TechCrunch
INQ Extends Its Social Magazine App, Material, To iOS After 50,000+ Downloads On Android
Material is a social magazine app powered by Twitter and/or Facebook usage. It’s the latest project from INQ, the U.K.-based, Hutchison Whampoa backed company that used to build social phones — way before everyone started embedding Facebook. And before Samsung became big enough to gobble up most of the Android OEM lunch.
INQ announced its pivot away from hardware to software at the start of this year, launching Material in beta on Android in February. The Android version of Material has had more than 50,000 downloads since then, according INQ CEO and co-founder, Ken Johnstone. Today, INQ has extended Material to iOS, and updated the Android app to add an offline view feature and the ability to edit topics. The iOS version of the app has a slightly different design — cleaner and less dense, according to Johnstone. But is otherwise the same.
INQ’s “interest extraction engine”, which powers content creation for the social magazine by parsing the user’s Twitter and/or Facebook account, has also been tweaked since the Android beta launch to improve its ability to identify interests from social activity. As with most of these interest identifying algorithms, it apparently improves the more you use it, based on what you look at, and (in the case of Twitter) who you follow.
Material’s content is currently delivered as two daily editions: one in the morning, and a second edition that can be downloaded when it’s ready around 12 hours later. The idea being to offer up a best selection of topical, personalised content from around the web throughout the day. Sections within your magazine are generated based on your social activity, so will differ for each Material user (but can include categories like Books, Films, Technology etc). The app does let you add/remove sections if you don’t like what it’s saying about what you like.
How does Material differ to the social magazine competition of Flipboard, Zite, Pulse et al? Not hugely, really, although Johnstone claims it offers a lower barrier to entry/set-up than rivals, being as it can be powered just by signing in with your Twitter (or Facebook) account. There are also no human curated sections in Material. Content is pulled in solely by looking at activity on your social networks and matching that to stories from across the web — therefore his argument is that the content it finds will be entirely unique to you.
“For somebody who has invested a lot of time in Twitter or Facebook anyway, this is about getting a return on that investment,” says Johnstone. ”This product is a very easy product to use based on the work you’ve already put into your social networks. It’s heavily customised, it’s not some guy curating content for a design section, for you, which is the same as everyone else’s design section. It’s completely unique. So in that respect it offers a much more personal experience.”
Twitter on its own is likely to give better results than Facebook on its own, according to Johnstone, assuming you use Twitter enough to generate enough of an interest graph (or don’t, in my case, use it too much for work purposes — skewing results). But using both accounts will apparently offer the best results. “Some people will get better results than others, that’s something we’re very conscious of,” he adds. “But it should be pretty good for everybody — and hopefully awesome for some.”
In my experience of testing it out for a few days ahead of launch, it has the same issues as all these social magazines: a small portion of content is interesting; the majority is relatively unexciting, being only mildly relevant to some general interests; and another portion of the stuff makes you go WTF?! (In my case, I am apparently following someone on Twitter who really likes Miley Cyrus). Bottom line: the interests of the people you follow are not always informative of your interests.
Unsurprisingly, the overall feeling you get from flicking through an edition is not a cohesive, editorially unified whole, but an algorithmically generated bunch of mostly random stories with (at best) a few loose, overlapping themes. And a lot of redundant duplication. It’s computer-generated content wearing a magazine’s clothes. But that’s a charge you can level at any solely algorithmically powered social magazine.
I’d be hard pressed to rank Material against its social magazines rivals. It’s clearly not entirely optimised for my relatively specialist use of Twitter (and large number of followees) so it seems unfair to judge it based on what it delivers to me. It was also still pretty buggy — although Johnstone stressed the iOS app was in the final development test phase, and there were a number of known issues they were aiming to fix for launch.
However one rather key problem I noticed (and which wasn’t on a list of known issues he flagged up ahead of launch) was stories being mis-categorised — especially in the ‘Comedy’ section it generated. But then computers being confused by humour is not exactly a new story.
What about business model? Ultimately, INQ’s end-game here is to acquire enough users — and learn enough about them — to have the data to build an advertising business out of Material, likely based on injecting relevant adverts into each user’s magazine, much like Facebook has done with ads in the Newsfeed on its mobile apps. However Material monetisation is a long way off at this point. For now, INQ’s social magazine experiment is being funded by their long time partner Hutchison so the focus is squarely on pulling in the users — and pulling in stuff the users are interested in.
Some screenshots of the Material iOS app follow below.
HTC Reportedly Building New Mobile OS Specifically For China Market, In Partnership With Chinese Government
HTC’s Hail Mary play might not take the form of another new smartphone: The Taiwanese company is reportedly working with Chinese government officials to build a mobile OS that includes “deep integration” with China-specific services like Weibo, aimed specifically at the Chinese market. The project could see the new mobile OS launch before year’s end, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news.
The report said it wasn’t clear whether HTC’s China OS would be forked from or based upon Android in some way, and a source speaking to the paper said that in fact the company has changed plans throughout the year regarding whether it would be something completely new, or just a new user interface based atop Google’s mobile OS. Already HTC has some devices using the OS in active testing, and prototypes are in the hands of Chinese government officials.
Attempting to partner with a company to build a partially homegrown OS solution isn’t a new move for China. The Chinese government recently partnered with UK-based Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, to build a China-specific version of its own OS that likewise favored integrations with China-made apps and services. In general, the Chinese government has been actively trying to lessen reliance on foreign-made software. A white paper from China’s tech ministry released in March criticized its country’s over-reliance on the Google-made Android OS.
A strategic alliance with the Chinese government could help HTC secure some good lasting power even as it faces challenges in terms of worldwide market share and sales of its Android-based smartphones. It’s unlikely that its own China-specific OS will pose any major threat to the dominance of Android and iOS, especially in the short-term, but if China’s government is serious about putting lasting investment in home-grown alternatives that favor Chinese software and services, building significant market share early might not be a necessary component of its survival.
In other words, making yourself integral to a long-term China government plan for technological independence is probably a wise move for HTC in uncertain times, which isn’t to say it wouldn’t be better served by also improving its fortunes elsewhere in the world, too.
Cognitive Networks Partners With LG To Bring Interactivity To Smart TVs
Advertisers and content creators want to complement TV shows and ads people are watching with interactive features viewers. They can then find out more about what they’re watching, get discounts, maybe order pizza and other goodies directly from the remote control. Cognitive Networks plans to help them create these experiences, with technology that the company has embedded in LG Smart TVs.
The enhanced features than Cognitive’s platform can provide are due thanks to a feedback loop that has been brought to viewers through a new generation of TVs that are connected to the Internet. Cognitive Networks uses a technology called automatic content recognition (ACR) to figure out what viewers are watching and to serve up interactive ads and additional content targeted at what’s on the screen.
LG is the first consumer electronics manufacturer to partner with Cognitive Networks to make this happen. The technology will be supported on LG’s 2012 and 2013 smart TVs, enabling advertisers and content owners alike to “enhance” shows and ads with interactive creative.
In addition to the LG partnership, Cognitive Networks is also announcing the availability of its Engage Enhanced TV platform, which partners will use to build those interactive features. The platform will enable viewers to see multimedia content during shows, participate in polls, and make purchases directly from the TV, among other things.
Already, Showtime is using the technology to provide additional content during its shows. Interactive elements pop up based on what’s happening on the screen, as content owners and advertisers can choose when to signal them.
The good news is that users will be able to choose when they want their content “enhanced” and when they just want to lean back and watch some TV. After all, not everyone wants to participate in polls when watching reality TV — some just prefer to yell at the screen.
Cognitive Networks isn’t the only ACR vendor in town — startups like Flingo are also seeking to enable more interactivity on the TV screen. Now the race is on to partner with as many TV manufacturers as possible and get on as many connected TVs as they possibly can.
No comments:
Post a Comment