Blackstorm Labs, a startup that’s working to build technology that brings developers tools to get out games and apps more quickly through HTML5, today said it is working with Rakuten to build a new entity called R Games that will serve as a hub for games in Japan and Asia.

Blackstorm Labs has been working with Rakuten for some time on the project, which was rumored last November, but it is coming out officially this evening, and co-founder Ernestine Fu said that working with Rakuten dovetails with users in Asia generally having a more progressive worldview of app distribution. Apps running on Blackstorm Labs’ technology are designed to boot instantly and have the same quality of a regular app without having to download large files.

“If you think about any new distribution platform you try to create, you need to have premiere amazing content on that platform,” Fu said. “The game studio to feed some initial content. But at some point we’ll open to additional developers.”

R Games is more of a “joint spinout,” with Blackstorm basically handling education and development of the technology and relaying that over to Rakuten. R Games already has dozens of people working on games that will be distributed through Blackstorm Labs’ HTML5 technology, and is tapping big brands like Taito to make games like Bubble Bobble and Pac-Man. The startup has one board seat in the venture.

Blackstorm Labs isn’t actually shipping any of its existing employees off to R Games, which would certainly not be a scalable situation if it were to seek additional partnerships and deals like these. But late last year, it became clear that the technology had a opportunity to create, at the very least, a thriving gaming ecosystem based around HTML5 technology, Fu said.

“We built within two days this quick bubble shooter game — it was not polished at all,” Fu said. “We were able to take that game and show it to the folks at Rakuten. It was all these things that were rough but it was one of those big moments that there are new distribution platforms. At the time HTML5 tech was so rapidly changing, Google and Apple were a part of that,”

Games still continues to be one of the strongest showcases of the technology, with the ability to quickly dive into a high-fidelity gaming experience that can tap into more social elements across different platforms like Facebook Messenger. But Blackstorm Labs’ technology can theoretically go beyond games, if developers are able to use that technology to figure out new use cases for applications that can quickly spin up and launch within a browser while having the same level of quality of a downloaded app.

If that’s the case — and that was one of the core elements of Blackstorm Labs’ pitch — then developers may be able to sidestep the cluttered App Store completely if it gets wide adoption. The actual applications could theoretically be embedded within links in your News Feed or messenger clients while still behaving like a typical app. Getting that technology widely adopted is still going to be an uphill battle, but part of the reason the company started off with games is that they have very high performance requirements.

Apple added the iMessage App Store last September, which made it possible to add stickers and play games within a conversation using the company’s popular chat app. While this is the first iMessages app made by Starbucks, the coffee retailer is no stranger to working with software makers. It teamed up with Microsoft Outlook last year to help easily send a cup of coffee or schedule a meeting at a local Starbucks via the email app.

The update includes new push notifications that will change based on how often you use the app, a mobile ordering review screen with “brand-new look and animations” and new location filtering options so you can find the nearest Starbucks based on what they offer, like when you’re looking for a nitro cold brew or a PSL. Better yet? You don’t have to wait to try it out as all these new features are available now.

There’s been plenty of chatter lately about the new Product Red edition iPhone 7, which finally breaks free from the muted metallic lineup with its brilliantly colored exterior. From what I’ve seen around NYC, though, you’d be well advised to protect any new phone or suffer the all-too-ubiquitous cracked screen. Case and bag maker Speck has just the thing to protect and show off this brightly hued handset, its clear Presidio iPhone 7 case.

This protective shell cleared the 8-foot drop test with honors, offers scratch resistance and its custom-engineered material resists UV yellowing, since many users tend to walk around with their phones out and, you know, beach selfies. Speck has provided us the one of these enviable iPhone 7 handsets and a clear Presidio case to keep it safe for one lucky reader this week. You get up to three chances at winning this prize by entering in the Rafflecopter widget below. Don’t let that stop you from making a purchase, however, the Product Red edition profits go towards raising awareness and fighting HIV/AIDS.

Google is launching a new certification program for mobile site developers today. The exam covers everything from the basics of why mobile sites matter to how to improve mobile site speed, effective mobile UX design and more advanced topics like progressive web apps.

As Google notes, passing the exam is meant to show that you have “a demonstrated ability to build and optimize high-quality sites, and allows you to promote yourself as a Google accredited mobile site developer.”

A lot of the content in the study guide focuses on site speed. As Google notes, the majority of mobile site visitors will leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load, yet the average load time for a mobile landing page is 22 seconds (and if those users leave without ever fully loading the site, they aren’t likely to click on any Google ads either, of course).

It’s worth noting that the exam doesn’t focus on Android, iOS or any other mobile operating system, though it does cover Google’s own Accelerated Mobile Pages project (and even though that’s a Google project, others are starting to support it).

The new certificate joins similar exams for AdWords and Analytics in Google’s Partner program (though the AdWords certificate is a bit more involved because you also need to pass more than one exam).

Featured Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Imagine sending a direct message to your carrier when you have a problem with your phone. The brand manager will get your permission to receive your location data and then they can direct you to the closest store. This could make getting your needs met much faster than searching around your mapping app or Yelp.

Twitter has been beefing up its customer service features for a while now, including single-link feedback buttons and other tools. Wingstop even has an order form built into its direct messages for frictionless ordering. So far, restaurants TGI Fridays and Wingstop are using the location-based APIs, while other brands are sure to follow suit.

Netflix added support for offline viewing on iOS and Android late last year, and today it’s bringing the same feature to Windows 10, with the exception of Windows 10 mobile devices. Arriving now in the updated Windows 10 application, a subset of the Netflix catalog can be downloaded to your PC or tablet computer, in order to be viewed when a network connection is not available – such as when traveling.

The addition was spotted earlier today by MSPoweruser, an unofficial source for Microsoft and Windows news.

A spokesperson for Netflix confirmed the feature saying, ” Today, the Netflix app will support the downloading feature on Windows 10 laptops and tablets. We are constantly exploring new ways to make this feature available to more members and make it easier for more people to enjoy Netflix on the go.”

Similar to the launch on iOS and Android mobile devices, offline viewing is not available for just any title on Netflix, due to rights issues. Instead, the feature is limited to a mix of Netflix Originals and select licensed content.

However, because of Netflix’s vast selection of its own programming, that still means there are a lot of shows and specials that can be downloaded locally, including popular programs like Stranger Things, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Narcos, The Crown, Bloodline, Sense8, and many others, as well as a number of specials, like live standup comedy specials, as well as documentaries and other Netflix films, for instance.

This offline catalog remains consistent regardless of device – iOS, Android or Windows 10 – but it may vary slightly by region, depending on licensing restrictions.

Downloading content is not difficult – in the updated app, you just tap the down arrow next to the show, movie or episode you want to watch to save it to your Windows 10 device. You can also browse for things that can be downloaded through the new section in the app, “Available for Download,” via the menu. Here, another tab called “My Downloads” will let you manage that content.

The feature is now available to users worldwide, Netflix also confirmed.

We should note that there are a few reports from early adopters that downloads are not working properly for them. When they try to download content on a supported device, they’re getting a “download error” message saying “there was a problem.” (Netflix says it’s looking into this problem, and we’ll update if it determines the issue or offers a solution.)

The Windows 10 app is available on the official Microsoft Store, here.

Image credits: Windows Central

For the first time, news aggregator Nuzzel will include advertising.

That doesn’t mean you’re going to see banner ads popping up all over the startup’s app and website. Instead, the Nuzzel Newswire consists of sponsored links in Nuzzel’s email newsletter, pointing to a blog post, press release or news article of the advertiser’s choosing.

So why call it a “newswire” when it’s really just sponsored content? Nuzzel founder and CEO Jonathan Abrams told me he’s pitching this as an alternative to paying for press release distribution through a service like PR Newswire, where he said “probably few people will really read” it.

“Of course you could do both,” Abrams said. “But the idea is that this is a way to get your content in front of influencers that a traditional press release service may not deliver, since they take anything and release so many press releases every day.”

In contrast, he said the Newswire will only run one sponsored story per day.

Nuzzel, for those of you who haven’t tried it, offers a number of ways to keep track of the news, whether that’s following feeds/newsletters curated by Nuzzel or other users, or by connecting your Twitter account to see the stories that are getting the most shares from the people you follow.

Abrams declined to reveal anything about the size of Nuzzel’s audience, except that “it’s fair to say that at this point, the real value of the Nuzzel Newswire is the quality of the audience vs. huge size” — a point underlined on the Newswire website, which highlights a few individual Nuzzel users.

As for why the ads are only running in the newsletters, Abrams said he might add them to other products in the future, but he’s starting with email “because we thought native ads in email newsletters would get really good engagement and not as many people were doing it.”

Want to remember to tell a friend happy birthday, good luck or congratulations? Had a follow-up question for a client that just occurred to you at 1 AM? Want to write a heartfelt thank you to be texted at a later date? Unfortunately, neither SMS nor most messaging apps – including iMessage – allow you to draft a text in advance and schedule it to be sent out on a later date. But a new iOS application called Scheduled can help.

To be clear, the app does not actually schedule texts for automatic sending.

For that, you’d need to hack your iPhone and use one of the jailbreak apps instead. Apple does not allow for this functionality, officially.

What Scheduled does is offer an App Store-approved workaround for scheduling texts.

The app itself is simple and straightforward to use.

You first select the person you want to text from your Contacts, then write the text you want to send and select the time you want to be reminded to send the text. When that time rolls around, Scheduled sends you a push notification so you can return to the app to send the text.

After sending, a quick swipe will delete the reminder from the app’s queue.

Scheduled isn’t only for SMS or iMessage, however – it also supports messaging apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Twitter, and it allows you to copy the message’s text to paste it into any other app of your choice. It can be used for reminding you of emails or phone calls, too.

Further down the road, Scheduled plans to add support for LinkedIn and Slack, and it will roll out a few tweaks to the sending flow, Apple Watch integration, and Android support at some point.

To be fair, there are other text message scheduling apps on the App Store, but Scheduled’s interface is clean and modern, compared with those I’ve seen previously.

1. 
   
   
   
   

   compose message – text – en@1x

   
   


2. 
   
   
   
   

   overview – text – en@1x

   
   


3. 
   
   
   
   

   send with – text -en@1x

   
   

The app itself is a product from Brthrs Agency, a digital agency just outside Amsterdam in The Netherlands, which does a combination of client work and startup investing.  The team, which consists of Sebastiaan Kooijman and Robert Keus, tells TechCrunch that Scheduled is currently a bootstrapped company project. They’re considering making it a startup of its own, if it achieves traction.

The team says the plan to make money is to charge $0.99 if you want to add four or more messages to the queue.

Of course, many users are already asking for auto-send functionality following the app’s launch a few days ago, but this is not something that Apple permits.

“We are investigating the options [for auto-send],” says Keus, “but it’s hard from a technical perspective. And our concept is to support people to be thoughtful,” he adds. “When we have auto-send then people can act like robots.”

Agreed.

Scheduled is currently a free download on the iTunes App Store. 

Starbucks introduced its mobile ordering system in 2015, and it’s been a victim of its own success in some ways. Customers at popular spots are eager to use the mobile ordering system to choose their selection and pay in advance, in the hopes of avoiding a line – but they’re having to wait anyway, thanks to a virtual queue that’s as large or larger than the real one, depending on the spot. Now, it’s looking for ways to make mobile ordering work better, and in pursuit of that goal it’s going to trial a location that exclusively serves mobile order customers, within its own Seattle HQ.

The location will go mobile-only starting next week, Reuters reports, turning one of the Seattle-based company’s two internal cafes into a dedicated mobile order and pay location. All mobile orders from building employees, which include 5,000 people, will be routed to the new location, and it’ll feature a different design, with a prominent pick-up window that also offers a view to baristas preparing the orders, according to the report.

Starbucks added the order ahead and pick-up option to its app across the U.S. in September, 2015, and it’s been a popular feature among users since. The feature allows users to browse the Starbucks menu within the app, select a location, and pay for their order ahead of time, receiving an estimate about when it’ll be ready to pick up. Depending on the location, the order will then be left at a designated pick-up location, or called out by a barista for pick-up like orders made in-store.

Featured Image: Starbucks.com

By their very nature, most augmented reality games are at least a little bit futuristic. The creators of Archer, however, are embracing the past… in more ways than one. FXX’s Archer, P.I. mobile game will have you pointing your Android or iOS device at your TV, Facebook and even billboards to scan for clues to a hidden story inside Archer: Dreamland, the film noir-inspired eighth season for the animated series. If you want to claim your rewards and unlock every mystery, though, you’ll also have to print and assemble physical objects based on what you see in the show. That’s right — if you’ve welcomed the paperless future with open arms, you won’t get everything the story has to offer.

Snapchat is shifting from a social network limited to content shared by people you follow to an ephemeral, real-time database of what’s going on now everywhere. Today Snapchat launched Search for Stories submitted to its public Our Stories. It makes Snapchat as deep as whatever the world is sharing, creating near-infinite rabbit holes to go down, and a stronger competitor for YouTube and Twitter.

That aligns exactly with Snap IPO strategy following the slow-down of user growth after the removal of auto-advance and the launch of Instagram Stories and Facebook’s other competing clones: Snapchat wants to be where some people spend tons of engagement time, rather than where everyone spends a little time.

It also sees Snapchat break one of its cardinal rules. User-generated content is no longer limited to a lifespan of 24 hours. A Snapchat spokesperson confirms to TechCrunch that some Snaps submitted to Our Stories that appear in the new Search feature will be visible for less than a day to up to a few weeks or even months.

If content around a theme is being submitted more rapidly, what’s seen in Search results will turn over more quickly, while themes that only get submissions every few days may see Snaps stay visible for longer to make sure there’s something to watch for the theme.

[embedded content]

How Snapchat Stories Search works

In January, Snapchat opened the ability to submit to Our Story from people in certain locations, like big events, or at certain times, like Christmas, to everyone everywhere all the time. But this meant it was pulling in way more content than its human curators could package into specific, widely visible Our Stories like ones for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade or the NBA Finals.

Now, Snapchat is using algorithms to scan the caption text, time and visual elements found in Snaps submitted to Our Story and group them by theme. For example, it could pull out Snaps with the words “dog” or “puppy” in captions, or use machine vision to detect the shape of a real dog in the photos or videos, and aggregate them into an Our Story that comes up when people search for “Puppies.” Snap notes you could use this to watch a nearby basketball game, see what’s happening at a local bar, check out a specific Fashion Week runway show or explore a vacation spot. More than 1 million themes will have Search results available.

Snap says it will keep expanding the ways it categorizes submissions. Perhaps that could eventually include what background music is playing or what voices are saying. 

The rollout of the feature begins with people in select U.S. cities being able to search for public Our Stories, but everyone’s submissions are already being indexed. For now, no ads, sponsored lenses or sponsored geofilters will appear in the Search collections. That makes this a play for more engagement, not a new channel to drive more ad views.

Snaps submitted to Our Story can appear in Search results for up to months, rather than disappearing after 24 hours like usual

Why Search makes Snapchat endless

Previously, you could think of Snapchat like a television with the Stories of people you follow as different cable channels. Discover and Snapchat Shows were like HBO, offering extra premium content. All you could watch was what these channels aired. If you flipped through all the channels and still weren’t satisfied, you were out of luck.

Search is like having the world’s biggest Blockbuster video rental spot open up next door. Suddenly you can browse a near-endless array of content in all sorts of categories, from popular mainstream releases to weird niche foreign films. New films arrive faster than you can watch them, so there’s always something you haven’t seen available.

For the biggest Snapchat fans, this uncaps their potential engagement time. You can now do around-the-clock movie marathons.

Another analogy is to think of Search as turning Snapchat into the ephemeral, real-time YouTube built for mobile video creation. YouTube indexes the world’s online recorded video content with Google’s search prowess. But often there’s a delay of a few hours to days from when something is recorded to when people upload it. And since YouTube was originally built for the web, the clips are typically longer, from 30 seconds to a few minutes.

That norm subtly discourages short-form, mobile-shot, real-time, off-the-cuff content. And that leaves the door open for Snapchat and its new search feature. Instead of just relying on text descriptions and manually added tags, Snapchat is using machine vision to see what’s actually in content, then categorize and index it. Since it’s all mobile and people submit to Our Story as soon as they’ve shot something, plus it’s curated mostly by algorithms, content should be more quickly searchable.

And because Snaps disappear eventually, even if not just after 24 hours here, it encourages the submission and searchability of raw, unpolished, but still compelling content YouTube isn’t getting.

Finally, you could also see Stories Search as a competitor to Twitter. If you want to read what people are saying around a topic in real time, today you search Twitter. But now if you want to SEE what people are capturing with their cameras around a topic in real time, you can search Snapchat. The camera is the new keyboard, after all.

These ideas support the narrative Snap has been pitching to investors. It can’t sell itself on future user growth and eventual massive scale like Facebook since its growth plummeted late last year around when Instagram Stories launched. Instead, while it only has 158 million daily active users, it repeatedly highlighted that they spend 25-30 minutes a day in Snapchat on average. Search thereby fuels Snapchat’s best hope for growth, not in breadth of users but in the depth of their engagement.

If Snap can’t get everyone on earth using it because Facebook’s slew of Stories competitors steal the international markets and older demographics, then Snap must get the U.S. teens it already has addicted to stick around longer. Search is how.

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When Nintendo launched Super Mario Run on iOS late last year, the company was embarking on a huge experiment in more ways than one. Introducing its most enduring mascot character to mobile was an experiment in its own right, of course; but perhaps the bigger and more challenging experiment was the business model the company chose for the game. “Free-to-start” was the firm’s effort at creating an alternative to the pervasive free-to-play model by essentially repurposing the old PC shareware model – allowing people to download and play a sizeable chunk of the game for free, and then asking for a one-time payment ($10, in this case) to access the rest of the content.

This felt, at the time, like a bold attempt by Nintendo to use the power of its intellectual property to push for serious change in the mobile market. With a tiny handful of notable exceptions (Minecraft and, well, that’s about it really), premium games have made no inroads in the mobile space as the F2P model has extended its dominance. There’s a lot of variation within F2P, of course; different developers implement the model differently depending on the type of game they’re making and the audience they’re targeting, and some developers absolutely handle it better than others. Nintendo, however, seemed to want to create an alternative model for games that don’t suit F2P (and audiences who don’t like it), and to be willing to undertake the very heavy lifting required to change consumer attitudes and behaviour on that front.

With Super Mario Run, this went pretty much as expected; the game did very well for a premium mobile game but did not trouble the top reaches of the revenue charts for very long. This makes sense; the game’s biggest fans paid their $10 in the first few days after launch and haven’t paid anything since, so ongoing revenues are simply trickling in from latecomers at this stage. This is a revenue curve much more like that of a console game than an F2P mobile game, and the fact that it even hovers in or around the top 100 top grossing games on iOS is actually a testament to Mario’s enduring popularity.

“Did Nintendo actually believe that the Mario IP and the Nintendo brand – as powerful and valuable as they are – would be sufficient to reform a mature and highly settled market like mobile gaming overnight?”

Along with the rapid drop out of the top-grossing charts (again, this is exactly what any halfway competent modelling of the outcomes of this business model would have anticipated), there was also a vocal and angry backlash from mobile game consumers against what they perceived as the high price of the title. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to console game consumers, for whom $10 is a very cheap price, but asking for that much money that early in the game elicited strong emotions from consumers who primarily play mobile F2P titles (many of which, given a little patience, can be played forever without paying a penny). Once again, this was a predictable response; the assumption was that Nintendo knew this would happen, but was willing to essentially use the strength of the Mario brand to “get out and push”, weathering the opprobrium in the name of slowly changing consumer behaviours and market norms.

As a result, it’s a little surprising to see Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima describing revenues from Super Mario Run as being below expectations. Certainly, Nintendo is new to mobile, but it’s working with a very well established partner in DeNA, and I’m sure it did an enormous amount of research into how the field operates before committing its star character to a mobile game. If what Kimishima means is that this experiment is turning out to be harder than expected – that F2P is more deeply ingrained in the market than Nintendo realised, and that it will take a lot more effort to normalise a different model in consumers’ minds – then that’s fair enough, though it raises questions over how well the company understood the market it was entering. What is more worrying is the possibility that Nintendo actually didn’t realise what a task it was undertaking by launching a non-F2P game in a market where F2P is, well, the only game in town. Did Nintendo actually believe that the Mario IP and the Nintendo brand – as powerful and valuable as they are – would be sufficient to reform a mature and highly settled market like mobile gaming overnight?

Which of these interpretations is correct isn’t just academic pondering; it’s an important question for the company’s mobile strategy. Since the launch of Super Mario Run, which recently came to Android devices, the firm has launched one further mobile title – Fire Emblem Heroes – which is based on a far less popular and famous IP than Mario, but has significantly out-performed its stablemate in revenue terms. Fire Emblem Heroes is an F2P game, albeit one with a very light-touch approach to monetisation, and is a far less dramatic departure from ordinary mobile game design than Mario Run was, featuring mechanisms such as “gacha” draws to get new characters and a variety of items and currencies for levelling up your squads. Of all of Nintendo’s mobile efforts thus far, it’s by far the most successful in commercial terms, and has generally been received warmly by critics as well.

“Fire Emblem Heroes creates a Catch-22, because it actually proves that Nintendo is perfectly capable of creating a successful, well-regarded F2P game that enhances rather than devalues one of its core IPs”

The interesting thing is that the same Nikkei Asian Review article which quoted Kimishima describing Super Mario Run’s sales as disappointing also cited an unnamed “senior company official” as saying that Fire Emblem Heroes’ F2P model was “an outlier”, with the firm having a preference for the Super Mario Run model. Nintendo hasn’t confirmed what business model it’ll use for future mobile titles such as Animal Crossing. The question is, does that preference for the more console-like Super Mario Run model – which is so much closer to the comfort zone of the company’s designers, no doubt – extend to a genuine willingness to keep pushing that model, driving back against consumer resistance and sacrificing short-term profitability in pursuit of creating change in the market? Does the company now understand that that’s the task it has undertaken, even if it didn’t initially quite grasp the enormity of what it was effectively trying to do when Super Mario Run launched?

Nintendo is perhaps the only company in the world capable of taking on the task of changing mobile gaming – not of “defeating” F2P (which does not need defeating, and as Fire Emblem Heroes and countless other games show, can be an excellent model for the right game and audience), but of introducing a sustainable alternative business model that eschews micro-transactions entirely. It’s not just that the company owns many of the most powerful and recognisable brands in gaming; it’s also that Nintendo is in a unique position of needing to protect those brands and IPs far more than it actually needs revenue from mobile titles. Unlike most rival companies, it can quite happily justify lower revenues from mobile games in the name of ensuring that its brands do not suffer damage or devaluation from being tied to an inappropriate business model. However, Fire Emblem Heroes creates a Catch-22, because it actually proves that Nintendo is perfectly capable of creating a successful, well-regarded F2P game that enhances rather than devalues one of its core IPs. Given that success (and with the huge revenues created by Pokemon Go no doubt also looming large in its collective consciousness), does Nintendo really have the will to keep on trying to push this boulder uphill?

Though the lack of a name attached to the quote about preferring the Super Mario Run model does not inspire confidence, it at least suggests that Nintendo still has some enthusiasm for the task of carving out a new business model in mobile. Kimishima’s comments, however, tell us that regardless of how clearly the company understood the magnitude of that task at the outset, they have certainly come to recognise it now. Super Mario Run and Fire Emblem Heroes suggest two very different paths forward for Nintendo’s mobile ambitions; which direction it jumps on the next few mobile titles it publishes will be a determining factor in how the future of the company as a whole takes shape.

When it comes to video, the audio is pretty damn important. Hell, they even give out some sort of award for getting it right on occasion. Moodelizer wants to put the power of suitable soundtracks in the hands of amateur filmmakers, by letting you add a delightfully over-the-top soundtrack to the most mundane of tasks at the touch of a button.

Moodelizer has created a ton of different music tracks, with a twist: They come unmixed, and with an elegant set of mixing tools to help even non-musicians create great-sounding soundtracks for video.

So you may have a nice bit of calm music leading up to a snowboard stunt, for example. When the sportsperson turns the hella nar nar to 11, you can add some funky beats and heavy orchestrations to turn the drama up. It sounds really simple, because, well, it is. But the app works incredibly well — and a piece of music that’s finely tuned to the film you’re showing off goes a long way to making the viewer’s heart rate peak at just the right times.

Turn the sound as loud it goes, and check this out to get a feeling for what the company’s trying to do:

And, in a similar vein, but showing off the idea of building the drama in music just a tiny bit better, this one makes me happy, too:

To demo its tech, the company has released an app, now available on iOS, with an Android version coming in a month or so. Of course, all of this is probably mostly a stunt to sell more licenses of its professional Moodelizer Studio product, but who cares: The app is free and tons of fun. Definitely one to play around with for an afternoon, if nothing else.

Facebook’s launch of Stories may be the social network’s big news of the week, but some Facebook users have spotted another addition, and are thoroughly confused. A “rocket ship” icon has popped up in the app of select users worldwide, adjacent to the News Feed button. Its appearance is prompting a lot of users to wonder, “what on earth is this thing?”

The button may be either at the top of the screen or the bottom, depending on whether the user is on iOS or Android.

What has Facebook done now? 😤 I already really dislike that marketplace crap. Now what’s this rocket icon thing??? pic.twitter.com/l0obKojCJH

— Amanda Clinton (@Amanda_Clinton) March 4, 2017

As it turns out, the rocket ship icon is just the latest in Facebook’s ongoing experiments in presenting an alternate News Feed to users – one that consists of posts, articles, photos and videos from sources you haven’t followed, like Facebook Pages or posts news media organizations, for example.

While you might not be actively tracking these sources, Facebook believes it’s content that you’ll like. The items displayed in the “rocket ship” feed come from Pages that are similar to those you’ve already liked, as well as those that are popular with your friends – like a video that many people in your network are watching, for instance.

This is not a new experiment – Facebook was recently spotted testing an alternative News Feed, but was using a different icon (a small square) at the time. That test was also limited to Android beta users, according to reports. A similar earlier test on iOS actually labeled the second feed with the word “Explore.”

The new experiment with the rocket ship, however, is appearing in the mobile version of Facebook across both iOS and Android platforms, including those who have not opted into a beta.

Despite Facebook’s advanced algorithms designed to keep users engaged and endlessly scrolling – and its understanding of what a user has liked, watched, and clicked – the company has not heavily focused its efforts on helping users connect more broadly with interests through recommended content. Instead, today’s News Feed is filled with content a user has explicitly liked, whether that’s friends’ posts or updates from Pages users are following.

But Facebook has always wanted to have a better angle into people’s interests – especially as other networks (like Twitter) have made it easier to follow news and topics, and not just people, brands, and businesses.

Wtf is that rocket icon in the latest Facebook app

— maidcat 🏳️‍🌈 (@shdwcat) March 22, 2017

I’m normally not tech stupid- but i have no idea what the “rocket” icon means at the bottom of Facebook on my phone.

— Scott Thomas (@only_me_ScottoT) March 6, 2017

In 2012, Facebook introduced “interests lists” to organize its News Feed by topic, but this never saw mainstream adoption. In 2014, the social network experimented again with interests, via its mobile app Rooms, which offered users a means of discussing various topics. But that app eventually failed. 

An alternative News Feed-like stream of information could be another way of tackling interests, but popping it into the app without an explanation is clearly confusing to those who have new feature.

The expanded test is underway now in markets worldwide, we understand. The rocket ship icon itself is fairly new, based on a number of tweets most of which were either posted this month or the last.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the global test in a statement, saying “We are testing a complementary feed of popular articles, videos, and photos, customized for each person based on content that might be interesting to them. We’ve heard from people that they want an easy way to explore new content they haven’t connected with yet.”

Facebook will reveal at its F8 conference a new class of group bots that work inside Messenger group chats. These group bots can keep users informed about real-time news such as a sports game’s progress, e-commerce deliveries and more, according to three sources familiar with the development of the feature.

Facebook is already working with top chatbot makers to prepare for the launch. Facebook will open up APIs to allow more developers to start building group bots, too. When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson said “we don’t comment on rumors or speculation,” but my sources confirm this is coming.

For example, a Messenger group of football fans could add a sports bot to their thread, where it could report score changes, big plays and other news from the game. An e-commerce group bot could keep a group of coworkers informed about the status of their lunch delivery, letting them know that the order is being prepared and when it arrives.

Facebook Messenger already features sports news bots from media property theScore and the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, plus food-delivery bots like those from Domino’s. Soon they could be equipped to keep a whole group for friends in the know.

The group bots launch could address two big problems with the Messenger bot platform Facebook launched last year at F8 that TechCrunch previously reported was coming.

First, the group bots will act more like news tickers instead of trying to pretend to be a human discussion partner. They’re not really “chatbots” as much as they are “information bots” as people won’t be having the same back-and-forth conversations as they do with one-on-one chatbots.

Unripened AI technology and poor understanding of questions led many users to be disappointed with Facebook’s chatbots. Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus admitted at TechCrunch Disrupt that “The problem was it got really overhyped, very, very quickly. The basic capabilities we provided at the time weren’t good enough to basically replace traditional app interfaces and experiences.”

Since these group bots won’t be the sole conversation partner, there will be less pressure on them to act human, and more opportunity for them to service a specific utility.

Second, their existence in group chats will provide a viral growth mechanism for bots, which don’t have easy discovery channels already.

Currently, users have to type a bot’s name into Messenger’s search box to start a conversation with one. There’s no native way to browse for bots, so businesses have to either get the bot’s exact name drilled into people’s heads through marketing or get them to initiate a conversation with a bot through a Facebook News Feed ad. That’s led to the emergence of little-known third-party browsing options like Botlist.

With group bots, one user could add a bot to a thread, thereby exposing its existence to other friends in the group. Both particular bots and the whole bots platform could see a rise in recognition and audience, which might attract higher-profile developers and brands to build them.

It’s still unclear how exactly users will find and add bots to threads. Facebook doesn’t have a bot store or suggester, but perhaps more bot discovery options will be part of the slew of announcements slated for Facebook’s big yearly F8 development conference on April 18th and 19th in San Jose. We’ll be there to confirm today’s scoop and provide analysis of the rest of the news Facebook reveals.

While truly conversational AI will eventually rise to proficiency, Facebook is smart to refocus on group bot technology that can reliably solve real needs today.

Featured Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

In its biggest change in a decade, Facebook is evolving from text and link-focused sharing to the visual communication format its admits “Snapchat has really pioneered”.

Starting today, all users will soon have access to the new Facebook Camera feature that lets them overlay special effects on photos and videos. They can then share this content to a Snapchat clone called Facebook Stories that appears above News Feed on mobile and works similarly to Instagram’s 24-hour ephemeral slideshows. Users may also share these posts to News Feed, individual friends through the new Facebook Direct private visual messages that disappear once digested, or any combination.

“As people mostly post photos and videos, Stories is the way they’re going to want to do it” says Facebook Camera product manager Connor Hayes, noting Facebook’s shift away from text status updates after ten years as its primary sharing option. “Obviously we’ve seen this doing very well in other apps. Snapchat has really pioneered this” explained Hayes, less shy to mention the competitor by name than some other Facebook executives.

But really it was the rapid ascent of Instagram Stories to 150 million daily users that he says inspired Facebook to start testing its own Stories in January, and keep expanding it to 12 countries before today’s rollout. Surprisingly, Hayes says Facebook Stories is “additive”, not detracting from News Feed sharing or usage of its other Stories products. “We’ve tested in markets with Instagram Stories and Messenger Day, and we’ve seen this as accretive. They end up posting more and they like using the Stories format across apps.”

That’s the worst news for Snapchat and best news for Facebook since the world’s biggest social network adopted the strategy of copying the competitor that refused its acquisition offer.

If Facebook Stories clearly cannibalized News Feed sharing and consumption, it would have to demolish its most popular and lucrative feature to make way for the future where the camera is the new keyboard. And if users saw Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp’s Stories features as uncool clones or redundant as a set, it might have had to limit its attack on Snapchat to just one of its core apps.

Instead, Facebook can charge in full-speed, attacking Snap from every angle without much penalty to its existing business. And with its enormous engineering and design teams, plus billions in profit each quarter, it can throw more resources at Camera, Stories, and Direct visual messaging than Snap can. That product development strength is in on display with today’s launch, and apparent from Facebook’s insistence on showing reporters forthcoming special effects that one-up Snapchat’s iconic lenses.

Until now, Facebook was just running missile tests and fighting skirmishes on the frontier. Today Facebook declares total war on Snapchat.

Storytelling For Everyone

“The way people have been prompted to share for ten years, it’s very text-centric” Hayes describes. “Even when you look at the way we’ve done this on mobile, you can see half of the screen is still taken up by a place for you to type text.”

“Our new camera puts visual content at the heart of the Facebook experience” says Kristen Spilman, Facebook’s director of art and animation. “So it feels natural for the camera to do more of the talking.”

Facebook has been casually pursuing visual communication for years, but got serious about it back in August when it started testing the first version of Facebook Camera during the 2016 Olympics. It went so far as to replace half the News Feed home screen with an open camera window. But while Snapchat opens straight to the camera, Spilman says “people were not comfortable with how drastic some of the change was”. It can be pretty jarring to suddenly see your own face on screen, so Facebook decided to hide the camera but let you open it with a swipe. Hayes says Facebook would consider opening to the camera “if over time we find this becomes the primary use case.”

Facebook wants to make Camera and Stories accessible to the wide range of demographics that use it everyday, not just the teens that gravitate to Snapchat. “We learned from Instagram that Stories as a format is actually great for all types of people”, says Hayes. “We think it’s going to be adopted by people regardless of age.”

Courting the international market was also a priority for Facebook. It’s built text-overlay filters using local slang for around 10 different top markets, like the US and Canada. In Ireland users can slap the words “Gas” or “Some Craic” on their posts, which might confuse those abroad but mean “astonishing” and “having a good time” in the country.

This is how Facebook plans to recruit users to Stories that Snapchat has forgotten. While the LA startup has focused almost entirely on US teens, Facebook designed its version to appeal to teens everywhere and be intuitive enough for older users Snap shunned with its esoteric interface.

How to use Facebook Stories, Camera, and Direct

Facebook’s obvious but somewhat cluttered design puts its new products readily accessible from the home screen rather than buried in tabs.

Stories

Just like with Instagram Stories, you’ll immediately notice the circular Stories bubbles in a row above the News Feed, showing the profile pics of friends who’ve posted, ranked by relevancy rather than reverse chronologically like Snapchat. This solves the problem that you didn’t necessarily add all your friends to see their Stories. Even though your boss or distant acquaintances might post, you’ll see your closest friends first, which makes sure you get the maximum value no matter how long you spend watching.

One big problem with Facebook Stories is that they’re visible to all your friends and for now you can’t change that. That interferes with the more casual, off-the-cuff, goofy, personal style of content people typically post to Stories, which they might not want their boss or family to see. Facebook should build a privacy feature for hiding your Story from certain people. At least you won’t see Stories from anyone you unfollowed on Facebook, like annoying old buddies or exes you want to avoid.

As you watch the chronological slideshows of photos and videos you can tap to fast-forward a frame or swipe to skip to the next friend, each of which can see who watched their Story in what order. Relevancy-sorting also empowers auto-advance so all your friends’ Stories play in a row, unlike Snapchat which makes you clumsily create a manual playlist of which to watch.

A text and image reply bar appears overlaid on Stories so you can quickly type or shoot a response that gets sent over Direct. These replies only live as long as the 24-hour disappearing content, so friends will have to check them quick or miss them entirely. The readily visible reply bar might slightly obstruct the view, but should greatly increase reply frequency.

For now, Facebook Stories can’t be viewed by your public followers, so the product is effectively pushing social media influencers to do their broadcasting on Instagram Stories where verified profiles get special features. There’s also no Pages or businesses allowed on Stories for now, or ads inserted between Stories. However, Spilman says once Facebook is sure users love Stories, “We’ll considering broadening to brands and businesses.” Injecting ads could give Facebook a new supply of ad inventory just as it expects to run out of News Feed ad space — something that’s worried Wall Street in recent earnings reports.

Camera

A quick swipe right from the feed reveals the Facebook Camera where you can tap to shoot a photo or hold to record video. After you jazz it up to your liking, you can either post to your Story, to the News Feed, to specific friends via Direct, or any mix of these. The option to blast a Camera post to all of them could be spammy, but sometimes you might want to share the best scene from your Story to News Feed. Facebook even encourages Camera post to News Feed by making them full-bleed thanks to overlaid profile pics and  Like/comment buttons.

Along with shooting new stuff, you can upload from your camera roll with no restrictions or borders on old content. You’ll only see letter boxing if content was shot on a device with a different aspect ratio. Videos have a max length of 40 seconds, much longer than Snapchat’s 10 and Instagram’s 15. That means you can share longer videos you’ve recorded or downloaded, like viral clips.

Facebook’s Camera offers most of the creative tools you’d expect plus a lot more.

What’s in Facebook Camera:

• Drawing with resizable marker and chalk brushes


• Emoji stickers


• Colored captions


• Animated selfie lenses and masks


• Environmental effects like highlight lines and fun house mirrors


• Reactive filters that respond to movement like lava lamp colors


• Iterative filters that surprise you with new effects if you get more people in frame


• Fine art style transfers that make your images look like line drawings or impressionist paintings


• Professional artist filters like Hattie Stewart’s doodle bombs and Doug Copeland’s psychedelia


• Licensed filters from six movie studios, including a Minions filter


• Cause-supporting filters like rainbows for gay pride


• Geotagged location filters for certain places


• Country-specific filters for around 10 initial markets

What’s missing:

• Simple Instagram-style color filters for boosting exposure or contrast (Snapchat, Instagram)


• 3D stickers for pinning text, emoji, or drawings to objects in a video (Snapchat)


• Playback effects for slow-mo and fast-forward (Snapchat)


• FaceSwap (Snapchat)


• User- and business-submitted filters (Snapchat)


• Caption background colors for easy reading (Instagram)


• Location tags for turning any place name into a stylized sticker (Instagram)


• Mentions for tagging friends (Instagram)


• Computer-generated filters that turn any text into frames (Messenger)


• Who’s Up For? filters for inviting friends to hang out (Messenger)

Rather than hiding special effects behind an unintuitive tap like Snapchat, a column of dots denotes that you can vertically swipe through suggested special effects like ones for a current holiday or your city. There’s also a whole tray of 50 to 70 categorized effects showing the most popular ones, those you’ve recently used, selfie masks, style and color filters, and overlaid illustration frames.

Facebook refused to detail any financial details of its licensed filters like the Minions movie effect. It could try to pull sponsorship revenue from these like Snapchat, or just curate ones people will actually want and offer them free like Facebook already does with branded stickers.

When Facebook gathered reporters in San Francisco yesterday to demo the product, it clearly wanted us to think of it as going a step beyond Snapchat’s offering. That’s why it showed off high-tech effects that aren’t available yet. One, for example, adds Mario-esque music and throws 8-bit sunglasses on each additional person who comes into frame, with a bonus effect if you can get five people on camera together.

The next big opportunity here for Facebook is turning Camera into a platform. As I wrote last year, Facebook can’t possibly dream up every possible special effect people might want. Snapchat already allows filter submissions and payments in exchange for temporary geoflters. By allowing users and AR developers to submit filters. Facebook could make its camera’s breadth infinite. Though Facebook was cagey, the team admitted “that is a long-term vision for the platform.”

Overall, Facebook Camera feels extremely powerful and polished, with effects popping up fast and a sensible way of organizing them all. It doesn’t require you to know secret tricks or techniques, which can be fun for the teen in-crowd but alienating to olds. Whether or not you use Stories, Facebook Camera should help you express yourself more vividly.

Direct

While Facebook split chat off its main app a few years ago and forced people to download Messenger, Direct brings private communication back to the main app. Anything you shoot or upload through Facebook Camera can be sent to specific friends who’ll receive it in their Facebook app’s Direct inbox. You just can’t start with a text. These messages last at least until they’re viewed, and will remain visible until the conversation stops. So if you’re rapidly replying back and forth with text or images about a Direct message it will stay alive, but it goes away once you cease to banter.

Facebook tells me after content disappears from your Story or Direct messages, it completely deletes the content off its servers. The only exception is if it’s flagged by someone for violating Facebook’s community standards, in which case it’s kept until the investigation concludes. Though it might seem a bit redundant with Messenger also having its own camera, Hayes says “it’s not out intention to build up Direct as a Messenger replacement.”

The New News Feed

Whenever you move 1.8 billion people’s furniture, some are going to get pissed. Loyal Snapchat users or those who’s friends primarily live on Instagram might see Stories as making Facebook too cluttered, bloated, or redundant. But there are still at least a billion people who would probably enjoy Stories that aren’t using them every day yet. These are Facebook’s core targets with today’s launches.

Now people have Stories for each way they might want to share. Instagram Stories is for artful photography. Messenger Day is for igniting conversations and inviting friends to hang out. WhatsApp Status is for minimalist visual communication. And Facebook Stories is for showing you day-to-day life to the widest audience. Though subtle, those differences are likely why Facebook doesn’t offer any cross-posting options, making creators do the labor of re-uploading everywhere if they want to reach all their networks.

Don’t expect Stories in Facebook’s apps to suddenly stamp out Snapchat. Facebook’s best hope is that US teens who are addicted to Snapchat end up using its Stories too. But Snapchat’s neglect of international markets and older age demographics left the door open for Facebook. Now with its aggressive invasion of the Stories space, it may claim those segments before Snapchat ever gets a chance, blocking the upstart’s growth.

In the long-run, we remember the tech companies that provide value at scale, not just who invented things. We remember Netscape as an innovator, but that doesn’t make Google Chrome a clone. Facebook was willing to swallow its pride to protect its future. Maybe if Yahoo or BlackBerry were willing to pivot like this, they’d still be in power.

Facebook is testing an enhanced local search feature that could see the social network creeping in on Google Maps, Foursquare and Yelp territory, TechCrunch learned and Facebook confirmed. Facebook users are now able to surface recommendations of nearby places – like “dinner nearby” or “bars nearby,” for example  – by entering a query in Facebook’s search box on the web or mobile. This returns a box in Facebook’s search results that include a list of relevant businesses, along with their ratings on Facebook, a map, as well as which friends of yours have visited or like the places in question.

A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed the feature saying, “We’re testing a new way to discover where to go and what to do around you.”

The company declined to share other information about the addition, including how long the test has been in progress. It’s possible some users have had this option for a much longer time, but others are only now gaining access or don’t have it at all, as is standard with Facebook’s tests.

The feature itself isn’t immediately obvious because the place suggestions aren’t always the first search result. On the web, the map and list of recommendations often show up as you scroll a bit further down, below the results for posts from Groups, links, posts from friends, and Facebook Pages.

But on mobile, the results are much closer to the top, if not the first item. (It varied depending on the query, in tests.)

The suggestions themselves are in a small box in the search results that includes a pink pin drop icon next to the heading, like “Shopping & Retail Nearby” or “Pizza Places Nearby” or whatever else you may have searched. Facebook is also prompting these searches via auto-complete suggestions from the search box.

It’s unclear how Facebook determines which results to show you in the small box, as it’s seemingly not number of reviews, rating, or proximity to your current location that determines which places are shown first. Nor is it social data  – for instance, a place visited by over a dozen friends was returned below one visited by just a few.

Beneath these initial suggestions, you can click “See all” to be taken to a fuller list.

In addition to standard information like the business’s name, address, phone number, and photos, Facebook displays how many people have rated the business, its star rating, pricing (as measured by one to four dollar signs), whether it’s open now, plus the above-mentioned social data about your friends’ visits and likes.

Facebook is also using technology to parse users’ reviews in order to highlight what the business in question is known for, or what people talk about in their reviews.

For example, a bakery’s review might say that “people talk about friendly service, vegan donuts and iced latte.” (Nope, Facebook’s tech doesn’t have a grip on proper grammar just yet.)

Plus, the business listings may have a call-to-action, as they do on their Page – like “Sign Up,” “Shop Now” or “Call Now,” for example.

On the web version of the feature, you can filter the search results by price, places that are currently open, or other social metrics, like “visited by friends” or “good for groups.” Restaurants can also be narrowed down by cuisine (pizza, sushi, Chinese, etc.). And you can “Like” the business on both web and mobile.

Facebook is clearly taking advantage of its wealth of data on businesses and social metrics to build out this feature – an inevitable next step for the business, given the obvious opportunity for search ads.

This is hardly the first time that Facebook has dabbled with serving up local business info, however.

Way back in 2012, Facebook launched Nearby, following its acquisition of Foursquare competitor Gowalla. That feature did much of the same thing, and still exists in its present form from the “More” menu on mobile. The integration of “Nearby” suggestions in the search results seems more like an iteration on this earlier feature. But it adds functionality – like the calls-to-action and the algorithmically-parsed customer reviews – which makes it a bit more functional.

Above: Facebook Nearby, circa 2012

What’s interesting is that, despite everything Facebook knows about its users, the suggestions were not ranked as well as they could be. For instance, just because a lot of my fellow parents have hosted kids’ birthdays at Chuck E. Cheese, that doesn’t warrant the restaurant from getting top billing in a list of suggested pizza places. It also pushed a lacrosse uniform shop and the teen-focused Hot Topic to the top of its suggestions for “Women’s Clothing Stores Nearby.” Uh, no.

Above: various filters in the Nearby feature in search

Either Facebook isn’t fully tapping into its data to make these suggestions, or its data alone is falling short. If the latter, it could use another infusion – like the data from Foursquare.

Facebook had skipped over Foursquare years ago in favor of Gowalla. But today’s Foursquare is more powerful than the social check-in app of the past. Its database of locations is integrated into over 100,000 apps (including Snapchat), it offers businesses useful analytical data on foot traffic, it partnered with Nielsen to map digital ads in order to connect them to real-world traffic and sales, and it just rolled out a push notification-based recommendation engine to developers.

It’s not hard to imagine how well these features would fit into Facebook given how closely they’re aligned with Facebook’s own goals. But Foursquare’s trouble with finding an exit has always been about its price and valuation.

In the meantime, Facebook’s existing “Nearby” feature and this new local search addition pale compared with what Foursquare, Yelp or Google today offer consumers. It’s handy, I suppose, if you happen to be on Facebook, but it’s not worth launching Facebook for this alone when better options exist.

Additional reporting: Josh Constine

(Image credit, dinner nearby, h/t: Jose Gutierrez) 

Group chat will get a bit less chaotic with the global rollout of two Facebook Messenger features it was previously testing in Vietnam.

Users can now @mention friends in a group chat to send them a special notification to reply to your message so they don’t miss it in a noisy thread. You just type @, then the person’s name or in-thread nickname, and the name will be highlighted and that person will get an alert.

Meanwhile, Facebook is bringing its News Feed Reactions to Messenger so you can reply by attaching a love, smile, wow, sad, angry, thumbs-up or thumbs-down emoji to a specific message. This way you’ll be able to simply express agreement, disagreement or an emotion about a particular message, even if a bunch of other messages have come in since.

Tap and hold on a message to pull up the Reactions menu and select one. Everyone will see a counter of different reactions on the message, and you can tap that counter to see exactly who reacted how. Reactions work in one-on-one chats, too.

The “Thumbs-down” Reaction could be interpreted as Facebook’s first real “Dislike button.” However, Facebook calls it a “No” Reaction and told me that since people often use Messenger for coordinating logistics, it wanted to add easy ways to vote for or against a proposed plan.

TechCrunch first spotted and reported on a test of Messenger Reactions early this month, and also saw that users in Vietnam were trying out mentions. Reactions works very similar to iOS 10’s iMessage’s Tapback reactions launched in September, and Slack’s more expansive and long-standing emoji reaction selector.

Messenger Reactions work the same as iMessage’s Tapback reactions that launched last year

Doubling down on group chat is smart for Messenger at a time when it’s been criticized for injecting social media content broadcasting into the communication app via Snapchat Stories clone Messenger Day. Messenger actually started as a group chat app called Beluga before Facebook acquired it. With mentions and Reactions, Facebook could use its better group chat experience than SMS to win users from the status quo.

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This article was first printed in the GamesIndustry.biz Mobile Newsletter. To receive these special emails, sign up here.

Debates about the effective use of microtransactions have raged for so long in the mobile games industry that it’s easy to assume this is the most assured route to reaping the hefty revenues enjoyed by the likes of Candy Crush Saga, Clash Royale, Pokémon Go and so on. But while in-app purchases can prove lucrative for developers, there’s another source of income that can also pay dividends.

The concept of ads might be one that’s off-putting to hopeful mobile studios seeking to ensnare an audience of millions. The assumption is that promotions for other titles can disrupt gameplay, frustrate users or perhaps even steal them away to a rival game. However, when integrated efficiently and wisely, these can prove to be just as valuable – if not more so – than those much-lauded microtransactions.

Johannes Heinze, AppLovin

“The industry mainly considers games successful if they are high up the top grossing charts,” Johannes Heinze, managing director for EMEA at mobile marketing platform AppLovin, tells GamesIndustry.biz. “We’ve noticed that a bunch of casual game developers managed to build very viable businesses by turning this equation upside down and mainly monetise through ads.

“Their games usually have a very simple but addictive game design, they appeal to a broad audience, and they have high, long-term retention rates that enable them to consistently monetise their users by cross-promoting them to other games. The best of them even end up with lifetime values that are high enough to buy users at scale and end up high up the top free charts.”

The use of ads in mobile games has changed dramatically over the years. Intrusive static banner ads are rarely used now, with video ads now very much the norm. While these might seem to be even more disruptive, often unskippable for 30 seconds (a long time if you were just in ‘the zone’ on your endless runner of choice), many developers now opt to reward players for allowing the ad to run. Rewards can range from in-game currency to power-ups, and not implementing this is something Heinze believes is one of the biggest opportunities a lot of developers are missing.

“Developers should try not to link ad rewards to currency but rather some sort of one-time consumable like boosts, speed-ups, and revives”

“Often we see studios failing to implement rewarded video – the dominant format for ad monetisation – in an optimal fashion,” he says. “If there is any progression in the game, it’s important to adjust payout of the packages in order to make sure that the reward continues to be relevant within the game. Also, game developers should try not to link the reward to currency but rather some sort of one-time consumable like boosts, speed-ups, and revives.”

There is another form of in-game advertising that is becoming more prominent: playable ads. These bite-sized mini-games essentially work as interactive banner ads and aim to be less disruptive than videos or static promotions – after all, the user is still technically playing something. Initial versions were a little ropey, but more and more are being rolled out now that effectively convey the gameplay of the title they are promoting.

“Playable ad units are definitely on the rise and they are getting better and better. They basically give the user a first glimpse on what the product is all about”

“Playable ad units are definitely on the rise and they are getting better and better,” says Heinze. “They basically give the user a first glimpse on what the product is all about and build a smooth bridge from one game to another. Users interact with the ads and a high percentage also download the app.

“Playables are part of a bigger trend that focuses more on the actual content of the game. Instead of having fancy CGI or lofty taglines, more and more video ads are showing the actual gameplay, in a tutorial-like fashion. The marketplace is very crowded, therefore it becomes increasingly important to demonstrate the look and feel of the game and prepare the user for what’s waiting in the app.”

None of this means that developers should abandon the tried and tested in-app purchases that have long since established themselves as the bedrock of the free-to-play model. Heinze says these, in combination with video ads, will “continue to be the gold standard for monetisation”, but it’s nonetheless important for developers to think about how their freemium game will use advertising effectively in order to make up for the number of players that might not be inclined to spend their hard-earned cash.

“The best way to approach this is to think about the ad integration early on in the development cycle, and let the ads become a part of your game that supports your mechanics,” suggests Heinze. “Rewarded ads can be a great way to extend the session length – for example, granting the user another life after dying in an endless runner, offering the user a specific boost before they start a battle for watching an ad, or even utilising ads as a retention tool as some of the clickers are doing. These ‘natural’ integrations perform very well.”

With people more likely to be locking eyes with their smartphone screens these days when they’re hanging around in public, the London-based designers behind this feathery wearable are worried that the chances for exchanging flirtatious glances with passing strangers is being engineered out of daily life. Or, let’s be honest, translated into monetizable swipes on Tinder et al.

Their answer to smartphones stealing our presence and peripheral vision is a sensory device called Ripple that’s on the look out for admiring glances on its wearers’ behalf. Albeit, given that the wearer would be wearing what looks like two large and trembling, silver-tipped sea anemones on their shoulders it’s entirely possible they’ll garner more than the average number of side-eyes. Still, who knows what the future of fashion will look like? Let alone the future of dating…

The project, by four designers on the Innovation Design Engineering joint double masters course at Imperial College London and The Royal College of Art, combines sensors and computer vision tech with a series of slender protuberances that tremor when mutual attraction is detected, via a pair of on-board cameras.

“Ripple is a wearable extension of your body for the future of dating, which calculates who in a room is attracted to you,” they write. “When it finds someone, it gives you sensorial feedback, reflecting the excitement you feel when meeting someone special. If the attraction is mutual then it’s tentacles will move in reaction to their gaze, amplifying the language of seduction between the two people.”

The prototype device informs its wearer they are being watched by sending a ripple-like sensation up their back. At this point the wearer can turn their body to determine who in the room is peeping at them. When the device detects they are looking at the person who was looking at them they’ll receive a tap on the chest to confirm. And if they keep looking, Ripple will keep rippling.

You can watch the social-sensing wearable it in action in the below video.

(Via Quartz)