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Snapchat will let you play as your Bitmoji in video games
Want your video game character to look just like you? Soon you’ll be able to scan an in-game code with Snapchat to play as your personalized Bitmoji avatar on PC, console and mobile games. Today Snapchat announced its new Bitmoji for Games SDK that will let hand-selected partners integrate 3D Bitmoji as a replacement for their character skins. With support for Unity, Unreal and the Play Canvas engine behind Snap’s new Bitmoji Party game inside Snapchat, the SDK should make it easy for developers to pipe in life-like avatars that give people a stronger emotional connection to the game.
“It’s kind of a no-brainer to bring Bitmoji into games. Games can be so much more engaging with you…in the game,” Bitmoji co-founder Ba Blackstock tells me. “We’re adding an identity layer to gaming that has the potential to have a transformational effect on the industry.”
Snapchat has a massive opportunity to colonize the web — and the games ecosystem — with its Bitmoji instead of waiting for developers to make half-assed clones. Bitmoji is perhaps Snapchat’s most popular and enduring feature now that Stories and ephemeral messaging have been widely copied, with 330 million estimated downloads, according to Sensor Tower. As I wrote in my feature piece on Snapchat’s new platform strategy, “To stop copycats, Snapchat shares itself,” every distributed instance of the company drives attention back to its original apps, and each partnership it establishes is one more ally in the fight against Facebook.
Snap’s new CMO
Snap’s new CMO Kenny Mitchell
As Snapchat moves into this new era of marketing itself through Bitmoji, today it also announced it has hired a new CMO, Kenny Mitchell. He was formerly the VP of marketing at McDonald’s and the head of consumer engagement at Gatorade. Mitchell oversaw the sports drink’s Serena Williams tennis game that lived inside a Snapchat ad and saw an average of over 200 seconds of play time, and its viral Super Bowl augmented reality lens that let you dump a cooler of Gatorade on yourself.
“Kenny’s consumer marketing expertise and his deep understanding of our products will be a great combination for Snap,” writes Snap CEO Evan Spiegel.
The company has seen many senior execs depart over the years due to clashes with Spiegel over leadership, so we’ll see if Mitchell sticks around. He’ll be spearheading Snap’s new marketing campaign to reactivate Android users frustrated by its buggy app and bring them back to its newly reengineered version. “I look forward to helping Evan and Snap continue to tell their story to people around the world, and working with my new colleagues as we define the future of the camera and self-expression,” Mitchell writes.
Bitmoji, the visual identity layer
Snap acquired Bitmoji parent Bitstrips in 2016 for just $64 million, propelling it to become a staple top 10 app. Snap launched its Snap Kit platform in June 2018, allowing developers to integrate Bitmoji into the keyboards of their apps like Tinder for use as chat stickers or 2D profile pics. And this month, at Snap’s first Partner Summit, it launched partnerships to bring Bitmoji to the Venmo feed, Fitbit watch faces and more. But now it will let 3D Bitmoji replace your in-game character head-to-toe.
For now, the SDK will be free to top developers chosen for the program from PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android and other platforms. Surprisingly, most game devs just build their own avatar customization feature from scratch, but they’re typically focused on clothes and crazy hairstyles rather than fine-tuning a face that looks like your own. And while customized avatars are common in shooter games, Bitmoji could bring them to platform, racing, dancing, puzzle, fighting and role-playing games too.
Bitmoji for games won’t be an open platform, to ensure the brand isn’t misused. Blackstock explains that “You can look at what we’re doing with Bitmoji Kit where we have guidelines of best practices of how to use Bitmoji and not use Bitmoji. We’ll apply the same kinds of guidelines to gaming.” That might mean no extra graphically violent games, or anything in which players might revel in inflicting pain on a personalized avatar. But Fortnite, with its cartoony violence, might be an ideal Bitmoji partner.
Snap’s global head of gaming partnerships, John Imah, says he could imagine using his Bitmoji in titles from Star Wars, Lego, Mario Kart or Warcraft. Depending on how their models for characters, landscapes and items work, developers may have to do some work to make Bitmoji work gracefully. But Imah says when it can, “There will be some modification on our end to make sure this works within their engine so we can make this process as seamless as possible for these developers.”
Users will design their avatar in the Bitmoji or Snapchat app, though there may be in-game customization options down the line. If users ask to import their Bitmoji, the game will show a QR Snapcode on screen that users can scan with the Snapchat camera. That authentication unlocks their Bitmoji to use as an avatar skin in the game. Suddenly, every quest, battle and cutscene becomes about them, not some generic character.
Given Fortnite is earning hundreds of millions of dollars selling cosmetic upgrades, the inevitable question is whether Snap will start selling bonus outfits, items or face options for Bitmoji. “It’s really early days for Bitmoji for Games. It’s something we’ll explore later down the road,” Imah tells me. Imagine if kids could buy Supreme sweatshirts or fresh Nikes for their Bitmoji? That could be a lucrative new business for Snap that’s strengthened by each Bitmoji partnership, and at a time when it’s eager to boost revenue and cut losses as it aims for profitability.
Bitmoji for Games could cement Snapchat as the best way to visually represent yourself online without a photograph. As the darker sides of the internet and human nature come into focus for the tech industry, we need more ways to be ourselves while retaining privacy. Bitmoji could deliver the emotional connection of seeing yourself as the hero without the risks of exposing your true face.
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Snapchat fully rolls out reengineered Android app, boosting usage
After a year of its user count shrinking or staying flat, Snapchat is finally growing again, and more growth is likely on the way. That’s because it’s finally completed the rollout of Project Mushroom, aka a backend overhaul of its Android app that’s 25 percent smaller and 20 percent faster. Designed for India and other emerging markets where iPhones are too expensive, Snapchat saw an immediate 6 percent increase in the number of people on low-end devices sending Snaps within the first week of upgrading to the new Android app.
Snapchat grew from 186 million daily active users in Q4 2018 to 190 million in Q1 2019, adding 1 million in North America, 1 million in Europe and 2 million in the Rest of World, where the Android app makes the biggest difference despite rolling out near the end of the quarter. It has been a long wait, as Snap first announced the Android reengineering project in November 2017.
“As of the end of Q1, our new Android application is available to everyone,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in his prepared remarks for today’s estimate-beating earnings report. “While these early results are promising, improvements in performance and new user retention will take time to compound and meaningfully impact our top-line metrics. There are billions of Android devices in the world that now have access to an improved Snapchat experience, and we look forward to being able to grow our Snapchat community in new markets.”
Some of the growth stemmed from tweaks to Snapchat’s ruinous redesign, including better personalized ranking of Stories and Discover content, as well as new premium video Shows. Now with the Android app humming, though, we might see significant growth in the Rest of World region in Q2.
Unfortunately, since Snapchat uses bandwidth and storage-heavy video, more usage also means more Amazon AWS and Google Cloud expenditures. That’s partly why Snapchat is predicting a slight increase in adjusted EBITDA losses from $123 million in Q1 to between $125 million and $150 million in Q2. Rest of World users only earn Snap about one-third as much money as North American users, but cost nearly as much to support.
We first highlighted Snap’s neglect of the international teen Android market when Instagram Stories launched in August 2016. Spiegel and Snap were too focused on cool American teens, squandering this market that was snapped up by Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp. Now Snapchat will have a much harder time winning emerging markets as they’re not the first to bring Stories there. But if it can double-down on ephemeral messaging, premium video and its augmented reality platform that are leagues ahead of Facebook’s offerings, it could finally creep toward that 200 million DAU milestone.
Come see Snap CEO Evan Spiegel speak at TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2nd-4th. Get your tickets here.
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To stop copycats, Snapchat shares itself
Evan Spiegel has finally found a way to fight back against Mark Zuckerberg’s army of clones. For 2.5 years, Snapchat foolishly tried to take the high road versus Facebook, with Spiegel claiming “Our values are hard to copy”. That inaction allowed Zuckerberg to accrue over 1 billion daily Stories users across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook compared to Snapchat’s 186 million total daily users. Meanwhile, the whole tech industry scrambled to build knock-offs of Snap’s vision of an ephemeral, visual future.
But Snapchat’s new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social web that’s scared of being squashed beneath Facebook’s boot. It rearranges the adage of “if you can’t beat them, join them” into “to beat them, join us”. As a unified front, Snap’s partners get the infrastructure they need to focus on what differentiates them, while Snapchat gains the reach and entrenchment necessary to weather the war.
Tinder lets you use Snapchat Stories as profile photos
Snapchat’s plan is to let other apps embed the best parts of it rather than building their own half-rate copies.
Why reinvent the wheel of Stories, Bitmoji, and ads when you can reuse the original? A high-ranking Snap executive told me on background that this is indeed the strategy. If it’s going to invent these products, and others want something similar, it’s smarter to enable and partly control the Snapchatification than to try to ignore it. Otherwise, Facebook might be the one to platform-tize what Snap inspired everyone to want.
