam in China. The app, Weishi, which is only available in Chinese for now, chalked up 160 million video views in a single day on Valentine's Day this year, which also coincided with the Chinese Lantern Festival. Tencent says that "millions" of the video clips were also viewed outside the Weishi app itself, via services such as Weixin (the version of WeChat available in China) and mobile IM platform QQ – testifying to the reach that Tencent has in China with the presence of its social platforms. This milestone followed a similar surge in popularity during Chinese New Year, though there were no specific number of video views provided for that period. Tencent says that videos were commented, shared and liked more than 100 million times on the eve and first day of the festival. Recording a video on Weishi is exactly like how you'd do it on Vine or Instagram — tapping and holding on to the screen starts your recording, while releasing it stops the recording. There are additional bells and whistles on Weishi though — other than filters, which Instagram also has, Weishi lets users add background music and watermarks to their videos. They can even choose from six themes that come with preset music and watermarks.
For viewing videos, Weishi employs a more visual format than Vine by displaying thumbnails for its video channels. Clicking on a particular channel brings you to a page where you can filter either via the most-recent or most-popular videos. You can also choose to follow someone immediately via an icon right next to the video, instead of being directed to a profile page like Vine does.
As per Tencent's other social services, recruiting celebrities and brands is a huge part of its strategy to appeal to users. More than 1,000 celebrities have set up Weishi accounts to interact with their fans, Tencent says. Weishi was launched in September last year, and according to data tracker App Annie, it has been ranked among the top three most downloaded social networking apps in Apple's App Store in China from December 27, 2013 to February 25, 2014. There is much potential for Weishi in China, given that Vine still does not have that much of a presence in the country given its link to Twitter — which is blocked in China. Furthermore, short-video sharing could be an invaluable add-on to WeChat in the long run, taking a key role in helping the chat app evolve to become a social platform. WeChat's rival, Japanese messaging app Line, already took a step in this direction last year by adding Snap Movie — a Vine-like feature that allows you to create 4-10 seconds of video clips with your choice of background music and can be posted to your in-app timeline, where they will be played on loop automatically. ➤ Weishi: iOS | Google Play Headline image via Shutterstock This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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