Somrat Niyogi, CEO of Miso, writes via TechCrunch that “Twitter currently dominates live TV because it enables these ‘come-in come-out’ experiences that are light, delightful and informative. But ultimately, Twitter is also dominating because of the mistakes we are making in the social TV industry.”
Niyogi believes the fundamental issue is in the industry’s approach to consumers. “Right now, second screen apps are saying, ‘Here are other ways you can use your smartphone while you watch TV!’ But is anybody really asking, ‘What do people really want to do when they watch TV?'”
“Companies should pick a single value prop and deliver it really well. This is why Instagram has 100 million users and no second screen app has climbed to 1 million users organically,” writes Niyogi.
“Let me emphasize this again: the key is to do one thing and do it right. As Matt Cohler wrote recently, there are winners in the mobile space and patterns are emerging: ‘Great mobile apps act like push-button remote controls for real life,’” he writes.
Niyogi highlights successful ‘single purpose apps’ like Instagram, Yelp and Pulse.
He ends his article with this question: “Now, I encourage everyone to ask themselves: is there a habitual, single thought experience that people want to use everyday that I can deliver in a magical, simple way?”
His answer? “I believe there is. But, only time will tell and there is more work that needs to be done. Most of all, I believe that TV and the experiences around it will only continue to get better and better… as long as we get on the right track.”
Starting this week, Google Play will be more tightly integrated into the Google TV experience. Google Play movies, TV shows and music will be available on Google TV in the next few weeks.
“You’ll be able to buy or rent content directly through the Google Play Store on Google TV, and purchases you’ve made on other devices will also be automatically available on Google TV,” according to the Official Google TV Blog.
“Google Play titles will also be discoverable through our TV & Movies app, which brings recommendations for shows and movies available on live TV and apps like Netflix, Amazon, and now Google Play,” notes the blog.
Additionally, purchases made on other devices will be available on Google TV.
“For developers, this update also enables many other Google Play features including auto-updates, subscription billing, and smart app updates,” explains Google.
Last year, 3.4 million ultraslim PCs were shipped worldwide. Despite the slow adoption, NPD DisplaySearch predicts that number to dramatically increase to 65 million by 2015 (one-quarter of all mobile PC shipments).
The expected growth of devices including ultrabooks, Apple’s MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with retina display will be sparked by reduced prices and the devices’ similar feel to tablets.
NPD DisplaySearch also predicts that tablet shipments will exceed notebooks by 2016.
“Tablet PCs have offered consumers what they have been requesting from the notebook market for years, instant-on activation, long battery life, and sleeker designs,” notes Richard Shim, senior analyst with NPD DisplaySearch. “These attributes are the basis for enabling greater and easier accessibility to content and services.”
“Ultraslim PCs are the notebook market’s response to tablets and aim to balance performance and convenience,” he says.
AT&T announced its plans to carry the Samsung Galaxy Camera, which is expected to be the first combination of point-and-shoot camera and smartphone.
“The Samsung Galaxy Camera is becoming a hotly anticipated item, thanks to its recently announced Dropbox compatibility and next-gen, ultra-connected focus,” reports Digital Trends.
“AT&T announced it will be supporting the 4G (HSPA+, most likely) camera, which will have run Jelly Bean and have access to the full catalog of Google Play apps,” explains the post.
The Galaxy Cam features a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor, 1GHz processor, 21x optical zoom and 4.77-inch HD touch display. Expected to launch within the next few weeks, pricing has yet to be announced.
Digital Trends describes the Samsung Smart camera line as “a pleasant surprise” in regards to Wi-Fi connectivity. “Manufacturers have struggled with implementing this feature in an easy-to-use, simple way for users, but it’s something that Samsung has done incredibly well. And we only expect this to be an even more fluid experience with the Galaxy Cam.”
The device “stands a decent shot at cornering the consumer camera market: Wi-Fi enabled point-and-shoots are a hot commodity, and strapping a Galaxy S3 to one only sweetens that deal,” suggests the post. “It’s cutting edge, especially for an industry that’s been remarkably slow to adopt and adapt to mobile technology.”