The “Camera company” corrected course and took back control of its destiny this week at its first ever Snap Partner Summit in its hometown of Los Angeles. Now it’s a camera platform thanks to Snap Kit. Its new Story Kit will implant Snapchat Stories into other apps later this year. They can display a more traditional carousel of your friends’ Stories, or lace them into their app in a custom format. Houseparty’s Stories carousel shares what your buddies are up to outside of the group video chat app. Tinder will let you show off your Snapchat Story alongside your photos to seduce potential matches. But the camera stays inside Snapchat, with new options to share out to these App Stories.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel presents at the Snap Partner Summit
This is how Snapchat colonizes the native app ecosystem similarly to how Facebook invaded the web with the Like button. Snap’s strong privacy record makes these partners willing to host it where now they might fear that Facebook and its history with Cambridge Analytica could tarnish their brand.
Instead of watching these other apps spin up mini competitors that further fragment the Stories world, Snap saves developers the slow and costly hassle while instantly giving them best-in-class tools to boost their own engagement. Each outpost makes your Snapchat account a little more indispensable, grants its camera new utility, and reminds you to visit again. It’s another reason to stick with Snap rather than straying to other versions of Stories.
If Spiegel knows what’s up, he’ll douse the Story Kit partnerships team with resources so they can sign up as many apps as possible before Facebook can copy this idea too. For now, Snap isn’t injecting ads into App Stories, but it could easily do so and split the cash with its host. This would attract partners, generate revenue, and give Snap’s advertisers more reach.
Houseparty embeds Snapchat Stories
Either way, Snap will score those benefits with its new Ad Kit. Later this year the Snapchat Audience Network will launch allowing partners to host Snap’s full-screen vertical video ads and earn an as-yet-undisclosed revenue share. They won’t have to build up an ad sales force or build an auction and delivery system, but just drop in an SDK to start displaying ads to both Snapchat users and non-users. The company’s message again is that it’s becoming easier to cooperate with Snapchat than copy it.
Snap’s new ad network
Giving its advertisers more reach and reusability for Snap’s somewhat proprietary ad unit format helps Snap address its core challenge: scale. Snap’s 186 million total users can look small in comparison to Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube, especially since that count sank in Q2 and Q3 before stabilzing in Q4 of last year. That makes it tougher for advertisers to justify the chore of spending on Snapchat. Ad Kit and potentially Story Kit give Snap more reach even without user growth.
Added size could tip the cards in Snap’s favor given it’s already popular with an extremely important demographic. Snapchat now reaches 75 percent of 13 to 34-year olds in the US, and 90 percent of 13 to 24-year olds there. It claims to now reach more of that younger age group than Facebook in the most lucrative countries: the US, Canada, UK, France, and Australia.
Facebook has massively neglected this segment. Case in point: Facebook Messenger’s Stickers feature that’s popular with kids has hardly improved since its launch in 2013, which I hear was a fight to get approved internally. Meanwhile, Snapchat keeps growing its lead on virtual identity with Bitmoji. Now Snap will let you put your personalized Bitmoji avatar on your FitBit smart watch face, use them to joke about Venmo purchases, and even represent yourself with one in Snap’s new multiplayer games platform.
Again, Snap wants partners to integrate the real thing rather than try to build some half-assed facsimile of Bitmoji. Surprisingly, Facebook’s Avatars have been mired in development for over a year and Apple’s Memoji can’t escape iMessage and FaceTime yet. That’s why Snapchat would be wise to double-down on trying to make Bitmoji the ubiquitous way to represent yourself without a photograph. Facebook’s lack of design cool and Bitmoji’s massive headstart with this differentiated product is a powerful way for Snap to wedge itself into partnerships.
Snap needs all the help it can get if the underdog is going to carve out a substantial and sustainable piece of social networking. Teaming up was the theme of the rest of the Snap Partner Summit. It’s built ways for Netflix, GoFundMe, VSCO, and Anchor to share stickers and for publishers like the Washington Post to share articles back to Snapchat. It’s got Zynga and ZeptoLab building real-time multiplayer Snap Games that live inside chat and are a clever way of slipping ads into messaging.
Snapchat’s new Scan augmented reality utility platform has signed up Giphy and Photomath as well as former partners Shazam and Amazon to let you squeeze extra interactivity out of your surroundings. And since the physical world is too vast for any one developer to fill with AR experiences, Snap beefed up its Lens Studio platform with new templates and creator profiles so developers add to its warchest of 400,000 special effects. Facebook may be able to clone Snap’s features, but not its developer army.
“If we can show the right Lens in the right moment, we can inspire a whole new world of creativity” says Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy . From partnerships to utilities to toys, all the new announcements drive attention back to Snapchat’s camera. That makes it ripe to become the augmented reality brower of the world.
