TechCrunch
Just.me Chases Instagram With Quickie Selfies Plus Filters To Mask Your #Me Shot
Instagram’s narcissistic obsession with selfies has been well-documented. Turns out it’s also contagious — at least, if you’re in the business of trying to build a rival social property, as Just.me, a U.S. mobile messaging startup that wants to become a one-stop-messaging-cum-social-sharing-platform, undoubtedly is. In an update to its iOS app just.me has added a new selfie message type, to pander to the (similarly) self-absorbed. The move underlines how mobile messaging, photo-sharing and social networking continue their not-so-slow-motion collision.
Version 1.2 of the just.me iOS app now includes selfies as the first option when you hit compose message — above compose a (text) message – to speed up posting that awesome #me shot. Once you’ve taken your selfie, the app also offers Instagram-style filters (and a moveable blur effect) so you can be liberated from the self-consciousness of posting something photorealistic. And so your latest selfie has a chance of standing out from the other 50 you’ve previously posted.
Selfies composed via just.me’s app interface are automatically hashtagged #selfie — “so that all users can browse through just.me’s public feed to see selfies from just.me’s global community of more than 150 countries”. So, yeah, be sure you’re ready for your close-up before taking that quickie selfie and gifting it the Internet.
Just.me founder Keith Teare, partner at incubator Archimedes Labs (and co-founder of TechCrunch*), explained that selfies were already being posted to just.me’s public feed — so they wanted to come up with an easier way to create and browse selfie content. “Users now have a single place to post and see the best selfies from around the world. Given that users are increasingly using their mobile devices to be social – without the need to join a social network – it was a natural step for us to fully support and embrace the emergence of the selfie as a new way to communicate and message your thoughts, feelings and disposition with friends or the public,” he said in a statement.
Just.me’s app launched on iOS back in April, and pulled in some 250,000 users in its first three months — before also expanding onto the Android platform. Android app users will presumably also get their own quickie selfie feature in due course.
Just.me’s v1.2 app update also adds an iPad-optimised interface, with support for portrait and landscape orientation. Its Android app interface has been optimised for tablets too.
*Disclosure: In addition to TC co-founder Teare himself being involved, just.me has raised funding from (among others) CrunchFund — which is of course tied up with TechCrunch in several ways, including the fact that our parent company AOL is an investor.
Multiscreen Video Store Platform Latto Raises Further $4 Million
Multiscreen video store platform Latto, which offers a white label solution for Telcos, Broadcasters, and Content Aggregators that want to get in on the multi-screen steaming and on-demand video action, has closed a $4 million dollar funding round, adding to the $11 million that the Israeli startup has previously raised.
The new investment comes from an unnamed private Luxemburg-based fund, though according to CrunchBase data this is likely previous backer Neurato Investments. Latto’s other earlier investors include 2B Angels and Plus Ventures.
Operating in an ever more crowded market — Latto’s competitors include The Platform, SeaChange, Quickplay, and Ooyala, as well as Cisco and Ericsson at the Telco end of the market — the company is tapping into the so-called ‘cord cutting’ trend that is seeing consumer uptake for ‘Over-the-Top’ (OTT) video. In addition, the advent of multiple devices (PCs, smartphones, set-top boxes, connected TVs, and tablets) is seeing the need for a multiscreen solution, providing video assets that target and are interoperable with different screen resolutions and codec support.
To that end, Latto is talking up its personalisation and ecommerce features that offer new ways to help clients monetize their content and multiscreen offerings. Specifically, this comes in the form of Latto Shop, which enables operators to provide personalized offers and ads as well as an “interactive media store” for both content and commerce.
One way to think of Latto shop is as an e-commerce site within a video watching experience, with personalised content and offerings powered by the “Big Data” that the platform captures, consisting of data from viewers — who and where the viewer is, what they like, and their viewing and purchase behavior — as well as data harvested from the content and the product being promoted.
The pitch to operators is that Latto Shop provides additional incremental revenue streams, in addition to the core OTT offering.
In terms of existing customers, the startup isn’t able to publicly say which operators’ multiscreen offerings it’s currently powering, presumably due to commercial agreements, though a quick scan of Latto’s previous PR points to many of these being based in Asia.
No comments:
Post a Comment