Category: Industry News

Facebook’s Revamped ‘Pages Service’ for Better communication between Businesses and Customers

October 6, 2015

Good news for businesses who want to showcase their products on social media platforms. Facebook is redesigning its “Pages Service” on mobile devices. This social network is adding new features to Pages like ‘The New Shop’ section to help retailers bring their products to the forefront of their Facebook page, while ‘The New Services’ section will enable professional service ventures to showcase their list of offerings at the top of their pages. Facebook will also be testing several call-to-action buttons such as ‘Contact Us’, ‘Call Now’ and ‘Send Message’ to help connect businesses and their targeted audiences’ directly. In addition, this popular platform is also working on its layout to help users easily navigate through the pages on their mobile devices. With its countless innovations every day, we think Facebook is really doing well for businesses to achieve their goals. With these revamped pages, business can certainly drive more sales and help people acknowledge their brand. It is a great opportunity for companies to interact directly with their target audience and give them a way to learn about their business much more rapidly. Besides, this upgradation in collaboration with Shopify also aims at increasing M-commerce transactions. Source: Facebook

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Technology to Bolster India’s Economy and Fundamentally Change our Lives

October 1, 2015

Prime Minister Sri Narendra Modi envisions “Digital India” as an enterprise to transform India. In his recent visit to California, Modi won over the Silicon Valley for his initiative to make India digitally sound. With an aim to connect 1.25 billion citizens, the government promises to empower them with technological advancements. He believes technology can help connect citizens with government. Extensive use of internet, mobile phones, Skype and other smart devices will not only be put into operations in the IT industry but also will touch the lives of farmers, villagers and the poorest citizens living in the farthest corners of the country. “I see technology as a means to empower and as a tool that bridges the distance between hope and opportunity” as said by the Prime Minister of India. He met with the heads of the tech industry’s largest companies including Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook and Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to stir up interest in upgrading his country’s technology infrastructure. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is quite impressed with this initiative that is setting as an example for the world leaders as how to connect with citizens online. The CEO conveyed his strong support for the efforts towards a “Digital India”. Facebook has already started a project to enable Wi-Fi hotspots in rural India. Likewise, Google plans to enable Wi-Fi internet to 500 railway stations, Microsoft is on its way in making India its hub for cloud services through data centres located in the country and Qualcomm announced a $150 million fund for start-ups in India. Our Digital Marketing team assumes Modi’s visionary project “Digital India” is a game changer to the interfering bureaucratic system of the country. The initiative is definitely a great influencer when it comes to investments in India especially from the foreign land. With majority of the tech companies’ leaders coming forward to be a part of the project, it seems that Digital India is finally ready for takeoff. Hope to see India a digitally empowered society and a globally recognized knowledge economy soon. Source: The Times of India.

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The Leading Tech Companies Form Alliance to Develop Open Source Format for Online Videos

September 30, 2015

The tech titans Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Mozilla, Intel, Netflix and Amazon formed an Alliance for open media to develop next-generation video compression technology and codecs in the public interest. Compression improvements would pave the way for high-resolution videos that download faster and look better. The Alliance aims at meeting the growing demand for high-quality video, imagery, audio and streaming across the increasing number of diverse devices and their users worldwide. Each of them will contribute to create an open, royalty-free “next-generation” video format that shall adhere to the following principles –  Optimized for the web  Supportive of copy protection  Flexible for commercial, non-commercial and user-generate content  Interoperable and open  Scalable to any contemporary device at any bandwidth  Capable of consistent, high-quality and real-time  video delivery  Optimized for hardware and designed with low computational footprint According to Mozilla, the plan is to release the standard under Apache License 2.0 instead of working in isolation on independent standards. “Customer expectations for media delivery continue to grow, and fulfilling their expectations requires the concerted energy of the entire ecosystem,” said Gabe Frost, the executive director for the alliance. Besides, Ian LeGrow, manager of the Windows partner group at Microsoft opined “Streaming video is where we’re all headed”. The tech giants are assuming that their mission will successfully challenge the powerful force of MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) that has produced many widely used compression standards to dominate video distribution. Our Digital Marketing Project Manager, Mr. Souvik Bhattacharyya in support of the mission said that such a movement will pave the way for a new format which will offer seamless streaming media without any security hazards unlike Flash format videos with countless security glitches. This open codec based format is likely to take over the web very soon and is targeted to offer top notch experience across all devices. Source: Cnet.com, Techtimes.com,

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Facebook is finally working on the ‘Sympathize Button’

September 24, 2015

No longer will you feel constrained by the digital choices on offer. The social networking giant is testing a new button to expand the range of emotions users can express other than simply ‘liking’ a fact. In a Q&A session at the company’s headquarter, Facebook’s CEO and Co-Founder, Mark Zuckerberg said, “every moment is not a good moment.” He realized that people may not want to like a particular event on this social platform and they might strongly want to show their disdain. The Ongoing Controversy While some people think that the dislike button will toxify relationships, fuel bullying and aggressive behaviour online, others think that the social platform does not allow them to express for things that aren’t good. The “thumbs down” button has been constantly being requested by many users since the introduction of the “thumbs up” icon in 2009. Although Zuckerberg does not want it to be a mechanism to “vote down” other’s posts, he mentioned, it will be for times when clicking ‘like” on “sad” posts looks insensitive. Zuckerberg revealed that instead of unveiling a button that directly sows seeds of discontent, Facebook will unveil a “sympathize” button that conveys solidarity or support. Who would want their posts to be “disliked” by others? “Some people have asked for a dislike button because they want to say, ‘That thing isn’t good.’ And that’s not something that we think is good for the world. So we’re not going to build that,” Zuckerberg said at the time. According to one of our Account Relationship Managers, Mr. Santanu Mukherjee, “Just like the opposite of Love is not Hate, opposite of Like is always not Dislike. It is indifference.” He also agrees to the fact that the dislike button may lead to apprehension before uploading any posts on Facebook. The fear of “rejection” will certainly lead to lesser engagement in this popular social platform. We want to build a “Responsible World” with no negativity or war around. And the so called “Dislike button” could act as a counterbalance to that phenomenon. Source: cnet.com, Facebook

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Google Teams up with Twitter to Challenge Facebook’s Instant Article

September 22, 2015

Facebook’s ‘Instant Article’ delivers news articles instantly on mobile apps. This format can load up to 10 times faster than a typical mobile web article.  To challenge such potential, the search engine giant, Google along with Twitter and other news publishers including “The New York Times” and “The Guardian” is creating a Web link and article storage system in order to load news articles and digital magazine pieces in a few milliseconds. While Facebook have more sway over publishers, Google is exploring ways to enhance its influence with publishers and increase its traffic to high-quality publisher content. Besides, Twitter too, wishes to retain its visitors for a longer duration. This partnership will help in greater visibility in Web search and notably display tweets embedded on web pages. Google is already planning to offer €150 million to European publishers and digital journalism start-ups in the next three-years to support news sector. Mr. Santanu Mukherjee, one of our Account Relationship Managers, opined that Google is more effective in driving search traffics to websites where as referral traffics are mainly dominated by Social Platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is ahead in this game and to beat that Google has paired up with Twitter. Many of the websites display the tweets on their web pages and Google picks up those tweets inform of news from the cached pages and displays instantly on the mobile devices. This helps in quick retrieval of current news and hence contributes more traffic to the website. The project is described as accelerated mobile pages where the articles will be displayed immediately without any waiting time. We believe Google by all means, wishes to remain the undisputed King of Web search. Source: The Times of India.

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Twitter’s Updated Audience Insight Dashboard and Persona Targeting

September 17, 2015

Twitter has updated its Audience Insight dashboard to enable brands use detailed demographic information specifically to their ad campaigns. Twitter’s Product Manager, Andrew Bragdon, explained that such an enhancement will help you  Understand who you’re reaching with your ad campaigns  Compare insights between your reached (who’re viewing your campaign) and engaged audiences (who’re actively engaged in replying, Retweeting and favoriting your ads)  Gain more knowledge about the users who have converted in the past. However, this can be achieved only if you enable the conversion tracking tool.  Success Stories “Twitter’s new audience insights tool gives us a deeper understanding of our audience, enabling us to serve the most relevant content both on-air and online.” Sam Peasley, Director of Digital Media, 100.3 THE SOUND (@TheSoundLA) “We found this to be a useful and insightful tool which helped us discern what sports our clients were interested in and what devices they were using. This greatly improved our targeting capability for our paid campaigns.” Niall Casey, Social Media Advertising Analyst, Paddy Power (@PaddyPower) Twitter Added Persona within Insights Dashboard Twitter has also added ‘Persona’ filtering feature to offer categories of audiences for the advertisers to target.  For instance, if you want to target college graduates who are using Android phones, you click “college graduates” and then select “Android” as a mobile platform to discover more about this group of users. One of our Account Relationship Managers, Mr. Santanu Mukherjee strongly feels that, marketers can now compare the audiences whom they’ve reached via paid ads and who have engaged themselves in form of retweet, favorites or replies. Hence they can identify where they are losing opportunities and can tweek their campaigns accordingly. They can also narrow down the “Opportunity to Show” factor among the target group. Persona Filter groups the users based on their profile. He adds, “Digital Marketing is all about right market segmentation, proper targeting and communication. With the newly added features Twitter has made segmentation and targeting easier. Now with a proper communication you can penetrate the market with your product/service using digital platform.”  Source: Marketingland.com, blog.twitter.com

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3D Sensors in Mobile devices – Coming soon

September 11, 2015

Apple recently acquired 3D-sensor manufacturer, LinX for $20 million. What is their plan? Are they trying to surprise their fans with three-dimensional mobile camera in the future? Well! Many market researchers are predicting that 3D sensors will be associated with 80 percent of Smartphone cameras by 2018. The industry is anticipating an earning of at least $2.02 billion by 2020. Besides, mobile device manufacturers claimed that there are more valuable data to be captured instead of confiding only to flat images. And exploiting ‘Depth’ is something they’re aiming at. According to BBC news Intel has revealed a version of its 3D depth camera that is small and thin enough to be fitted into a 6in (15.2cm) smartphone. Even the US based Pelican Imaging is also working on a depth-sensing array of cameras for smartphones to allow photos to be refocused after being taken as well as to create 3D selfies. The Impact Intel’s RealSense/Project Tango phone concept are using sensors to bring depth to images.  This would be perfect for image and video editing. Any image with depth information would allow a user to modify things like focus or lighting after a picture has been taken from the mobile phone. This is where it would differ from our day-to-day use of mobile applications. While an app can add or remove an entire object from a scene with proper lights, shades and occlusion, depth will bring striking special effects. 3D sensors can map the exact size, shape and colors of a given object, be it a human face or a piece of art. We perceive 3D sensors are ultimate supply to the demand of next generation VR and AR headsets to enable easy communication with virtual objects. The increasing need to map real-time environment, to control gestures and to track the accurate depth data of an object can be fulfilled with this new technology. The advanced sensors strive to give mobile devices a human like understanding of motion and space, thereby enabling a satisfactory user experience. Most importantly, this new technology will certainly be of interests to more number of users.

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Facebook’s New Conversion Lift Tool to Optimize Ad Campaigns

September 10, 2015

Facebook is working at making your social media ads more successful. You can now measure more things as you run Facebook ad campaigns. With Facebook’s improved version of Conversion Lift measurement tool, advertisers can now compare multiple test and control groups (group of users who are seeing the ads and the group who aren’t). The Impact This new tool would help the marketers in identifying which ad units are delivering the best results and how mobile ads are performing. Moreover, they can compare brands and direct response ads and also find out whether ads focusing on consumers’ lifestyles or the products are more effective. Conversion Lift can also track the effect of advertising on offline behaviour. It can measure any advertising impact across purchasing channels including stores, apps and websites to get an idea of how advertising can affect behaviour. Marketers can determine the added business driven by Facebook ads. “When you look at the change in sales and behaviours based on your goals, you can be pretty certain that your marketing is the one thing that drove any difference in behaviour,” said Brad Smallwood, VP of measurement and insights at Facebook. (Ref: http://adexchanger.com) We think this tool would be of immense benefit to the marketers as it offers them a more holistic view of their ad’s performance. They can measure the impact of exposure to an ad across different devices. Moreover with Conversion Lift tool controlling group responses, advertiser’s point-of-sale data can be easily combined with audiences’ data taken from Facebook Custom Audiences Pixel to determine how effective an ad campaign is. Marketers can improve their marketing decisions based on this information. Source: Techcrunch, Facebook

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