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen provides a detailed review of the upcoming Windows 8 on his website. He highlights features of the new bimodal user approach and offers helpful tips based on his experience.
Allen notes that some long-time Windows users might be initially frustrated by the lack of a traditional Start menu. But the new screen is visually pleasing and easy to navigate, he suggests.
“The Start screen displays a scrollable collection of tiles,” he writes. “Each tile represents an app (Mail, Internet Explorer, and Calendar, for example) or feature. Many are live tiles; that is, tiles that display notifications related to that app or feature.”
And although it can sometimes be difficult to find, he writes of the new control called the Charms bar, which offers access to important features like Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings.
“There are a number of things introduced to Windows by the tablet aspect of the bimodal user experience that I found puzzling, especially for a traditional desktop user like myself,” he writes. These include difficulties using multiple monitors, inadvertently switching modes, inability to build hierarchies on the Start screen and difficulty scrolling in desktop view on a tablet.
Allen notes in his conclusion that the bimodal operating system will take some adjustment, but he remains confident that users will adapt quickly, will find touch to be a natural progression and will be particularly impressed with the tablet capabilities.
“The tablet interface is elegant, responsive, and stacks up nicely with other tablets on the market,” he believes. “And with its capability to optionally switch to desktop view right on the tablet, Windows 8 extends to mobile users the flexibility to run traditional applications and become more efficient and productive while on the go.”
The idea of a “data center in a box” has taken hold as demand for Internet data storage rises.
The technology — pioneered by the U.S. military and later adopted by companies like Google and Microsoft — allows companies to store data by stuffing containers full of data centers, and then hooking up the containers to a power and water supply.
Research firm IMS reports the demand for these types of data centers doubled in 2012 and is expected to increase by another 40 percent by next year.
“Data storage and processing is being driven by the growth in mobile computing devices, higher performance computing requirements, increased Internet communication, streaming entertainment, digitization of healthcare and government records, and a migration towards online business models,” explains Liz Cruz, author of the IMS report.
In the short term, this type of data storage is cheaper than building a traditional data center because companies can buy storage as they need it.
In the long run, however, it may prove more costly. But it is also possible that as more companies move into the business of selling this type of storage, the price will drop and the system will become a reasonable long term data storage solution.
Nielsen announced it is launching a new rating service that will enable advertisers to gauge the popularity of their campaigns across a variety of viewing platforms.
The long-awaited Nielsen Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings will combine data from online and television metrics. The project was developed in partnership with ESPN, Facebook, GroupM, Hulu and Unilever.
“According to the latest Nielsen Cross-Platform Report, in addition to watching 34-plus hours of TV per week, the average American spends nearly five hours online on the computer,” reports Broadcasting & Cable. “Nielsen also said more than half of Americans now watch video online, with online viewing increasing average weekly video consumption to somewhere around 35 hours.”
“Since traditional TV and the Web typically use different metrics, it has been hard to calculate a campaign’s total reach and frequency across platforms,” notes Advertising Age in a related report. “This effort builds upon Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings, which was rolled out last year to provide demographic ratings of online-ad campaigns with metrics comparable to those used for TV advertising.”
“Creating a way to reach, measure and monetize inventory across screens and platforms advances the industry toward the high caliber, seamless standard that can provide new opportunities for players across the industry,” says Steve Hasker, president, global media products and advertiser solutions at Nielsen.
However, some argue that the new approach is oversimplifying matters since consumers engage differently with TV than they do with their digital devices.
Social gifting is growing up. No longer just about virtual goods, digital gift-giving has evolved to allow friends to easily send physical items while also letting brands “become a part of the conversation between friends,” writes AllFacebook.
Following Facebook’s acquisition of gift card app Karma, the social network has launched Gifts, a native program to compete with Wrapp, Gifties and other social gifting services. It enables Facebook users to send physical gifts such as Gund teddy bears, Starbucks gift cards and Star Wars flash drives.
“The action appears next to Post and Photo options, above the prompt to write on a person’s timeline. The friend then fills in their address to receive the real-life gift (unlike SuperPoke, these presents are real),” the post explains. “Facebook also prompts users to give gifts when they click on a friend’s birthday announcement in the top-right corner of the news feed.”
In addition to reducing the friction of gift giving, social gifting aims to provide opportunities for advertisers.
According to Wrapp co-founder and COO Carl Fritjofsson, a gift card or personal message that comes from a personal contact holds more weight than a brand simply emailing a discount offer.
“For consumers, it’s all about casual gifting, as well as significant gifting. From a retailer’s prospective, it’s generating store traffic through very genuine and friend-to-friend contacts,” Fritjofsson says. “Facebook is essential to the way that we built our platform… We think that social gifting is definitely going digital, and Facebook is the natural way to facilitate that, because of the friendship graph.”
While banks, merchants and technology companies have bet billions of dollars on mobile payment technology, it’s not likely they’ll see any return for years to come.
“Mobile payments and purchasing at the physical point of sale have experienced little adoption in the U.S. marketplace despite abounding innovation in mobile and payments technologies,” according to a report from Javelin Strategy & Research.
As more people get smartphones, mobile payments in general and NFC (near field communication) specifically will have more room to grow.
That same report from Javelin Strategy & Research estimates that by 2016, 72 percent will own a smartphone, up from the current 51 percent.
“We think NFC is a great user experience and today provides the broadest reach in terms of merchant coverage compared to other technologies,” says Robin Dua, head of product management for Google Wallet.
Many had hoped that the recently released Apple iPhone 5 would come equipped with the NFC-enabled chip in order to push the process along. But the phone does not include an NFC chip.
“Equipping the most popular phone with NFC would have a been huge education moment for consumers and a big validation for NFC,” notes Thomas McCrohan, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott.
YouTube wants to launch a new mobile music service that enables users to easily discover music via multiple categories, according to a new LinkedIn job posting.
The Google-owned video platform wants to create “new systems from the ground up that will generate millions of new music videos and surface YouTube’s music video catalog by artist, discography, and genre to users on mobile devices for the first time,” suggests the job posting for technical program manager.
YouTube has had some difficulty in the mobile space because not all of its content was available on its app.
“Previously, publishers were able to opt out of displaying their videos on mobile devices,” GigaOM explains. “Now, publishers can only block their videos from being displayed without ads — which means that a lot more monetized clips, including numerous music videos, are available on mobile devices.”
The site created its own iOS app after Apple’s YouTube app was removed in iOS6. The company must also compete with Vevo apps that separately run their own videos and advertising, even though Vevo is a YouTube content partner.
According to consumer-tracking service NPD, television sets are now the most popular way to watch streaming video from the Internet.
“NPD says 45 percent of consumers report that TV is now their primary Web video screen, up from 33 percent last year,” reports AllThingsD. “It basically swapped places with the PC, which used to account for 48 percent of viewing but now represents 31 percent.”
At this point, NPD figures that only about 10 percent of homes have an Internet-enabled TV, but consumers are often streaming programming through devices such as their Blu-ray player, Apple TV and Xbox 360.
NPD’s general screen breakdown by device: TV — 45 percent, laptop PC — 17 percent, desktop PC — 14 percent, tablet — 1 percent, netbook — 1 percent.
Also according to the NPD report, Netflix is the most popular streaming service, with 40 percent of connected TV watchers using that service.
European startup Brainient looks to “boost brand engagement and recognition” through interactive elements within online advertisements.
The company, which has enabled advertisers to tailor the same video campaign for computers, smartphones and tablets, is now taking interactive to a whole new level via the gesture-based Kinect controller for Microsoft’s Xbox.
Brainient CEO Emi Gal says now is the time for connected TVs. “Even though the Kinect technology has been with us for a while there wasn’t enough consumption on connected TVs in terms of video — and finally now we’re getting to the point where people are consuming video across smartphones, across online and across connected TVs more and more,” he tells TechCrunch.
Brainient has launched its first Kinect-enabled ad, which it is using as a showcase and a case study for the new ad technique. The ad is for the upcoming film “The Hobbit,” and it incorporates photo galleries and cast biographies, accessible with the swipe of your hand.
“By adding interactive elements to connected TV ads Brainient will be able to offer advertisers the ability to track brand engagement and recognition on the largest screen most consumers own — and the one they tend to ogle for longest,” TechCrunch writes.
Data transmission just got a whole lot faster. The record for capacity on conventional optical fiber has been defeated 10 times over.
Four organizations teamed up to test a new technology that enables 1 petabit — 1,000 terabits or the equivalent of 5,000 HDTV two-hour long videos — to be transmitted each second over a 52.4 km length of 12-core optical fiber.
The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) along with Fujikura Ltd, Hokkaido University and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) demonstrated this new ultra-large capacity transmission.
The breakthrough could have a dramatic effect on broadband services, an area increasingly stressed by expanded smartphone traffic.
“Efforts to increase the capacity of optical networks to accommodate surging traffic demand have largely focused on driving down infrastructure costs by using more efficient optical communications equipment to support more widespread deployment of broadband services without changing the structure of optical fiber itself,” NTT’s press release states.
“With further cooperation and development of these technologies that exploit the freedom of optical fiber spatial structures, optical amplification, and spectrally-efficient transmission technologies, this will open the way to even longer distance transmission and very large capacity optical networks that support the continued rollout of broadband services in the years ahead,” suggests the release.
Free Internet advocates and privacy protectors hail Do Not Track, while advertisers claim it will destroy the Internet as all content is supposedly funded through tracking-based ads.
“But according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the online advertising industry had revenue of $31.7 billion in 2011, and only about 15 percent of that, $4.9 billion, came from online behavioral advertising (OBA), ads that target consumers through personal information-powered tracking techniques and that are causing the privacy controversy,” writes attorney and privacy advocate Sarah A. Downey for TechCrunch.
Do Not Track is even less influential when you consider not all Internet users enable the tool; websites have no obligation to respond to a Do Not Track signal and most ignore it; Do Not Track doesn’t mean advertisers aren’t collecting and selling your data — they’re just not targeting you with ads; and finally, 80 percent of the money advertising makes from targeted advertising goes to improving targeted ads, NOT to content providers.
As the ad revenue increased 530 percent since 2002, people have become increasingly concerned about tracking, with 68 percent saying they’re not okay with tracking-based targeted ads and another 71 percent saying they’re very concerned about their information being sold or shared without their permission.
“We repeatedly hear that users want to understand what data is being collected, by whom, and how these companies might ultimately use it,” explains Downey. “These questions are the real unknowns that consumers care about and that advertising companies can’t answer. What is all this data they’re collecting, and where is it all going?”
Downey suggests that most advertising “doesn’t pose any privacy threat because it’s contextual, meaning it’s based on where the ad is placed, not on who sees the ad,” and recommends starting a dialogue on the issue.
New technology called WebRTC — also known as RTCWEB (Real Time Communication on the Web) — “is poised to send a virtual tsunami through the mobile communications industry, likely changing the landscape for a good long time,” writes Erik Lagerway for GigaOM.
The premise behind WebRTC is to put voice and video services technology inside browsers and devices so that “when a developer wants to enable voice or video calling, they can use the code that is already there,” explains Lagerway. “The only way to do that on a mobile device today is with a stand alone app, which is not easy.”
Lagerway, who co-founded Hookflash and calls himself a “serial Voice-over-IP entrepreneur,” has worked with teams that have developed voice and video apps.
He believes that “WebRTC could take a great deal of heavy lifting out of the equation for developers and end up becoming the common denominator in the new mobile network.”
“The WebRTC open standards project has been in progress for more than a year now, and there are plenty of early demos of WebRTC already,” he writes.
“I think we will likely see some production deployments of WebRTC in the next six to nine months, when Firefox and Chrome for Android support it in a production version of their browsers. And Google seems primed to deploy it to their large user base on Hangouts.”
