TechCrunch
Tour Management Startup TourCommand Upgrades With An Eye On Up-And-Coming Musicians
Given the challenges facing the recorded music industry, touring seems like an ever-more-important way for musicians to make money. Yet TourCommand co-founder Asad Yusupov said there hasn’t been that much done to make it easier to actually manage a tour.
“There are very few tools for the backend of the music industry,” he said.
So Yusupov and his three co-founders (Joshua Gunter, Ivan Veskov, and Brian Putt) have built online software that’s supposed to make the menial touring tasks easier. They launched the company two months ago with capabilities like the ability to manage the guest and equipment lists and to make hotel reservations — not things artists and managers couldn’t have done before, but brought together in one place.
And now they’re launching TourCommand 2.0, which Yusupov said should make the platform particularly useful for “entry-level artists who want to become touring professionals.”
The new features include the ability to create custom artist pages, to share directly from TourCommand to Facebook and Twitter, to track tour budgets, and to search a database of different venues. These features aren’t necessarily for newbies only, but Yusupov said the marketing tools in particular can help someone who’s trying to start their career. (It also puts TourCommand, whose main competition on the tour management side was Master Tour, in a position where it could be competing with services like ReverbNation and BandPages.)
“The way we’ve set up TourCommand is that it is the artists’ tour kit,” Yusupov said. “You can literally go in there and build the beginning stages of your career.”
Although Yusupov talked up the number of customers that TourCommand could potentially serve, he also acknowledged that new musicians don’t necessarily have a lot of the money, and they might not stay in the business for very long. However, he said there always new people entering the business. And to make TourCommand affordable, pricing starts at $7 a month (the team is probably hoping some of those users will find success and graduate to a higher pricing plan).
By the way, even though Yusupov and his co-founders are young (their ages range from 20 to 25), they claim to know the touring business from real experience. Yusupov, for example, co-founded booking company EMG Management — he said the company booked appearances by the Jersey Shore cast among others.
He added that TourCommand is being tested by companies including record label Roc Nation, and no one has canceled yet.
Facebook Feed Change Punishes Pages For Posting Crappy Memes
Facebook cracking down on Pages trying to trick their way into your News Feed. Today it announced a feed algorithm change for Pages that gives more visibility to timely, relevant, sharable content from trusted sources. Meanwhile, it punishes Pages that ask people Like their posts, and post “low-quality” memes. The update could drive more traffic to reputable Pages while strangling spammers.
Earlier this month Facebook announced that it would start publicizing changes to the News Feed. It revealed there are hundreds of thousands of signals taken into account when customizing the feed for each person. Instead of tuning the algorithm quietly, Facebook decided that the impact on users and businesses is so large that it’s best to be transparent and explain the changes in detail.
The first set of changes it revealed were focused on content from friends. These included Story Bumping to make sure you don’t miss great posts, Last Actor to show you more about people you’ve recently interacted with, and Chronological By Actor, which is still in testing but could help people to follow along with real-time updates.
Now Facebook is focusing on how Pages appear in the feed, a more sensitive topic because so many businesses have grown to depend on the News Feed for content. Many Page admins vocally criticized Facebook for starting to ask them to pay to reach their existing fans. Much of the fervor stemmed from Facebook simultaneously getting more stringent about demoting spammy posts.
The problem was that Facebook wasn’t up-front about these changes, leading to rampant speculation that it was trying to extort Pages by not showing them in the feed unless they paid. By being clear about what’s going on this time, Facebook should avoid much of the backlash.
How News Feed Is Changing For Pages
Facebook says it did a survey of users asking what they thought made a Page post worth seeing. The questions included:
- Is this timely and relevant content?
- Is this content from a source you would trust?
- Would you share it with friends or recommend it to others?
- Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g., asking for people to like the content)
- Would you call this a low quality post or meme?
- Would you complain about seeing this content in your News Feed?
It took the user feedback and built a better machine learning algorithm that can distinguish between high and low-quality posts, and show the best ones higher in the feed.
Facebook says that in its tests, of the change “we saw a significant increase in interactions (likes, comments, shares) with this content” and “People in the test group also hid fewer stories overall”. That showed the algorithm tweaks were a success so it will begin rolling out the update over the next few weeks. Facebook says the impact should be minor for most Pages.
The most important thing for Pages to know about the change is that posting Lolcats-style memes with overlaid text on images might not be the best strategy going forward. I asked whether Facebook’s machine learning algorithm will be able to identify these kind of posts and demote them, and it seems that the answer is ‘yes’. The company tells me:
“Pages producing some low quality, meme content can expect to see a slight decrease. Pages that are exclusively posting low quality, meme content might see a bigger drop. The magnitude of the change will be greatest for Pages creating high quality content. Generally, these Pages should see increased distribution.”
In general Pages should focus on a strategy of posting great, engaging content that doesn’t use dirty tricks to get Likes. And that should mean that more of what you see in your News Feed is worth your precious attention.
Mark Zuckerberg Will Speak At Disrupt SF
With its mobile business humming, what is Facebook focused on now? Well, Mark Zuckerberg’s got some big ideas, like helping the whole world get on the Internet. And he’s going to share them with our audience when he gets on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September. His talk at our conference last year boosted Facebook’s share price almost 9%, so we think this one is going to be eventful too.
Zuckerberg has been running Facebook for almost 10 years now. It’s gone from tiny college startup to juggernaut social network, business darling to Wall Street black sheep and back again. Now it helps 1.15 billion people connect with friends, family, businesses, and increasingly, other applications.
In the meantime, Zuckerberg has tried to retain his hacker mentality while maturing to manage an increasingly complex business. He’s led Facebook to some big successes this year. It’s grown mobile to 41% of the company’s total ad revenue, and $FB shares have clawed their way back above the $38 IPO price.
Not everything has gone smoothly, though. Facebook Home has been slow to gain traction, even if features like Chat Heads have done well on their own. An exodus of veterans employees and designers has shook the company. Facebook was able to buy its way out of competition with Instagram,but new photo sharing and international messaging apps are nipping at its heels. And despite a lack of conclusive evidence, critics continue to claim Facebook makes us sad and teens are tuning out.
But the most fascinating thing about Facebook might be Zuckerberg’s ambitious plan to bring affordable Internet to the five billion people without it. Tuesday, he announced Internet.org, a partnership with six mobile companies to make the web accessible to everyone, and published a 10-page roadmap for getting there. Disrupt will be his first public talk since the Internet.org launch, where we’ll see if he can convince the world it’s really an altruistic endeavor, and not just a long-term user growth strategy.
We’ll ask Zuckerberg about all these topics and what else he’s pondering at Disrupt SF on Wednesday, September 11th. Also taking the stage will be Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, and the world’s top venture capitalists. Check out all of the influential speakers and guests joining us on the full Disrupt SF agenda.
Get your tickets now while you still can. We are only a week and a half away, so don’t delay if you want to come. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found here.
Students can also come be a part of Disrupt SF. We have limited student tickets available, so be sure to go here to find out how to get yours quickly.
Mark Zuckerberg Founder, Chairman and CEO, Facebook Mark is the chairman and CEO of Facebook, which he founded in 2004. He is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company, leading the design of Facebook’s service and the development of its core technology and infrastructure. Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving the company to Palo Alto, California.
Apple's App Store Rankings Algorithm Changed To Consider Ratings, And Possibly Engagement
Apple may be testing changes to its iTunes App Store ranking algorithms, which see it taking into account app ratings and other new factors in the App Store Top Chart rankings. Whether or not the changes are more experimental in nature, or indicative of a larger overhaul of how apps are ranked in the Top Charts is not yet known, but these changes have resulted in apps losing and gaining in position without a corresponding increase or decrease in app downloads.
Boston-based app marketing startup Fiksu was the first to notice this trend in late July, having seen apps with ratings of 4 stars or more receiving a ranking boost which they’ve maintained throughout August. Meanwhile, apps with less than 3 stars dropped down in the charts, and haven’t moved back, despite downloads remaining relatively consistent. Mid-rated apps of 3 to 4 stars have not been as affected.
Previously, the App Store took into account download volumes and velocity as the two largest factors that determined an app’s rank, the firm noted in its report. But now how well consumers actually like the app could be coming into play.
There’s also some evidence that the rankings for the newest version of the application may have more influence than those for older versions, which would make sense in this scenario, given that an app publisher may roll out an update to a historically well-reviewed and highly ranked app that’s a dramatic and unwelcome change causing a surge in negative reviews.
Another major shift which Fiksu has seen for several weeks now is a slowdown in how often apps change their position. In the past, apps’ ranks would update every 15 minutes, allowing developers to really see the impact of their new installs. Lately, though, app positions are changing every three hours on the consumer-facing App Store.
