TechCrunch
Augment Makes Augmented Reality Useful For Salespeople With Its New ‘Business Catalog'
While augmented reality has been around for a while, Augment is trying to monetize it with its platform. The company just released its Business Catalog feature, targeted toward salespeople. For $30 per month and per user, you can carry around all your catalog on your iPad and show how it would look like to your client. It makes sense for furniture, merchandising displays or even art prints.
“Our biggest competitor is choosing not to use augmented reality,” co-founder and CEO Jean-François Chianetta told me in a phone interview. “Thanks to our platform, you can upload and visualize your 3D models as augmented reality objects in minutes,” he continued.
With the business catalog, everybody on the sales team has the same 3D portfolio on their tablets and phones. Everything is downloaded to the devices so that they don’t have to worry about connectivity. Comparatively, the free account is much more limited as you can only see a few test models and upload your own models to your own account for testing purposes — you cannot deliver your models to your team and you need to be always connected.
The premium offering was already available in beta for a few months. More than 3,000 users tried it out. But, starting this week, they now have to pay the subscription fee.
When asked who Augment’s potential clients were, the answer was very straightforward. “We work with companies who already use 3D models,” co-founder and CMO Mickaël Jordan said. “We support 3ds Max, Maya or even SketchUp files,” he continued. So far, 8,000 users have uploaded 3D models to the platform.
Companies like Curioos use Augment for its digital art marketplace. Before buying an art print, you can figure out what print size you should order for your living room, and how it would look like over the fireplace.
There’s another part to Augment’s business. The company also creates advertising campaigns using augmented reality. For example, clients can create a booth to promote DVD sales in a supermarket and let anyone take a picture of his or her friend with a famous movie character. The character will be in 3D thanks to the Augment app. In many cases, companies need to hire an agency to create a special app — when you work with Augment it’s easier as you can build your campaign on top of its existing platform.
Back in April, the French startup raised $300,000 (€220,000) from multiple angels. It plans to raise more funding in the coming months. Now that the company generates revenue, it will be a compelling argument to convince VCs.
Nokia Promises Its Amber Update Will Come To All Windows Phone 8 Lumia Devices By The End Of September
Today Nokia promised owners of its Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices that its “Amber” update will reach all phones by the end of September. The Amber upgrade is a mix of feature improvements that will improve Nokia’s handsets, further setting them apart from devices built by other smartphone OEMs.
Amber contains a photo-editing tool, improved image processing, the ability to snag motion in sequence with “Action Shot,” the acceptance of double-tap input to wake the phone, and improved internal storage reporting.
However, the most important new piece delivered by Amber is “Glance Screen,” a tool that makes your phone’s inactive state more interesting. When your handset is inactive, it will display a clock and battery information. So, you can more quickly interact with your phone without having to do anything at all. You can turn off Glance, of course, or have it switch off after a set amount of time.
In past years, we would now discuss how Amber puts Nokia ahead of Samsung, HTC, and other Windows Phone OEMs (remember Dell?). We don’t have to do that anymore, as Nokia controls essentially the entire Windows Phone market. Thus, the changes are not as much changes to Nokia’s Windows Phone handsets as they are adaptations to the Windows Phone platform itself. Given that Nokia sells nearly 90 percent of Windows Phone devices, any changes that it makes become de facto official changes.
This is a problem for Microsoft, as it initially ceded flexibility to make changes to Nokia in partial exchange for it adopting the platform. This saved Microsoft’s mobile life, but in the process cost it control: If Nokia can essentially skin Windows Phone to its own contentment, Microsoft is in a material way not in charge of the Windows Phone user experience and design.
I doubt that sits well in Redmond. Thus, Microsoft either builds a phone itself (there have been rumors), or it bolsters HTC (the only remaining OEM partner with more than a scrape of market share that isn’t Nokia) to get a better grip on its platform.
Whatever the case, if you are a Nokia handset owner, the Amber update will be rolling out depending on your handset and country and likely carrier over the next month. Get ready.
Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan
MoPub's Optimizer Lets Mobile Publishers Automatically Prioritize Their Most Lucrative Ad Networks
MoPub is releasing a new tool called the Optimizer that should allow mobile publishers to take an entirely automated, hands-off approach to managing their ad networks — and increase revenue, too.
The team gave me a demo of the new feature, saying the technology uses a “waterfall” approach, moving down a list of possible networks from which to serve an ad, starting with the one that had the highest estimated CPM (price paid per thousand impressions). Normally, MoPub prioritizes those networks based on CPM estimates provided by the publisher. The problem: Those estimates are often wrong. (MoPub has been trying to address the lack of transparency and data about the performance of individual ad networks with its new dashboard.)
Now, when publishers hit the Optimizer button, MoPub will automate that prioritization process based on its own data and the data it has acquired from various networks, so that it can predict the likely CPM, clickthrough rate, latency, and more on a given ad. Ideally, for each impression MoPub should be serving an ad from the network that’s likely to make the most money for the publisher.
“It seems like a really simple concept, but our publishers haven’t seen anything like it before and they’re basically blown away,” said Marketing Director Elain Szu.
The data used for prioritization is supposed to be as specific as possible. In other words, when possible, MoPub will calculate CPMs and so forth using data specific to that publisher and that geography, but when necessary it will use more general data, and in some cases, when there’s really no data available, it may just fall back on the estimates provided by the publishers.
Not every publisher is going to embrace this for all of their campaigns, Szu added. Instead, she suggested it could be particularly useful for small publishers who don’t have the resources to manage their ad networks in a very hands-on way, as well as for larger publishers who may have a number of geographic segments to monitor. Those larger publishers may want to pay close attention in more mature markets like the United States while taking a more automated approach in small-but-growing markets.
The MoPub team also showed me the results of some early campaigns, particularly how the share of ads from different networks shifted when the Optimizer was turned on, and continued shifting over time. (In some cases the Optimizer would even shift money away from the MoPub Marketplace to other ad networks.) In each case, the CPMs went up compared to past performance and compared to apps that weren’t using the Optimizer — you can see one example in the (anonymized) chart above.
Deeplink.me Launches A Retargeting Network For Mobile That Sends Users Back To The Apps They've Already Installed
Deeplink.me, the new service from Cellogic making it possible for users to navigate through the apps on a smartphone the way you navigate the web, is today exiting from its beta period and launching an accompanying retargeting network. The network takes advantage of Deeplink.me’s knowledge of deep linking into apps to identify users who have a particular app installed on their phone, in order to show them personalized ad units which redirect them to a specific page within an app.
For background, the Deeplink.me service launched into beta this May as something of an offshoot of Cellogic’s development of Nextap, a content discovery network for mobile applications. App developers can build mobile app deeplinks (Deeplink.me links) which can automatically detect where end users are coming from (web or mobile) and then point them to the correct resource, whether that’s a website, mobile web page, or specific page within an installed mobile application. At the time, the company described this service as a “bit.ly for deep linking,” as these shortened Deeplink.me links could be promoted on social media or elsewhere on the web.
Since the initial launch, the service has been tweaked a bit to better fit into developers’ workflows. Before, developers would have to figure out their app’s URI was, what the corresponding web page was, then create an individual link to point there. Now, things are more rule-based. For instance, a social network’s URL may be domain.com/profile/user123, and the URI is profile://user123. A rule can be set up that explains how those two things are related, so each URL can be automatically translated.
According to Cellogic CEO Itamar Weisbrod, several thousand “medium to premium” app developers have signed up to use Deeplink.me so far, and a small handful are currently testing the retargeting capabilities.
The Deeplink.me service and basic analytics are free – similar to other efforts like Quixey’s open initiative with AppURL - but the retargeting service is how Deeplink.me plans to generate revenue.
With this, developers can choose to retarget to any users they want, but Deeplink.me will also help by providing suggestions based on what apps people are using, when they’re using them, and how they’re using them, based on the data it gleans from its network.
“Because it’s retargeting, we can take very user-specific data and say, ‘come back in because of reason X,’” explains Weisbrod. For example, a regular app user could be targeted to launch an e-commerce app in order to participate in a flash sale that was taking place or return to their recently abandoned shopping cart, while another less regular user might just be encouraged to open the app again via a coupon or offer of some sort.
Though the system itself is still new and the beta testing group is small, the company says that they’ve already had repeat customers for the retargeting network, and those marketers are seeing high conversions. Specifically, they’ve found some traction with e-commerce, travel and freemium utility-like apps, as well as in the payment and wallet space. The retargeting is a per-click, bidded system, and the minimum to really get going is around a couple thousand dollars.
“Longer term,” says Noah Klausman, Cellogic’s VP of Business Development, “we see an environment where instead of seeing ads for ‘click here to download’ all the time sending you to some app you may or may not have interest in, we see a system that’s seamlessly flowing you through the apps that are already on your phone.”
That could prove beneficial to mobile app developers who often have a hard time getting users to open their app after the first install. Unlike on the web, the only way to see most applications is to download the app and then launch it. But while download numbers are easier to come by, especially since they can be bought and paid for, getting repeat users is much tougher. The idea with Deeplink.me’s network is to personalize the ads shown to users in order to get them to return to the apps they have on their smartphone or iPad, and getting them re-engaged with the service.
App marketers can get started with Deeplink.me’s retargeting networking by using a provided 300×50 template or uploading their own creative, and can then keep track of their ads performance using the provided analytics which shows numbers of ads shown, clicks, geography, and more. (This can also be integrated with other third-party analytics providers, too). The ad units themselves will be improved over time as well, allow for more interactivity, and more customization possibilities with regards to their look-and-feel.
Those interested in participating in the new retargeting network can learn more or sign up here on the Deeplink.me website.
No comments:
Post a Comment