TechCrunch
DingDong! Here's The New Craze In Photo Messaging Apps And It's Addictive
Lately I’ve been playing with a great little app called Povio. Not unlike Snapchat, you snap a picture and send to one or more people and the app prompts them to send one back, though the photo doesn’t disappear. It’s a little like photo messaging ‘with a nudge’. However, another player has been coming up with it’s own take on this idea, and today we can exclusively give some of you lucky people access to the DingDong app, which is one of the most viral we’ve seen lately.
The idea is to make staying in touch with friends super simple and expressive. Snap a picture with a simple doorbell-like button, it “DingDongs’ the person, then they can add an emoticon or send a DingDong picture back. The interaction goes onto a map with a thin line between your two locations. It’s a fairly emotional experience in may ways.
There’s no text field or traditional photo sharing mechanism, so everything has to happen inside the app – no feedback from people on Twitter for instance. That will clearly draw people into the app.
DingDong is entirely private – you can’t follow or be followed, it’s not a broadcast, not a public check-in. Each time you decide who sees your picture and location – it works exactly like sms in terms of privacy.
The app addresses a few major trends. Firstly, people are increasingly tired of sharing personal content publicly – hence why, to some extent, Path has garnered a corner of the ‘private sharing market’. Secondly, it is super simple like many of these new photo apps. Thirdly, I could see DingDong working well on a wearable device like a smart-watch.
I can see it offering a few business models such as in-app purchases of emoticons, sounds or other virtual goods. And perhaps interaction with brands.
Based in Berlin, the company is launching an iOS beta initially but an Android version is already in beta; also a Pebble watch prototype of the app is expected to be available during the summer.
Here are some codes we managed to get so you can try out the app, after downloading it here:
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onlrum yylvmv cavvwe wyubs6 7lbuwe
cwmprk 3e75kn dxxucf 9excf5 c7lheh
1yau5c tvoi5a xuywa1 oa6isu 0xrrb0
nouss8 pmvg3g xpqtwl 96cp6j evw4eg
lslr4q 8kgqmm wk95bw xnjmx1 rhxsos
xps9oc sicfr1 fhnzia 3ksb2b 2c5bxh
wtbsxt py6ah4 ynvgnq zh84jk ttjbjn
fmny4g zuvlrz valrgv rxnjgf 8nx00u
ytt443 cbf8t9 fj5l3q wmeut2 d96oom
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5bq7my w3pqvp 2ugwjq gxcmul 0fmciz
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Wantworthy Debuts Fresh, A Mobile Companion Featuring New Arrivals From Your Favorite Stores
Wantworthy, the 2011 TechStars NYC grad which offers an online shopping tool for tracking products you want to buy, is making its move to mobile with the debut of a new app, which also has a new name: Fresh. Unlike Wantworthy.com, which is somewhat utilitarian in nature, Fresh is more of a companion app to its parent website, as opposed to an attempt at re-creating the Wantworthy experience on mobile’s small screen.
You can think of the app as something like a feed reader for new arrivals. After you sign up and follow your favorite stores, you’re presented with a stream of new products which match your interests. The app cleverly walks you through a sign-up flow where it attempts to identify what kind of shopper you are through a brief Q&A where you tap on answers to identify your style and favorite stores. This helps to build out your personalized home feed.
Today, Wantworthy’s users tend to shop at a number of online stores, including national retailers like Nordstrom, JCrew, Sephora and Target, as well as those making a name for themselves in the e-commerce space like Nasty Gal, Shopbop, ASOS, ModCloth, Urban Outfitters, and others. Fresh offers a better way to shop across these stores, as you can quickly tap on a store’s name in the app’s sidebar to peek into their new product selections.
The app also features other sections like popular new arrivals and an editorially curated “Fresh Picks,” where product selections are organized into categories like “Accessory Candy,” “Bows not Bros,” “iPhone Bling,” “Quirky Cool,” “When I’m Rich,” and more.
You can mark items as “Want” or tap “Buy” to proceed to checkout. This will redirect you to the retailer’s site, though improved mobile checkout is a feature Wantworthy plans to address in time.
Explains Wantworthy co-founder Lauren McDevitt, the inspiration for Fresh comes from the need for a better mobile shopping experience than what many retailers today offer. “The browsing experience itself is kind of shoddy,” she says of using the mobile web. “Mobile websites are kind of a mess and mobile apps are kind of fragmented.”
Plus, for Wantworthy’s core demographic – a largely female, younger audience – their smartphones are becoming their primary device to do their online shopping, co-founder Josh Wais adds. And Fresh’s new arrivals can be almost like an Instagram for products, he notes.
On the web, around 65 percent of the products Wantworthy shoppers are saving are new arrivals, but the company declined to provide exact user numbers or actives at this time, only saying that the website has seen “hundreds of thousands” of sign-ups. However, the big number Wantworthy has on hand to demonstrate traction, or, in e-commerce speak, its ability to capture “real purchase intent,” is that it has reached half a billion dollars worth of products saved in shoppers’ accounts.
Some retailers are starting to notice, too, as one in ten of Wantworthy’s shoppers end up making a purchase. The founders say they’re now working with a larger retailer (which they’re not yet allowed to name publicly), on a trial program where Wantworthy data is used in promotional emails. They’re also in various stages of discussions with another small handful of five to ten retailers.
Fresh is something of a competitor to other mobile product aggregators like Fancy, Pinterest or Wanelo, for example, but Pinterest isn’t shoppable, and others are focused more on popular items or a “best of the best” kind of experience. Wanelo may be the one to beat here, currently at #23 in the Apple App Store’s Lifestyle section in the U.S. It also offers a personalized feed, but many of its users tend to prefer the trending page. While popular items are fun to browse, when you go to purchase a trending product on Wanelo, it’s often something that’s long since been sold out.
Fresh is attempting to differentiate itself through its larger focus on new arrivals, and its ability to sync your activity to the Wantworthy.com homepage, for when you’re back at your computer and ready to shop some more. Your list of “wants” can also serve as a universal wish list of sorts, and your personal link can be shared to Facebook or via email, if you choose.
Fresh is available now for download in Apple’s iPhone App Store. An iPad version and Android app are also in the works.
Codlo Kickstarts A Sous Vide Machine For Us Gastronerds
Another home sous vide machine is about to enter the market. UK-made Codlo just passed its Kickstarter goal, with only five days to spare.
Sous vide is a French method of cooking food sealed in airtight bags in a water bath. The idea is to immerse them in a regulated temperature that isn’t as hot as boiling water, with the intention of cooking them evenly throughout. The original Sous Vide Supreme machine starts at $429, and the professional model costs $749—and that’s before you add in all the vacuum bags and so on.
The sous vide trend has been gaining more awareness among home cooks in recent years, and Codlo is part of a trend of new budget-friendly cooking devices meant to offer the technology at home. Last year, the Nomiku device was successfully kickstarted, at more than twice its goal of $200,000.
The Codlo’s goal was a slightly lower $153,580 (£100,000). Both devices attach to existing vessels such as pots and rice cookers to turn them into sous vide machines. Codlo’s co-founder, Grace Lee, said that the funding will give the 12-man team just enough to invest in safety certification and the injection molding process.
“Manufacturing is hard. These days, with cheap reliable hardware coming out, it’s easy to overlook how complex hardware manufacturing is,” she said. Making precision devices like sous vide attachments can be more expensive to construct because they need to be rugged for the kitchen while staying sensitive to temperature fluctuations.
“It can be challenging to aim for temperature stability within fractions of a degree, that’s needed for sensitive food such as fish and eggs,” she said.
The Codlo’s individual components such as the circuitry, screen and power supply will be made in China. The device will be assembled in the UK “to limit intellectual property issues”, she said.
The Nomiku team, on the other hand, decided to make a much bigger investment in the device’s manufacturing process. Two of its three co-founders, Abe Fetterman and Bam Suppipat, relocated from San Francisco to Hong Kong and have been living there for the past six months, to oversee manufacturing across the water in Shenzhen.
Fetterman said: “Being on the ground has helped us communicate more effectively and resolve problems quickly. Our biggest issues have been communication and cultural differences. A project like this involves a lot of people, and they all need to be synchronized.”
Perhaps reflecting Lee’s point on the complexities of manufacturing these devices, mass producing the Nomiku has taken the better part of the past year since its campaign ended in July 2012. The team is expecting to launch the devices end of this month, it said on its Facebook page. I was fortunate enough to sample a rack of ribs prepared with the Nomiku when I visited Hong Kong in March this year.
For now, both teams don’t seem too worried about any impending competition on the home sous vide front. Fetterman acknowledged that there’s nothing to stop a big manufacturer from coming in and making a cheaper sous vide, at scale. “But sous vide cooking is still not well known, so bigger corporations entering the space will only increase the demand for these appliances,” he said.
Lee pointed out that the barriers to entry for smaller makers should keep the market from being flooded with Nomikus and Codlos. “Sous vide today is a much smaller market compared to, say, mixers, blenders, ovens, cookers. Temperature control is challenging, and existing sous vide appliances tend to be offshoots from temperature control specialists rather than kitchen manufacturers,” she said.
Akamai: There Are Now 734M IP Addresses Worldwide, Up 10% Y-o-Y, 1B+ Internet Users; U.S. Is 9th Fastest Broadband Country
Akamai has today released its Q1 State of the Internet report detailing the latest figures in online and mobile usage and current security threats. The topline figure is that our connected world is getting more connected. There are now nearly 734 million addresses in use worldwide, the company says. Akamai estimates that this works out to over 1 billion users because of device sharing. This represents growth of some 10% on last year — still a healthy number, despite the gradual exhaustion of IPv4 numbers, which alone are now around 700 million of that total IP address number.
We have embedded the full 40-page report below; here are some of the more important takeaways:
Where will you typically see the fastest internet? According to Akamai, that title will continue to remain in Asia, where South Korea currently offers the fastest speeds on average, at 14.2 megabits per second; Japan in second (11.7Mbps) and Hong Kong third (10.9Mbps). The U.S. is still at the bottom end of the world’s top ten fastest mobile networks, currently at number nine with 8.6Mbps. Interestingly South Korea is actually down by 10% on last year, while the U.S. is pushing hard to catch up, up 27% — with the global increase at 17% to 3.1Mbps.
What about on mobile? As a mark of how the story of the Internet in emerging markets is one of mobile and not fixed broadband, it’s noticeable that countries like China, Brazil and India are absent from the above list. However, when you go to which country has the fastest mobile network, it’s a BRIC win: a mobile operator in Russia — which Akamai notes only as RU1 — is the fastest at 8.6Mbps — that’s right, just as fast as the average fixed broadband in the U.S.
In terms of the fastest peak speed, this came out of Hong Kong with 43.7Mbps.
What are the biggest security threats? Akamai, as a CDN, also has broken out some statistics on where attacks are originating as well as what are the top targets today. China remains the biggest country in terms of originating attack traffic, at 34%. This is actually down by 7 percentage points from Q4 2012, and at the same time, another country is emerging: Indonesia, which accounted for only 0.7% of attacks in Q4 but now represents 21% of all malicious internet traffic.
Akamai does not go into any detail to give a “why” behind what is going on here — we’re reaching out to ask — but it does note that the traffic is concentrated in a couple of key ports. Port 445 (Microsoft-DS) — used for file sharing over TCP — remained the most targeted port, with HTTP and then HTTPS (SSL) in numbers two and three, likely because these remain the most popular routes for usage on the internet.
In terms of who is most vulnerable, enterprises remain the biggest target, likely for being potentially the highest reward for those hacking. Enterprise accounted for 35% of all attacks (67 in the Akamai sample size), up 14%, while e-commerce was at 32% and media was at 22% — all compared to the quarter before.
Stop Trying To Make Proximity-Based Social Networking Happen
Turn back the dial to 2009, and proximity social networking was buzzing, thanks to the launch of Google Latitude and the hype and oxygen burning around check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Such services promised that we were all going to be broadcasting our location to friends — and even strangers — so that life could be one big serendipitous cool-tastic, gamified hook up.
By 2011 proximity’s potential was powering swathes of startups to jump in and try to ride the hype wave, spurred on by VC cash flowing into location networks. Such as the $41 million that poured into proximity based photo-sharing network Color. Never mind that user adoption wasn’t exactly overwhelming for any of these location services. Foursquare reported 10 million users in 2011. Compare that to the growth rate of mobile messaging apps — for example China’s WeChat, which has amassed 190 million+ monthly active users in around two years — and there’s no denying that proximity in and of itself is not something that turns the majority on.
Most people need to communicate at regular intervals — which is the driving force behind the rise and rise of mobile messaging apps. Far fewer people feel a similar imperative to regularly broadcast their location. Or tether their communications to a particular location. That’s got ‘niche use-case’ written all over it.
Now, in 2013, it has to be said that the grand location-based vision of Latitude et al hasn’t happened. Not in the form originally envisaged anyway. Earlier this month Google announced plans to retire Latitude (although it should be noted it’s folded check-ins in to Google+). Color, of course, gave up the ghost at the end of 2012. Meanwhile Foursquare has been fielding questions about check-in fatigue for years, and doing what it can to decrease check-in friction. And Facebook, which acquired Foursquare rival Gowalla in 2011, also retired its own check-in service, Places, back in 2011. The social network didn’t ditch location sharing entirely, rather it amalgamated it into general status updates as a tagging option, instead of having a break-out check-in service. Location became a feature, not a focus — and that’s as it should be.
Of course there’s still a hardcore of check-in junkies who use Foursquare, but there’s still a hardcore of Google fans who use Google+ (oh, and, Robert Scoble), just as there’s a core group of people who continue visiting the local library. The wider point here is that you don’t need to require users to manually check-in when you can grab their location data automatically, based on where a user’s cell phone or tablet is accessing your service. For those (pesky) users who block location spiders, there are still embedded options and frequent nagging to share where they are. But for the average ‘click yes to anything’ app user the emphasis has shifted to an assumption that location will be taken at the point of sign up.
Put another way, the fading glory of a manual check-in service like Foursquare doesn’t mean location-based services are going away. Au contraire. More and more location data is being generated automatically by the rise of mobile computing (and location sharing opt-ins), rendering the manual check-in redundant — a quaint throwback to a gentler time when users were asked to volunteer every data point, not asked once to share the lot.
But what about the standalone proximity social network concept itself? I ask because a French startup, Hunear, is preparing to have another go at the space. Here’s how the co-founders describe their nascent bite at the cherry, just launched in London in beta as a mobile app:
Hunear is a social network (a website and a app) enabling users to join others at spontaneous meetings nearby. The concept of the application is simple : you choose what you want to do (eat, drink, visit the town, go to cinema…), the time that you would like to spend (from 30mn until 2 hours or more…), and then you create a “meeting” from these criteria. Then Hunear will instantly show you people who want to join you (or who created the same kind of event as you) that are nearby. Our concept is based on spontaneity and proximity.
Hunear’s concept was actually based on an idea the founders had three years ago while travelling, says co-founder Ivan Gabriele, so in others words at the height of check-in mania. Right now, a week or so post-launch, it’s too early to expect Hunear to work as intended. You can create prospective meetings in the app but the chance of another app user being in your locality, let alone keen to do exactly the activity you fancy, is pretty unlikely. But even if every meeting request was inundated with responses it’s difficult to imagine regularly wanting to meet random people to do random stuff like have a drink or go to the cinema. It’s just a bit, well, awkward, unless you’re looking for dating opportunities. Or genuinely don’t have any friends where you live yet.
Asked why a proximity social network should work now, when it’s proved so difficult to get the concept to stick before, Gabriele concedes the startup does not have “a perfect answer”, and says it is very much experimenting and hoping to be steered and shaped by its beta users. One idea it has is to try to build traction by targeting the service at existing communities of people who may be more actively looking for ways to meet than the average city dweller — such as expatriate communities, or conference attendees hoping to network.
“I had many friends who went to Le Web in London and they said even though they were there to meet new people it was really complicated to know where to go — which party to go to, which thing to do, with who to go. And everybody was trying to get information from Twitter and Facebook to try to organise where to go and it wasn’t really working,” he says. “We are thinking about maybe for the next Le Web trying to create a system or make a tool to help people to know where to go.”
All of which sounds very niche use-case again. Plus the problem of any such proximity tool — even for niche uses — is traction. Unless all of the users are using it — or at least, the sub-group of users you want to interact with — then its usefulness is circumscribed. And people will resort to using Twitter or Facebook where they can be sure others already are. Which is why a successful event discovery app doesn’t exist. The closest you get is under-utilised secondary functions within ticketing apps like Eventbrite.
Who does proximity really appeal to? Niche communities with a very specific use case. Take the gay hook-up app Grindr. Proximity is an essential component of that network since it’s a lot more hassle to hook up with someone if they’re not nearby. Or, in another example, what if you have something large/heavy to sell and ideally want to find a nearby buyer? There are a fair few proximity retail apps cropping up, such as Shpock. Local buying and selling can be attractive for multiple reasons, with increased trust in a local transaction and reduced hassle since delivery is taken out of the loop. It’s still no guarantee these apps can become social networks in their own right but they at least have a shot at leveraging location to oil the wheels of local commerce.
Now you might think proximity would also appeal to networks of friends. But that’s a fallacy that the demise of Facebook Places and the fatigue around Foursquare check-ins underlines. Friends first and foremost talk to each other. They don’t wait to pop up on a nearness radar before deciding to meet. They arrange meetings via the continued communication that underpins the friendship. This is why mobile messaging apps can easily build social networks but proximity apps can’t easily build communities. Meeting places are moveable; it’s who you meet — not where or when you meet — that’s important to the majority.
Thing is: proximity, in and of itself, just isn’t that interesting — when you consider that people are in regular enough contact with their friends to be able to find out if or know if they’re nearby without checking a location database. And also that urban geography rarely favours the kind of serendipitous encounters proximity social networks were supposed to deliver. Big cities are too sprawling to easily engineer chance meetings between friends, while smaller locations likely mean friend groups coalesce on the same hang-outs anyway so don’t need an app for that.
Meeting people is also a state of mind: which is why friends arrange to meet, so they are in the mood to hang out. Bumping into your buddy in the supermarket isn’t the same as arranging to go for drinks at the weekend. The long and short of it is the most interesting kind of proximity is the digital proximity that allows people to keep in touch virtually without having to be co-located most of the time. Location is a feature of friendship, communication is the focus.
In one of the most bizarre — and in my view misguided — recent instances of proximity/location technology applications, mobile maker Nokia has made an app called Job Lens that mashes up augmented reality with job hunting. The app lets the user view jobs relative to their location by holding the phone and pointing its camera around them. Now sure, everyone needs to know where a job is based before they decide whether they want to apply for it. But needing to know a job is 0.3 miles from your current location on a random street corner seems a very niche requirement indeed. Really it’s nearly impossible to imagine Job Lens being genuinely useful to anyone, unless you’re just curious about who’s hiring in your neighbourhood. If that’s how your startup is thinking of proximity and location it’s definitely time for a rethink.
And lest anyone think it’s just Europeans indulging in less than sparkling location-based thinking, Apple implementing an ‘apps near me’ feature in iOS 7, to replace its previous app discovery and recommendation feature. Again, that may have some niche interest — to see what your fellow university students are downloading say, or the apps your workmates like, but it’s a pretty gimmicky approach to app discovery, and one which leaves plenty of room for third-party app discovery services to tailor their suggestions to users’ preferences, not the vagaries of where a person happens to be at one particular moment in time.
[Image via Flickr by Category5 TV]
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