This latter change would go a long way to help prevent app developers using automated means to game the App Store charts. Potentially, the slowdown would give Apple time to identify “short download bursts,” explains Fiksu, which are often associated with robotic downloads and other inorganic means of acquiring downloads. In theory, the delay could allow Apple the time to look for anomalies in download patterns, and prevent apps from entering the charts when their “growth” had been bought and paid for.
It’s interesting that this change came about around the exact same time when an app called Glide was climbing the App Store charts, reaching #1 in social networking and #16 overall, despite numerous reports from users claiming the app was spamming their contacts to acquire downloads, a now all-too-common behavior. (Glide’s user interface made inviting contacts to Glide an opt-out instead of opt-in behavior, and used other techniques which left users surprised, then angry, about its methods.)
It’s certainly not the first nor the last to attempt to “growth hack” its way to the top of the charts, of course, but it’s a good example of the kind of app that would have been kept out of the rankings by such an algorithm change. As angry users filled the App Store with negative reviews and one-star ratings, the new algorithms could have possibly prevented the app from ever reaching the top 20 in the first place. Fiksu says it’s currently unclear whether the actual reviews (volumes or validity) are being taken into account here as well, but that it would make sense if they were.
Engaging Apps Rewarded, Too?
According to Ouriel Ohayon, CEO of app discovery and marketing service Appsfire, some developers are also noticing that Apple is taking into account refunds, and is processing revenue data differently for free-to-play games, as well. He had specifically noticed changes in the Top Grossing Ranks, noting that Pandora and Rdio had never been so high. (Pandora is now #1).
However, Ohayon cautions that this change won’t mean that Apple has eliminated publishers ability to game the charts entirely. “Ratings are still massively gamed, and the boost of ranks can still be achieved via many ad networks, even if the pace is decreasing to three hours,” he adds.
Meanwhile, MobileDevHQ CEO Ian Sefferman, whose company keeps more of an eye on app search results than rankings, says he’s noticed some recent changes affecting another aspect to the App Store as well. The search results are different when searching for iPhone apps from the iPad, when they used to the same as when you searched from an iPhone. Combined with Fisku’s data, this seems to indicate that Apple is focusing on improving app discovery overall, rather than just ranking tweaks.
That seems to be the case, as Niren Hiro of SearchMan, notes they’ve been hearing anecdotal reports from developers in both the U.S. and Japan who say that new user engagement (time spent, day 2 opens, ongoing opens, etc.) are also now increasingly affecting category rankings, and that as of August 5th, this change took place globally. (One example below, in the chart).
As with any App Store algorithm change, it soon becomes a game of whack-a-mole as Apple soon has to try to work around the tactic developers come up with in order to limit the damage from whatever new metric could cause their apps to decline in the charts. In the case of ratings, that appears to be a method where app users are diverted to third-party tools to leave their negative reviews, allowing developers to send only positive reviews to the App Store.
While anecdotal reports aren’t enough to go on, tracking engagement would be a promising change. If it was a factor in rankings, even developers trying to game the app store through these methods like the above would find their plans foiled. Then, the best way to reach the top charts would be to build a quality, engaging app…just as it should be.
YouTube Increases Data API Quota 10x, Video Upload Limits 100x
YouTube today announced a significant increase to courtesy Data API limits, which regulate how many videos app developers can upload and how many read and write operations their apps can perform. YouTube’s quota system previously gave developers access to 5 million units per day, but now they will have 50 million units to play with. In addition, YouTube is reducing the cost of uploading a video from 16,000 units to just 1,600 units, so a developer could theoretically now upload almost 100 times more videos than before (for a total of close to 30,000 per day).
The Data API – now in its third version – basically gives developers full access to virtually all of the features YouTube offers on its own site. Developers can use it to fetch search YouTube results and “to retrieve, insert, update, and delete resources like videos or playlists.” Together with the Player API and Analytics API, Google says, the Data API “lets your application provide a full-fledged YouTube experience that includes search and discovery, content creation, video playback, account management, and viewer statistics.”
As a Google spokesperson told me, when YouTube first launched the API, it decided on a moderate limit to ensure that everything worked properly. Now that it has been tested more broadly, the company decided it was time to expand the limits to ensure that developers “have what they need with our APIs.”
YouTube’s somewhat unusual quota system has long been a source of some confusion among developers. A read operation that just retrieves the ID of a resource costs one unit, for example. A write operation is a bit more costly at 50 units. Developers who hit their quota limits can always petition Google to increase them, but Google can always deny these requests, so today’s update should give many developers the reassurance that they can scale their apps without hitting YouTube’s limits anytime soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment