In the latest tweak to its ad system, Facebook is extending its ad format for promoting events to mobile screens, along with adding other enhancements. Previously, the social network’s Event ads ran only in the right-hand column on the desktop. But in the coming weeks, brands with a presence on Facebook will be able to create ads to highlight events and drive responses in both the mobile and desktop news feed. The ads can be created through the self-serve Ad Create tool or Power Editor. Along with other changes, brands and other organizations hosting events will be able to get more information about the performance of their ads, including the number of people who saw a link to the event or viewed the event, and the number of joins, saves and “maybes” it has received. “These insights represent the first step we’re taking to help [Page administrators] better understand what’s working and not working when promoting their events,” stated a Facebook blog post today. In addition, the company said it has made improvements to the events page for all users: “Each person’s events page has a new look and feel to better highlight their upcoming events and showcase new events, including suggested events based on information such as the Pages they like, their location and the day of the week.” Overall, 400 million people use the events feature in their pages each month, with nearly 30% of all events from concerts to “special nights at bars and restaurants” created by businesses and other groups on the social network, according to Facebook.
The outlook for the smartphone market is a bit better than it appeared earlier this year. That’s according to the latest forecast from research firm IDC, which estimates worldwide smartphone shipments will increase 23.8% in 2014 to about 1.25 billion. The research firm in February had projected shipments would grow 19.3%, and in May raised that figure to 23.1%. The strong growth in emerging markets is helping to offset the slowdown in mature ones like the U.S. and Europe, where smartphone shipments will only grow 4.9% this year after recent years of double-digit gains. By contrast, emerging markets -- spanning countries like China and India -- will see a 32.4% surge in shipments as consumers snap up low-cost devices. Still, even that rate is below the 38.4% growth for the entire smartphone market in 2013. "The smartphone market, which has experienced runaway growth over the last several years, is starting to slow. Mature markets have slowed considerably but still deliver strong revenues with average selling prices (ASPs) over $400,” stated Ramon Lamas, research manager with IDCs mobile phone team, in the release. Smartphones in emerging markets, meanwhile, typically sell for less than $250. More affordable phones mean higher sales. IDC expects smartphone volume in emerging markets to rise to 920.8 million, or 73.5% of that total. Android devices remain the catalyst, projected to account for nearly nine in 10 (88.4%) smartphones shipped in high-growth regions. The research firm estimates some 150 phone manufacturers support Google’s Android platform, driving its proliferation. Android-based phone makers -- especially Samsung -- also helped lead the shift toward larger screens. In that vein, IDC projects so-called phablets (smartphones with 5.5” to 7” screens) will more than double to 32.2% of the market in 2018 from 14% this year. Apple will help to drive that increase with its expected introduction of an iPhone model featuring a 5.5-inch screen next month (along with a 4.7-inch screen model). “Apple has the ability to drive replacement cycles in mature markets despite the slower growth,” according to IDC. "Smartphone user in China" photo from Shutterstock.
One of the co-inventors of the original Apple Macintosh, Marc LeBrun, has joined the video ad company Vungle to lead its engineering team, which has more than doubled since January. Si Crowhurst has also joined to head the company's new creative optimization group from London. "It's a great opportunity to have an influence on mobile apps and high-performance video, and working with developers to co-create and invent the future," LeBrun said. With a caveat on how quickly technology changes, LeBrun said he will work on building a structure to help developers of app frameworks work more closely with those who create ad content. He said don't think of an ad as a foreign object inserted in an app. It's part of the collaborative, co-creation process, and will support the work he will do for what the company calls Vungle Labs. LeBrun's work had a major impact on the world by building a bridge across consumer technology. "When I look back on the Mac, I don't want to spend time patting myself and the team on the back, but rather look at all the other things," he said. "We intended to make computers useful, but somehow there were a lot of missed opportunities. It was a great start, but how about all these other things." One of those "other things" is the available resources, tradeoffs and decisions that might make things smaller and less functional or more expensive. The group had to adapt to hardware and software limitations -- a challenge that LeBrun will overcome at Vungle as he works to build out the company's video advertising products and services. "There are more opportunities for computer systems to model the user, such as when you reach for something it's already placing it in your hand because it anticipates the need," LeBrun said. Computers have yet to use computing power to its full advantage. Rather than come up with the next great software package, developers need to start thinking differently, such as how the industry defines a mobile app. "Today, we tend to think of apps as an entertainment experience, but there's no reason we can't turn an app into an educational experience or empower the user through a social connections,"LeBrun said. "Then we ask what's an ad? An ad is content put into a framework that can dynamically associate with the query or the task." During his 40-year career, LeBrun has worked with companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 50 companies, most recently serving as engineering manager for search and advanced data services at Tagged.com, and prior at Adobe Systems as principal scientist for advanced product development. As an authority on signal processing and mathematics, he has worked on the staff of several top researchers, like Stanford, MIT and Xerox PARC, and received the prestigious George Pólya Award from the Mathematical Association of America.