It all feels like a coming of age moment for Snapchat, punctuated by the glitzy press event where media bigwigs gnoshed on Chinese steak buns and played with AR art installations in West Hollywood.
Spiegel has discovered a method of capitalizing on his penchant for inspiring mobile product design. With this strategy in place and Snap’s reengineered Android app and new languages rolling out now, I believe Snapchat will grow again, at least in terms of deeper engagement if not also total user count. Perhaps it will need a little bit more funding to get it over the hurdle, but I expect it will reach profitability before the end of 2020.
During a pre-event press briefing with a dozen Snap executives including Spiegel and Murphy (that was on ‘background’ so we can’t quote or specify who said what), one Snap higher-up joked that Facebook has been copying it for seven years so it’s started to feel normal. Zuckerberg recently declared he wanted to reorient Facebook around privacy, ephemerality, and messaging — the core tenets of Snapchat. But a Snap leader used some colorful language to describe how they don’t care what Facebook says its philosophy is until it fixes the 2 billion-user product that keeps doing harm.
Subtly throwing shade from the stage, Spiegel concluded that “Our camera lets the natural light from our world penetrate the darkness of the Internet . . . as we use the Internet more and more in our daily lives, we need a way to make it a bit more human.” That apparently means making other apps a bit more Snapchat.
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Snap is channeling Asia’s messaging giants with its move into gaming
Snap is taking a leaf out of the Asian messaging app playbook as its social messaging service enters a new era.
The company unveiled a series of new strategies that are aimed at breathing fresh life into the service that has been ruthlessly cloned by Facebook across Instagram, WhatsApp and even its primary social network. The result? Snap has consistently lost users since going public in 2017. It managed to stop the rot with a flat Q4, but resting on its laurels isn’t going to bring back the good times.
Snap has taken a three-pronged approach: extending its stories feature (and ads) into third-party apps and building out its camera play with an AR platform, but it is the launch of social games that is the most intriguing. The other moves are logical, and they fall in line with existing Snap strategies, but games is an entirely new category for the company.
It isn’t hard to see where Snap found inspiration for social games — Asian messaging companies have long twinned games and chat — but the U.S. company is applying its own twist to the genre.
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Snapchat launches Mario Party-style multiplayer games platform
Snap is unlocking a new revenue stream while giving you something to do between chats and Stories. Today Snapchat debuts its Snap Games platform that lets you play real-time, multiplayer games while texting and talking with your friends. The platform is based on Snap’s secret late-2017 acquisition of PrettyGreat, an Australian game studio with talent from HalfBrick (which built Fruit Ninja). That team built Bitmoji Party, a Mario Party-style mini-game fest, to show off the platform that includes five games from developers like Zynga and ZeptoLab. The games are rolling out worldwide on iOS and Android starting today.
To monetize the platform, Snapchat will let users opt in to watching six-second unskippable commercials that reward them with a power up or bonus in-game currency. Snapchat will share revenue from the ads with developers, though it refused to specify the split. It could be a little weird watching ads to more easily beat your friends. But down the line it’s easy to imagine Snapchat selling cosmetic upgrades via in-app purchases akin to Fortnite.
Snap announced the new Snap Games platform at its first-ever press event, the Snap Partner Summit in Los Angeles, where it also announced an augmented reality utility platform called Scan, an ads network and a way to put its Stories in other apps. “We wanted to build something that makes us feel like we’re playing a board game with a family of over a long holiday weekend. Something that makes us feel like we’re sitting with friends, controllers in hand, looking at the same screen,” says Snap’s head of gaming, Will Wu. The Information’s Tom Dotan and Amir Efrati first reported Snap was building a gaming platform and Cheddar’s Alex Heath reported it would end up launching today.
Snap Games could be considered a real-time spin on Facebook Messenger’s Instant Games platform, which has focused on porting to HTML5 well-known asynchronous games like Pac-Man and other arcade titles. Similarly, Snap Games don’t have to be downloaded separately, as they’re piped in from the web. Users can browse available games by tapping a new rocket ship button in the chat bar.
You’re invited to Bitmoji Party
#SnapPartnerSummit pic.twitter.com/WBTntkqZil
— Snapchat (@Snapchat) April 4, 2019
With Bitmoji Party, your avatar competes with up to seven friends simultaneously in a series of mini games where you have to stay balanced on a giant record as a DJ scratches it, or avoid getting knocked in the pool. You also can have another 24 friends spectate and rotate in. Winners earn coins they can use to buy dances to stunt on their competition. And with an ever-present chat bar, users can use text or voice to talk trash.
Rather than port in known IP, Snap recruited developers to build games exclusively for its vertical, real-time multiplayer format. These include:
- Alphabear Hustle from SpryFox – a fast-paced word puzzler
- C.A.T.S. (Crash Arena Turbo Stars) Drift Race from ZeptoLab – a cutesy racing game
- Snake Squad from Game Closure – a reimagining of the classic Snake game set in outer space
- Tiny Royale from Zynga – a top-down battle royale shooter game that feels like a Game Boy version of Fortnite top-down battle royale game
- Zombie Rescue Squad from PikPok – a zombie shooter
Snapchat’s partner games (from left): Tiny Royale, Snake Squad, C.A.T.S. Drift Race
Snap’s game platform has huge potential to boost time spent in the app and the ads views that generates because gaming is perfect for its demographic. “In the United States, Snapchat now reaches nearly 75 percent of all 13 to 34-year-olds, and we reach 90 percent of 13 to 24-year-olds. In fact, we reach more 13 to 24-year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the U.K., France, Canada and Australia,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed today. This is the age group with the free time and dense social graphs to make use of multiplayer real-time games.
The big question is whether Snap’s reward-incentivized video ad views will generate enough cash to keep developers coming to the platform. If not, a limited line of titles could get old quick. Snap has entirely avoided in-app purchases since shutting down its Lens Store in early 2016. There’s understandable concern that kids could rack up huge bills on their parents’ credit cards. But given how Fortnite has normalized paying for no-utility cosmetic upgrades for this same demographic, with the right controls Snapchat could do the same to make itself and its partners a lot more money. And given you’re always playing with your friends, not strangers, there’s an even deeper urge to buy funny costumes and dances to impress them.
Snapchat’s overarching strategy right now is to build an orbit of time-wasters surrounding chat. What began with Stories now includes Discover publications, premium Shows, augmented reality toys and now games. It may never become a favorite with the 35+ age group. But since messaging is the top mobile behavior, Snap can use it to keep people coming back and then distract them while they’re waiting for a reply or need a social alternative to small talk.
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Snapchat will power Stories & ads in other apps
Snapchat has found an answer to the revenue problem stemming from its halted growth: it will show its ads in other apps with the launch of Snapchat Ad Kit and the Snapchat Audience Network. And rather than watching as other apps spin up their own knock-off versions of its camera and Stories, it will let apps like Tinder and Houseparty host Stories inside their own products that users can share to from the Snapchat camera with Stories Kit. They’ll both be launching later this year, and developers interested in monetization and engagement help can apply for access.
Snapchat debuted the big new additions to its Snap Kit at its first-ever press event in Los Angeles, the Snap Partner Summit, where it also announced a new augmented reality utility platform called Scan, and its new multiplayer games platform. More than 200 apps have already integrated the privacy-safe Snap Kit that lets users log in to other apps with Snapchat, bring their Bitmoji, view Our Stories content and share stickers back to Snapchat.
But later this year, developers will be able to earn money off of Snap Kit with Ad Kit. Developers will integrate Snapchat’s SDK, and then Snap’s advertisers will be able to extend their ad buys to reach both Snapchat users and non-users in other apps. Snapchat will split the ad revenue with developers, but refused to hint at what the divide will be, as it’s still gauging developer interest. The move is straight out of Facebook’s playbook, essentially copying the functionality and name of Facebook’s Audience Network.
There are still big questions about exactly how Snapchat will reach and track ad views of non-users, and how it will be able to provide brands with the analytics they need while maintaining user privacy. But simply by making Snapchat’s somewhat proprietary vertical video ad units reusable elsewhere, it could prove it has a scale to be worth advertisers’ time. The lack of scale has often scared buyers away from Snapchat. But Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says that “In the United States, Snapchat now reaches nearly 75 percent of all 13 to 34-year-olds, and we reach 90 percent of 13 to 24-year-olds. In fact, we reach more 13 to 24-year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the U.K., France, Canada and Australia.”
To keep those users engaged even outside of Snapchat, it’s adding App Stories through Story Kit. Snapchat users will see an option to share to integrated apps after they create a photo or video. Those Stories will then appear in custom places in other apps. You’ll see Snaps injected alongside people’s photos when you’re browsing potential matches in Tinder. You can see what friends on group chat social network Houseparty are doing when they are not on the app. And you can see video recommendations from explorers on AdventureAide.
For now, Snapchat won’t run ads between Stories in other apps, but that’s always a possibility. We’ll have to see how long it takes Instagram and Facebook to try to copy Stories Kit and distribute their own versions to other apps.
Snap also has some other fun new integrations and big-name partnerships. Bitmoji Kit will bring your personalized avatar off your phone and onto Fitbit’s smart watches and Venmo transactions. Netflix will let you share preview images (but not trailers) from its shows to your Snapchat Story. A new publisher-sharing button for the web will let you share articles from The Washington Post and others to your Story.
By colonizing other apps with its experience, Snapchat decreases the need for them to copy it. Instead they get the original, and a lot less development work. And the platform makes your Snapchat account more valuable around the web. These integrations might not grow Snapchat too much, but it could help it keep its existing users happy and squeeze more cash out of them.
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Snapchat launches Scan, its AR utility platform
Point and shoot? No, point and interact. Snapchat can now help with your homework. The app’s camera is becoming the foundation of an augmented reality developer platform known as “Scan.” Snap today announced partnerships with Photomath to add the ability to solve math problems, and Giphy for detecting objects, which then spawn related GIFs onscreen. Scan will roll out to all Snapchat users soon, and developers interested in joining the platform can contact Snap.
Snapchat Scan spawns Giphy GIFs based on what’s around you
Previously, Snapchat’s camera could identify songs with Shazam and recognize objects so you could buy them on Amazon. But now instead of just offering a few scattered tools, Snapchat is crystallizing its plan to let you reveal hidden information about the world around you.
“Our camera lets the natural light from our world penetrate the darkness of the internet . . . as we use the internet more and more in our daily lives, we need a way to make it a bit more human,” said Snap CEO Evan Spiegel at the company’s first-ever press event, the Snap Partner Summit. There it also announced it would launch an ad network, power Stories in other apps and launch a real-time multiplayer games platform.
Scan with Photomath solves math problems
Others like Blippar have tried to build AR utility platforms, but they lacked the community and daily use necessary to already be top of mind when people want to scan something. But Snap CEO Evan Spiegel today revealed that, “In the United States, Snapchat now reaches nearly 75 percent of all 13 to 34-year-olds, and we reach 90 percent of 13 to 24-year-olds. In fact, we reach more 13 to 24-year-olds than Facebook or Instagram in the United States, the U.K., France, Canada and Australia.”
The comparison data comes from Facebook’s ad manager estimates, which aren’t always totally accurate. Still, the stats demonstrate that amongst the audience likely to explore the world via augmented reality, Snapchat is huge. Even if Facebook wanted to build this behavior, it can’t, because the Facebook Camera isn’t the heart of its social network.
When users tap and hold on the Snapchat camera, they’ll start to Scan their surroundings. Answers to math equations will magically appear. If you view a $10 bill, Hamilton will come alive and sing a song from the musical. Scan a slice of pizza and a dancing Giphy pizza slice appears. Users will also see the new Snapchat AR Bar with dedicated buttons to Scan, create a lens or explore the 400,000 AR Lenses created by Snapchat’s community. Indeed, 75 percent of Snap’s 186 million daily users play with Lenses each day, combining into 15 billion total plays to date. Scan was built off the acquisition of a startup called Scan.me, which until now has powered Snap’s QR Snapcodes that let people add friends or unlock Lenses.
Snap’s new AR Bar
Outside of utility, Snapchat is also adding a slew of new creative AR features to keep that audience entertained and loyal. For example, it’s launching Landmarkers, which uses point cloud data from user-submitted Our Stories of major landmarks to power animated AR transformations of famous places. Now the Eiffel Tower, Buckingham Palace, LA’s Chinese Theater, DC’s Capitol Building and NYC’s Flatiron Building can spew rainbows, shoot lightning and more.
Snapchat’s new Landmarkers
For developers and Lens creators using Snap’s Lens Studio tools, Snap is launching new Creator Profiles where they can show off all the Lenses they’ve contributed. They’ll all have access to new AR templates for hand, body and pet effects that take care of all the hardcore computer science. Creators just add their graphical assets like a mustache for dogs, fireballs that shoot out of people’s hands or rainbows that appear over someone when they hold their arms out.
Snapchat’s new Lens Creator profiles
Snap will even surface relevant community Lenses in the Lens Carousel based on what its Scans pick up. One place it falls short, though, is there’s no direct monetization opportunities for independent Lens creators, beyond Snap occasionally connecting the best AR artists to brands for paid Lens development deals. Snapchat admits it will need to create better incentives long-term.
At a big press briefing yesterday, the company’s top execs explained that growth isn’t Snapchat’s success metric any more. That’s convenient, considering the launch of Instagram Stories cut Snap’s growth from 17 percent per quarter to it actually losing users and only stabilizing this quarter. Instead, Spiegel says, deepening user engagement, and thereby the ad revenue users generate, is Snap’s path forward.
The more Snap gets users playing with augmented reality filters and the better development tools it provides, the more brands and devs will pay to promote their Lenses in the Lens Carousel or through video ads where users swipe up to try a Lens.
But that engagement is also critical to beating Facebook and Instagram to the next phase of AR. Instagram Stories might have 500 million daily users, but they’re mostly applying AR to their faces, not to interact with the world. Snapchat needs as many fun AR entertainment experiences like Landmarkers as possible to normalize AR exploration, which will unlock the potential of the Scan platform. That could one day fuel affiliate fees from AR commerce sales and other revenue streams.
Plus, Snapchat says Lenses are coded to be compatible with not just iOS and Android, but future AR hardware platforms. To build the biggest repository of AR experiences, Snapchat needs help, as I wrote two years ago that Snap’s anti-developer attitude was an augmented liability. Now it’s finally building the tools and platform to harness a legion of developers to fill the physical world with imaginary wonder. “If we can show the right Lens in the right moment, we can inspire a whole new world of creativity,” concludes Snap co-founder Bobby Murphy
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Foursnap? Snapchat tries ‘Status’ location check-ins
Today’s teens missed the Foursquare era, so Snapchat is giving them another shot with a new feature to aid in-person meetups. Snapchat is now testing Status, an option to share to the Snap Map a Bitmoji depicting what you’re up to at a certain place. You could show your little avatar playing video games, watching TV, asking friends to hit you up and more. And Snapchat will compile these into a private diary of what you’ve been doing, called Passport
This fixes the biggest problem with Snap Map and many other location check-in apps. Just because someone is down the street doesn’t mean they want you to drop in on them. They could working, in a meeting or on a date. Snapchat Status lets people convey their activity and intention so you can tell the difference between “I’m nearby but stuck with my parents” and “I’m nearby and want to hang out!” As Snapchat refocuses on messaging after Instagram stole its Stories thunder, Status could ensure there’s more to see that makes Snap Map worth opening.
Snapchat Status and Passport were first spotted by reverse-engineering expert and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong. “Share the Moment with Status,” the introduction to the feature explains. “You can now share where you are or what you’re up to. Your Status will only be visible to friends you share your location with.” To see your status, you choose from reams of poses for your Bitmoji ranging from them reading a book to holding a sign saying “text me?”
Meanwhile, “Passport is Just For You: Passport helps you keep track of the Places you’ve been. Places you set your Status at will be added to your Passport along with who you were there with. Only you ca see your Passport, and you can delete a Place from your history at any time.” Your Status only lasts until you leave a place, but it’s tallied along with the number of countries and cities you’ve check into on your Passport.
A Snap spokesperson confirms that “Yes, we are currently testing new ways for Snapchatters to better communicate on the Snap Map with their friends. This test is running with a percentage of Snapchatters in Australia.” Previously, special Bitmoji were only displayed on the Snap Map involuntarily, like when you were road tripping or flying to a new place; visited somewhere special like a beach, mall or major event; or if there was a breaking news moment.
If you don’t want to use Status or even show up on Snap Map, you can go into ghost mode at any time, plus all your location-based content disappears if you don’t open the app for eight hours. And if you do want to be found, you can check who’s viewed your location or Status in case you need to know who’s blowing you off.
Snap launched Snap Map back in June 2017, basing the idea off its acquisition of French location startup Zenly that it bought for $213 million in cash plus bonuses. Beyond spurring real-world interaction, Snap has also made Snap Map an embeddable way to explore breaking news events or hotspots around the world. Status could provide structured data about your behavior, which could beef up Snapchat’s scrawny repository of ad-targeting information. The app could even try surfacing nearby businesses or discounts.
Snapchat’s tighter-knit social graph and stronger track record on privacy lets it offer features that would freak people out if built by Mark Zuckerberg. Given Facebook is aggressively cloning Snap’s whole product philosophy, from its direct copy of Stories to ephemeral messaging to its premium content hubs Watch and IGTV, Snapchat desperately needs to differentiate. Luckily, Facebook has failed to figure out offline meetups, and has yet to roll out the “Your Emoji” status feature that similarly tries to convey what you’re up to visually but within Messenger instead of a map.
Doubling down on Snap Map is a smart move because its one of the few areas where Facebook can’t follow.
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Streaming service Quibi snags Snap and Pandora vet Tom Conrad as chief product officer
Jeffrey Katzenberg’s upcoming mobile streaming service Quibi has added another notable name to its roster of executive talent. The company announced it has hired Tom Conrad, previously VP of product at Snap (maker of Snapchat), and a co-creator of Pandora, where he served as chief technology officer. At Quibi, Conrad will be chief product officer, which will see him leading product, user research and customer support.
The news of Conrad’s hire was first reported by Variety on Monday, which also noted Conrad had served on Quibi’s board since late 2018 and was officially hired as CPO on March 25. He will report to Quibi CEO Meg Whitman in his new role.
Conrad will play a big part in Quibi’s success (or lack thereof, if it doesn’t fare well!), as a significant aspect to the service is to be the app’s mobile design. Unlike modern streaming services like Netflix, Quibi aims to offer short-form, high-quality video cut into smaller pieces for easy consumption on a smartphone. At this year’s SXSW, Whitman explained the Quibi advantage, noting how the technology it’s using will allow the company to do “full-screen video seamlessly from landscape to portrait.”
At Quibi, Conrad’s understanding of streaming services, thanks to his time at Pandora, and apps favored by young users, thanks to his role at Snap, will surely come into play.
Conrad left Snap in 2018 at a critical time for the popular social app. Its massive redesign had just rolled out, and was destroyed by early user reviews, with the majority giving the update one or two stars when it hit. The design was later rolled back. However, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was the product decision maker — Conrad was more involved in terms of execution. That experience, however, may have given Conrad insight into what doesn’t work for the young Gen Z crowd, as much as what does.
The executive also spent a decade at Pandora, as CTO and EVP of Product, which saw him leading the teams that designed, developed and maintained the Pandora apps across platforms — including web, mobile and other consumer electronics devices, as well as automotive. While Quibi is focused on being a mobile streaming app, it’s hard to imagine a streaming service that refuses to ever go cross-platform — especially since the majority of viewing of today’s streaming service viewing takes place on a television. (Even when it’s the streaming service from YouTube.)
With its billion-dollar backing from investors, Quibi has been able to snag several big names for its exec ranks, in addition to its CEO Meg Whitman, and now Conrad.
In March, the company said it landed top CAA agent Jim Toth (married to power producer Reese Witherspoon, by the way). Toth’s clients at CAA included Matthew McConaughey, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Jamie Foxx, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Salma Hayek, Zooey Deschanel and Neil Patrick Harris.
Quibi also hired former DC and Warner Bros. exec Diane Nelson to run operations. Nelson had served as president of DC Entertainment since 2009, and helped spearhead development of the DC Universe movies and shows.
In addition, the streaming service itself has already been signing big-name talent for its content, including Catherine Hardwicke, Antoine Fuqua, Guillermo del Toro, Sam Raimi and Lena Waithe. It’s also working with Steph Curry’s production company and most recently announced — awkward alert? — a show detailing Snapchat’s founding, focused on Evan Spiegel’s rise.
Image credit: Conrad, via Crunchbase
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TwitSnap? Twitter launches new camera feature to demote text
Twitter is rolling out the redesign to its camera feature TechCrunch reported on a month ago that’s designed to let you capture photos, videos and live footage and connect them to global conversations. Starting today, when you swipe left from the Twitter timeline, you’ll get the new camera that’s no longer buried in the tweet composer. After you capture some media (no uploads for now), you can overlay a location, hashtag or some words on a colored label. But what’s really special is that Twitter will show this media in a larger, more immersive format in the feed with the imagery appearing before the text in your tweet.
Twitter isn’t launching Stories or some dedicated feed of photos to rival Instagram. But it wants to become a more real-time lens on the world rather than just an interpretation of it through people’s words. The enhanced camera could get more people shooting media, which could make Twitter more accessible to new users daunted by walls of text. More visual content also makes it easier to slip more visual ads into the feed.
See it? Tweet it! Our updated camera is just a swipe away, so you get the shot fast. Rolling out to all of you over the next few days. pic.twitter.com/moOEFO2nQq
— Twitter (@Twitter) March 13, 2019
Twitter tells me it’s not giving tweets created with the camera an algorithmic boost in the main timeline. But a spokesperson told me its combined human and technology curation team may seek to spotlight Twitter Camera tweets in the Whats Happening section about live events in the Explore tab. We’ll see if media organizations and brands try to take advantage of the new camera to stand out in the feed.
When you swipe left on the timeline, you’ll see a Snapchat-style camera shutter button that records photos with a tap and looping videos up to two minutes long if you hold. A mini-swipe over and you can record video or audio-only live broadcasts without any Periscope branding (will that app just become Twitter Live?). Twitter will then recommend hashtags based on big nearby events and other signals, or you can add your own as well as a location and text. You can choose between six colors for the TV news-style chyron overlayed on those tags that help Twitter route the content into the imagery carousels for its different What’s Happening sections.
For now, there are no stickers, filters, light enhancements or other creative tools in the Twitter camera the way there is in the image uploader in the tweet composer (which conveniently also hosts a shortcut to the new camera). