Sales On Mobile To Rise 25% By 2016

eMarketer has released a report that projects 19.0 percent of US retail e-commerce sales will stem from mobile devices this year and will rise to 25 percent by 2016.

While apps are where mobile users spend most of their time, it’s mobile websites where consumers spend the most money. A sizeable share of US mobile users buy frequently from mobile sites: 32 percent of US mobile phone owners surveyed in November 2013 by PricewaterhouseCoopers said they purchased merchandise on a weekly basis from a website they accessed through their phone.

Photo Courtesy of eMarketer

The question concerning many retailers is whether apps in general are a threat to mobile website sales. The consensus among those interviewed for this report is they’re not. In fact, apps often drive incremental sales. It’s clear that, with more retailers having mobile websites than apps and many apps lacking commerce functionality, apps are more of a driver of mobile websites sales than a threat.

Source: eMarketer

Nerdist Pokes Fun At YouTube Commenters

YouTube may be a great place to post and find videos, but when it comes to getting the attention of a positive community, some folks have had better luck than others. And Nerdist Industries certainly knows this well.

The popular news-oriented website, which has nearly one million subscribers on YouTube, has also been the place for a number of negative comments on certain videos. The site’s co-founder, stand-up comedian and TV personality Chris Hardwick, addressed this Saturday night during his annual panel at San Diego Comic-Con.

Hardwick stated that he will no longer post exclusive videos on YouTube first, instead referring interested parties to check them out over on Nerdist.com. The reason for this, according to him, is that people often come to YouTube for a single viewing of a particular clip, then move on to other things. It’s not a place for them to “hang out,” according to him.

He’s also not fond of the commenters, as he refers to them as “toxic,” a term that actually got a huge reaction from the crowd. “YouTube is a bunch of 13-year-olds who are like, ‘Look at me, I am unattended!'” he stated. “The second comment is always ‘FIRST’, because they never make it.”

The Nerdist site, however, has become quite positive with community, featuring a number of audio podcasts, daily news posts, and other broadcasts that are highly popular. It’s also spreading out to TV, with one of the company’s offerings, All-Star Celebrity Bowling, being worked on by AMC.

While Nerdist will be premiering most videos on its site first, the company hastened to correct the impression Hardwicvk may have left that YouTube was less important than before. A Nerdist spokesman provided the following statement in an update:

Chris Hardwick is both Nerdist’s CEO and a standup comedian. His comments about our stance on YouTube were intended to be comedy rather than a reflection of our business strategy with respect to YouTube.

YouTube continues to be a tremendous partner for Nerdist, and while we will premiere much of our upcoming content on Nerdist.com, YouTube will remain a home for us well into the future. We are part of the YouTube community and we have no intention to turn away from our fellow creators, subscribers, and the 1-billion users that come to visit each month. Some upcoming content will even live exclusively on YouTube, as the personal touch that comes from being a vibrant, video-facing social media platform allows us to connect with fans in ways that simply aren’t available anywhere else. YouTube.com/Nerdist is here to stay, regardless of who shows up first and how many capital letters they use to tell us about it.

What do you think? Is posting its own videos a better strategy for Nerdist than trying to turn to YouTube?

Source: Recode.net

‘The Internet of Things’ Market Growing Fast

The net neutrality debate that’s currently ongoing isn’t just about streaming videos, it’s about other aspects of the Internet. PCs, mobile devices, smart TVs and set-top boxes use it quite frequently, but other devices, like cars and homes, could become part of the future market, according to a new eMarketer report titled “Key Digital Trends for Midyear 2014: The Internet of Things, Net Neutrality and Why Marketers Need To Care.”

Many forecasts indicate that creating an audience from currently untapped Internet sources could result in a huge market boost over the next few years, as you can see in the chart below. Several companies have predicted big changes, including the International Data Corporation, who believes the market will grow from the current $1.9 trillion to $7.1 trillion in just six years time; and Gartner Group, who expects 26 billion connected objects to be in existence by the time 2020 rolls around.

“There’s no doubt the world is moving towards a more connected future, but the speed with which consumers and enterprises make the transition to the Internet of things is still to be determined,” said Noah Elkin, executive editor at eMarketer. “The timing of adoption will determine just how much money and how many things are involved.”

Other statistics from the report indicate that Cisco Systems predicting 50 billion things to be connected by 2022, and MarketsandMarkets stating that the market will reach a new conservative high of $1.423 trillion in that time frame, a nice bump from the $1.029 trillion reported for this year.

The cost of connecting objects to the Internet is dropping rapidly, and the size and power requirements of the technology or also shrinking along with the price. As more and more devices add Internet connectivity, we’ll find new and interesting ways this helps our lives in a variety of ways.

What do you think Are you ready for the “Internet of all things”

Source: eMarketer

Budweiser’s Made For Music Campaign Launches ‘Underground’ Series

By Jessica Klein

Budweiser’s Made for Music campaign, launched last year with Jay Z and Rihanna, continues in 2014 with the six-part series “Made Underground.” The series follows Jamie N Commons and X Ambassadors as they travel from New York to London to Rio De Janeiro to Philadelphia searching for members of a new band of street performers.

The series will culminate in a performance at the Budweiser Made in America festival on Saturday, August 30. Produced by Noisey, Vice’s music channel, Alex Da Kid, and, of course, Budweiser, “Made Underground” episodes will feature the search for musicians in London on August 4, then in New York on the 12, with episodes based in Philly on the 19 and Rio on the 26. Those episodes will roll out on Budweiser’s music platform, including additional ones that focus on what happens when the band comes together.

The founder of KIDinaKORNER Records (which has signed both Jamie N Commons and X Ambassadors), Alex Da Kid also co-directs the series while producing and mentoring the band. Meanwhile, Jay Z curates the Budweiser Made in America festival, where the band resulting from “Made Underground” will play in late August.

“Living in New York, it’s hard to miss the amazing talent around every corner, which is why I am so thrilled to work with Budweiser’s ‘Made Underground’ to showcase the truly brilliant street performers throughout the world and highlight the energy they bring to our city life,” the X Ambassadors’ Sam Harris stated in regards to the upcoming series.

You can watch the trailer below:

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.

 

Pinterest’s New Male Brand Head Speaks

 

David Rubin

Pinterest has always been a site that’s been geared more towards female users, with its approach and design showing a certain touch that simply appeals to that kind of audience. Which leads to the question some of you may be asking — why is a man in charge of it

That man, David Rubin, is the current head of brand at the website, coming off a previous job where he worked as senior vice president of marketing at Unilever, doing work for Axe men’s body care. Quite a change, to say the least.

Speaking with Digiday, Rubin explained how the growth of the size is vastly important to him. “Growth is my mandate,” he said. “There’s a large and incredibly committed user base. Expanding that into more audiences and expanding it globally is why I am here.”

What does that mean Bringing a bigger male portion of the audience to Pinterest. There are a decent amount of them using the site now, although 71.5 percent of the general audience continues to be women. So the big growth opportunity would appear to be in getting men to use the site, hence the choice of Rubin.

However, many believe that Rubin is an ideal fit for the job. “David Rubin is really big on using data — sociological, behavioral, etc. — to tap into what motivates people,” said DigitasLBi group director of social and content strategy Jill Sherman. “And that’s where Pinterest is failing with men. They haven’t cracked the motivation code. How to attract men and keep them using the platform beyond saving things that pique their interest.”

Rubin knows he’s got an uphill struggle ahead of him, though. “This is a fantastic brand already,” he noted. “My job is to help unlock that for more people, more often.”

Do you think Rubin is up to ask for leveling out Pinterest’s audience

Source: Digiday

‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ Trailer Debuts At Comic-Con

 

One of the highlights of the cinematic material screened at this weekend’s Comic-Con convention was Mad Max: Fury Road. Warner Bros. publicly unveiled this first footage exclusively to the excess of eager fans that attended the convention; however, they also decided to release a shorter version of the preview online Sunday.

The plot for the new installment of the Mad Max film is as follows: The post-apocalyptic action film is set in the furthest reaches of our planet, in a desolate desert landscape where humanity is broken, and most everyone is crazed fighting for the necessities of life. Within this world of “fire and blood” exist two rebels on the run who might be able to restore order. There’s Max (played by Tom Hardy from The Dark Knight Rises), a man of action and a man of few words, who seeks peace of mind following the loss of his family in the aftermath of the chaos. And Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron from Prometheus), a woman of action who believes her path to survival may be achieved if she can make it across the desert back to her childhood homeland.

Mad Max: Fury Road is the fourth film of George Miller’s Road Warrior/Mad Max franchise co-written and directed by Miller.

The trailer featured, what can be considered, the ultimate car chase, starting with a feeling similar to The Road Warrior, but then opening up into incredible vistas and blasts of action that go far beyond anything Miller has put on screen in the past.

Watch the Mad Max trailer here:

‘Fates Forever’ Aims To Be A Mega MOBA For Mobile

A significant title arrived in the App Store last week, one that fans of multiplayer online battle arena games (or MOBAs, for short) will want to check out. It’s called Fates Forever, and it’s the latest effort from game studio Hammer & Chisel. It’s received dozens of good reviews thus far, as well as hundreds of thousands of downloads – which indicates that the avid community from the immensely popular League of Legends could be taking notice.

The game has been tweaked to work specifically with touch-screen commands, which will mean a world of difference to those who are used to playing with a keyboard and mouse at their fingertips. Fates Forever is the latest among many efforts either shipping or announced to bring the MOBA genre to mobile platforms, including Zynga’s Solstice Arena and Super Evil Megacorp’s Vainglory. While some mobile MOBAs have already been in the market a while, nothing has yet made a huge splash. Fates Forever is looking to change that.

Jason Citron, the founder of OpenFeint and chief executive for Hammer and Chisel, spoke at great length about the game. “We have hundreds of thousands of players who’ve tried the game,” he said. “Many of them are really into it. Some of them, we’ve heard, have given up Hearthstone and switched to Fates, which is pretty cool.”

The game was developed in just 18 months’ time, a true feat considering how deep and involving it is to amateurs and Legends veterans alike. As to why mobile was the ideal platform, Citron explained, “We tried to figure out what kind of games that already work on the PC would also work on tablets. This is a bit of a tangent, but I don’t think you get new game genres very often. Genres are reflections of the way our brains are wired. The human brain doesn’t change that much. As technology changes, it gives us the ability to make new types of game experiences, but rarely do you get a totally new genre. So we didn’t say, “What’s a totally new genre ” We said, ‘What genre exists on PC that we think we can do well on the tablet ‘

“We picked MOBA because it’s very popular. It’s culturally in vogue. I thought we could do a good job of it on a tablet, and I guess we did.”

Fates Forever can be downloaded here.

Source: VentureBeat

Streaming Games Success Is Elusive

We’ve been hearing about the potential for game streaming for years, and the concept has progressed from incredulity to technology to business. Yet, for all its potential, streaming games (in all its various forms) has yet to make a significant impact on the game industry. New players are entering the market, and old ones are re-tooling their offerings, but it’s not clear that market will ever respond positively. The technological issues, immense as they are, have largely been solved. What remains are much more difficult problems — fundamental game design issues, and very difficult business model issues to sort out.

First, it’s necessary to look at the technology. Essentially, game streaming means that you take the video output from a game device (a PC or a console, typically) and send it to another device with a screen (for instance, a smartphone), where the player makes their control inputs as they normally would. Those inputs get sent back to the game, which processes the result and sends back the output to the player. It’s just what happens when you play any game on a PC or a console — the difference being that you can be a thousand miles away from the PC, and the game is still playable. Also, you can theoretically play a PC game that requires a huge desktop box on your tiny portable device.

That sounds like magic. How can you play a game requiring fast reflexes, like a shooter or a fighting game, with all the time it takes to send data between you and the device that’s actually processing the game It turns out that in games typically there’s a certain amount of lag between your inputs and the screen (particularly with console games in dealing with typical TVs), and that with the right optimization a streaming game can perform pretty well. Sure, there’s often a reduction in the quality of the visuals, and the response may not be quite up to pro levels, but for most gamers it’s quite good enough.

Now we get into how game streaming has been implemented. The technology really became known through the efforts of OnLive and Gaikai. Gaikai was purchased by Sony, and its technology will be appearing later this year under the label PlayStation Now, which promises to deliver a variety of PlayStation games (from PS One, PS 2, PS3 and PS4) to other PlayStation devices like the PS Vita and PS TV, as well as some models of Sony Bravia TVs. OnLive has been in business for a while, but has struggled to find an audience. OnLive is now working with Mad Catz to provide OnLive streaming games through the Mad Catz M.O.J.O. Android-powered console.

Streaming games is also part of the business strategy for Valve with its Steam Machines, which would be able to stream games from your PC to a Steam Machine hooked up to your TV in the living room. Similarly, Nvidia has developed its GameStream technology for streaming games from an Nvidia GeForce-equipped PC to the Nvidia Shield handheld console or the Nvidia Shield tablet, in your own home or even remotely )if you have a sufficiently fast Internet connection). Here’s Nvidia’s footnote: “GameStream gaming outside of your home Wi-Fi network is a BETA feature and requires minimum upload and download bandwidth speeds of 5Mbps. Streaming experience may vary depending on the quality of your Internet.”

So if this technology is so spiffy, why isn’t everyone using it Can game streaming be a major industry force in the future The two primary barriers are now game design and the business model.

While game streaming technology offers to let you play a game from any source (PC, console, supercomputer, whatever) on any target device (smartphone, tablet, handheld console, Macintosh Air, whatever), the design of the games themselves makes this difficult or impossible. PC games are typically designed for keyboard and mouse input. In order to play such a game on a smartphone, those inputs have to be mapped to a touchscreen… or you have to hook up a keyboard and a mouse, which pretty much defeats the purpose of portability. Even when the control devices are similar (such as sending a PS4 game to a PS Vita through PlayStation Now streaming), differences in the controls means some adjustments have to be made (someone has to tweak the game by hand to make it work). Even if you’ve gotten the inputs figured out, the differing screen sizes and resolutions may make the game functionally unplayable (imagine trying to play League of Legends or World of Warcraft on a smartphone).

This means you can’t just take an entire games library, wave a magic wand, and make it available via streaming. Plenty of work has to be done on each title to make it work, even if you allow users to tweak their own control settings. Valve is still struggling with Steam Machines not because of the basic hardware — the issue is the controller, and trying to make it possible to play keyboard-and-mouse games on a controller resembling a video game controller.

The biggest hurdle may well be the business model, though. Customers will probably look for some sort of subscription offer similar to Netflix, where for one monthly price they can access any and all games they want. That’s not easy to accomplish for a streaming service, though, because agreements would have to be negotiated with each publisher. And publishers are very wary of game streaming, which they fear might cut into sales of full-priced games. Getting a good library of content, and making available at a reasonable price, is not easy.

While it’s nice to think about being able to play any game, any where, any time, we’re not really anywhere near that point. It will be interesting to see what pricing structure PS Now ends up with, and what the reception among gamers is. Nvidia’s Shield has yet to make much of a splash, but perhaps the Shield Tablet will be different — especially if Nvidia puts a major marketing push behind it. Valve’s Steam Machines, now slated for a 2015 introduction, are still a big question mark.

Next month there will be a Cloud Gaming Summit in San Francisco, so perhaps we’ll see some answers revealed.

5 Questions With Olga Kay

What did performing in a circus teach you that you have been able to apply to your YouTube career?

The amount of hard work I have to put in before I can see any results and I am talking YEARS! Also not giving up or be discouraged.

 What made you decide to create multiple YouTube channels?

I have passion for many things and I tested different types of content on my channel and quickly realized that not everyone would enjoy it. I had to separate the content.

 What are your goals with Operation: Moosh Clump, your fundraiser to create even more content?

Mainly to build a team of people to help me with production. Right now I do everything by myself mostly.

 We see you’re a huge gamer. What are your favorites?

The best game of 2013 and 2014 is still Far Cry 3 for me. I also enjoyed Bioshock Infinite and the indie game, Contrast.

 What advice would you give to someone looking to connect with an audience on YouTube? 

Be authentic and create content that makes YOU happy because it’s a lot of hard work and if you are starting off with content you are not into, you will burn out quickly and hate the process.

Facebook Covertly Poised To Take Over Video Space

By Jocelyn Johnson

Facebook offers a reach comparable to YouTube and is already an integral part of any creator’s social marketing mix.  As one video executive told us, when it comes to marketing and distribution online, YouTube and Facebook are the only game in town. Other social platforms don’t matter as much.

But where this starts to get interesting is how Facebook is stealthily readying itself to take YouTube head on.

The social giant’s true potential within the digital video ecosystem was first evidenced by the success YouTube star Ray William Johnson had in pre-releasing his “Riley Rewind” web series on Facebook a day before windowing it to YouTube. Johnson claimed that the series did 10 million views on Facebook in that one day.

Couple that with the seamless integration of Instagram video, the VOD provider Screenburn, which was used to re-release Katy Perry’s documentary “Part of Me”, the LiveRail acquisition for video advertising tech and the new mobile related-videos feature and you can start to assemble Facebook’s strategy in hitting at the major features YouTube, and other OTT services, offer.

And then, in March, Facebook hired former Ryan Seacrest Productions SVP Sibyl Goldman as head of entertainment partnerships, responsible for securing partnerships with studios, networks, celebrities, and other creative talent.

Multiple industry sources tell us that Goldman and her team have talked with YouTube talent and producers to distribute content on the social network. Publicly, Goldman has promoted the added value provided by Facebook’s own video player. “Videos generally tend to reach more people when published natively,” she said during a recent session at VidCon, a point that was confirmed by fellow panelist Justine Ezarik.

However, with a little sleuthy digging and tips from our sources, we’ve found there are quite a few prominent figures actively using and testing Facebook’s player.

One such company that is seemingly finding success using Facebook’s player is Buzzfeed, with its dedicated Buzzfeed Video page, where it’s generating thousands of likes and comments per video post. Some of these videos live only on Facebook while others are syndicated on YouTube as well.

Maker Studios is another company using Facebook’s player for show Nacho Punch. Full episodes of the show can be found uploaded into the Facebook timeline. However Maker is still using YouTube for episodes and the annotations functionality, a feature which Facebook has yet to add, but looking at Nacho Punch’s timeline on Facebook, it includes a blend of both players, likely an A/B test approach.

NachoPunch

Similarly, in a much more tepid approach, Upworthy, the website for viral content, is also being very indiscriminate in its choice of video player. Facebook native video, YouTube, and Vimeo embeds can be found across their Facebook page and social feeds.

However, when asked if Facebook is developing a partner program of some type, Goldman was noncommittal. “Right now, we’re focusing on driving video consumption, sharing, and engagement with fans.”

Even further, Facebook doesn’t have to get into the premium content creation business to entice advertisers to the platform. As long as it continues to educate influencers on the power of the native player while it incrementally strengthens its footing, the mega-giant could move the needle in terms of competing with YouTube.

This article was originally posted on VideoInk and is reposted on [a]listdaily via a partnership with the news publication, which is the online video industry’s go-to source for breaking news, features, and industry analysis. Follow VideoInk on Twitter @VideoInkNews, or subscribe via thevideoink.com for the latest news and stories, delivered right to your inbox.