There has been a lot made of the connection -- or lack thereof -- between social media and TV viewership and ratings. Adding to the debate, new research suggests that social content (including posts from friends, TV networks, a show's stars, celebrities not on a particular show, or anything else that's not an ad) does little to drive show discovery and engagement. Over the past six months, in fact, just 24% of consumers reported discovering a show through such content on Facebook or Twitter, according to new findings from Hub Entertainment Research. For its research, Hub Entertainment said it recently surveyed more than 1,300 TV consumers between the ages of 16 and 64, who self-identified as regular users of broadband and social media. By contrast, 58% of respondents reported finding out about a new show through some type of ad (including paid social ads), while 41% attributed “word of mouth” (through a channel other than social) to a show's discovery. A full 34% said old-fashioned channel-surfing turned them on to a new program. Most respondents said social media plays little or no role when it comes to finding new shows to watch. On a scale of 0-10, 62% gave low ratings (0-5) to social media’s role in discovery, while 27% gave it a zero -- meaning that social plays no role whatsoever in their discovery process. Overall, those consumers who do report engaging with their favorite shows through Facebook or Twitter said they are more likely to watch those shows live. According to Hub Entertainment, however, there are so few of those viewers out there that the impact on overall live viewing is negligible -- just a three-point bump, to 27%. More broadly, Facebook has far greater reach, both overall and as a tool to communicate about TV content. Indeed, 76% of social media consumers use Facebook daily, and 39% have used Facebook in some way related to a favorite TV show -- compared to just 47% and 17% for Twitter, the research shows. Separately, Twitter is more associated with show engagement, as 67% of consumers who engage in Twitter activities related to a show report that such activity does cause them care more about the show. “The good news regarding social media is that Facebook activity related to TV shows is fairly common, and that Twitter activity related to TV shows leads to greater engagement,” Peter Fondulas, principal at Hub, explained in the new report. “But very few do either one, and even among those who do the increase in engagement is not dramatic … So the net impact on a show’s live audience barely registers.”
Drone use is highly controversial in the United States, but that hasn't stopped Google from experimenting with an unmanned delivery service through its Project X division. A prototype dubbed Project Wing with a 5-foot-wide single wingspan carried candy bars, dog treats, cattle vaccines, water and radios to farmers in Queensland, Australia -- about 30 test flights in all. Tests conducted in mid-August show an unmanned drone hovering above the ground as it lowers packages. The Atlanticdetails how at the end of the tether, electronics detects the package has hit the ground, detaches from the delivery, and gets pulled back up into the body of the drone. A video on YouTube shows how it works. While drones are a far cry from search engine marketing, display advertising, and programmatic technology, perfecting the ability to deliver packages via an unmanned aircraft will help Google better understand the nuances in building a variety of hardware. Earlier this year, Google began acquiring satellite companies. It purchased Titan Aerospace, a maker of drones that Facebook also was reportedly interested in buying. Google also got help from an expert in robotics. Nick Roy, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticist, took a two-year sabbatical from MIT to lead Project Wing. His mission was to determine whether the idea of drone delivery made sense or was just a pipe dream, and whether Google should pursue the creation of a real, reliable service. It's all about changing the world -- something Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know well. Although Roy says yes, they have yet to build a reliable system. The "yes" does give Google the fodder to grow the program and push to create a service that will deliver things people want quickly. The details in The Atlantic describe Google X's "The Hatchery," how the project originated, who worked on it, and what the drone might look like in the future. Google has not settled on this design for all its future program development, but it has formed the platform for much of their testing," writes The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal. "While the hardware is a significant part of the problem, they seem largely agnostic about which flying machine might ultimately serve their needs best," Madrigal writes, explaining how the real challenges on the project will come in the design of the rest of the system like the delivery mechanism.
Labor Day around the Mad Blog office offers some much-needed downtime to sit back, sip lemonade, and reflect on how the Internet has eaten our jobs, taken away our free time, and turned our once-powerful nation into a Task Rabbit economy. (But one with lots of cabs.) OK, so I exaggerate. (Or as Homer Simpson famously told Marge about change: “It only leads to failure.”) Sure, I get that the tech world is all about disruption, and the basic capitalist tenet that whoever builds a better mousetrap (or app) -- wins. And gets a taxi path beaten to their door? I refer to the news last week that Uber, the app-based taxi and car-sharing service, has hired David Plouffe, the former Barack Obama campaign operative and world-class microtargeter, to bring his campaign manager skills to the start-up. It’s war, baby. Of course, by human standards, Uber just turned four and should be wearing overalls and going to preschool. But we’re talking about Silicon Valley. Well-organized and exceedingly well-funded, Uber in its four years has already eaten up most of the globe, having expanded into 170 cities in 37 countries, And the company says it is doubling its revenue every six months. TechCrunch reported Uber’s revenue last year was $213 million on more than $1 billion of bookings; Uber takes a 20% cut of all drivers’ receipts. The start-up now has a valuation of more than $18 billion -- that's with a “b.” So it's worth more than Hertz, Avis Budget and even a number of younger and more progressive companies that have been around longer than Uber, like Whole Foods and Chipotle. This amazing growth is all based on the firm having its own killer, taxi-dispatching software, and drivers providing their own cars. “Uber” translates to “above” as in the German national anthem, “Deutschland uber alles”: “Germany above all,” which still sends chills in some camps. But by the late 1980s in America, “uber” had become hipster code for “beyond,” as in the ultimate, a superlative adjective with an umlaut that could energize any noun. I was living in San Francisco in 2010, which is where and when Uber started. And I will say that in a city of endless attractions, limited public transportation and about 11 working taxis, Uber was a godsend. And I guess it brought much-needed service, similarly, to many cities across the country and around the world. But New York is different, a serious taxi town, going back more than 100 years. (Follow that cab!) And to me, it feels like Uber is indeed occupying Paris or invading Poland with its presence -- and it needs the ministrations of a former Obama staffer in order to continue the blitzkrieg. When I moved back to New York City in 2012, I returned to my former yellow cab habit, and found that on the whole, service had improved. The cars were actually greener, cleaner, quieter and less smelly. And being able to pay by credit card made the process speedier and a lot more convenient. I also knew that the drivers represented the vast immigrant population of the city; for generations, driving a cab has given these people an entry into middle-class life. In New York, medallion cabs are far more regulated than Uber cars. So I was not a fan of Uber’s attempt to break the taxi union here. But I polled my Uber-using friends on Facebook for their feelings, and the reaction was overwhelmingly -- even rabidly -- positive. The game-changer is the Uber app, which provides a map for users to “follow that cab”: to see exactly where the car is and how quickly it’s making its way to your location. The app also enables riders to rate drivers, which weeds out duds. Drivers, in turn, can rate users, which cuts the probability of getting into a car that smells vaguely of vomit. Others pointed out that Uber is a blessing for people with disabilities who can’t stand in the street to hail a cab, and also helps people of color -- who, sadly, are still discriminated against by some drivers. All my friends agreed that Uber is essential during bad weather, and a life-changer for customers who need to get anywhere during the witching hours between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., when cab drivers change shifts. Desperate New Yorkers have been known to run into traffic then, trying to negotiate a rate with an off-duty cab for way over the meter price. This brings us to Uber's “surge-pricing”: during rush hour or downpours, the cost of the fare can double or even triple. It’s a contentious issue that has already brought Uber a lot of bad P.R. The fear is that once the company monopolizes the business, there will be no recourse to surge-pricing. Still, I’ve got to say I do see some benefits in Uber's invasion of, er, presence in, New York. It has forced some corporate car companies to improve. Indeed, several have already introduced similar apps with GPS maps. And medallion owners should feel the pinch and have to up their consumer service game, as well. But just as I started really warming to the service, I saw a new report from the Verge showing the rapaciousness that has allowed for such stunning growth. Writer Casey Newton says Uber hires people to request rides from competitors, then cancel the orders -- all while using pre-paid cellphones and credit cards that are intentionally hard to trace. Earlier this month, competitor Lyft accused Uber of ordering and canceling over 5,000 Lyft rides. Uber responded by accusing Lyft of playing dirty pool, too. Then there’s the issue of stealing, I mean recruiting, drivers from other companies -- because Uber can’t find them fast enough. Competitors are encroaching on Uber -- but maybe the whole taxi-limousine thing is just an off-ramp on the company’s road to bigger things. (After all, we won’t even need drivers in the future when we all are in our autonomous Google cars -- being driven, after a software override, into the ocean or a locked facility.) Uber has already launched a messenger service in New York -- just the beginning of using its software platform to create a worldwide shipping and logistics grid. Eventually, like many other Silicon Valley empire-building companies using a winner-take-all, ask-permission-later strategy, Uber will go public, and make billionaires of fewer than 200 people, while flattening everyone else. There will be backlash, no doubt, and David Plouffe will have his work cut out for him. But imagine if we could figure out how to create world peace with the same speed, using a variation on the software with which Uber has so successfully matched people and cars. Instead, the focus, as has happened to other tech giants, will probably be on corporate spying and consumer behavior modification. One nation, Uber-Google-Amazon, over-apped, and above all, having many more taxi drivers madly competing on the streets, perhaps in Thunderdome style. Happy Labor Day!
While trains around the world keep rolling along, more and more travelers are using mobile to pay for the ride. Mobile train ticket sales are now in the billions of dollars, though the scope of payments varies widely by country, based on a new study. In yet another reminder of the global nature of mobile commerce, consumers everywhere are increasingly using their phones to pay for more things, especially train travel. Mobile payments or activities in areas that are recurring are in many ways the most logical in which to take off, with routine Starbucks visits and mobile payments there one of the most obvious examples. Taking a train, such as to work every day, is another example and a new worldwide study by Frost & Sullivan measures how much is being spent on that travel. Based on the amount of money spent to buy train tickets from a mobile device, Europe leads the world (by a lot), with clear room for growth in North America, according to the Strategic Dashboard of Global Rail Passenger Volumes study. Here’s the breakdown: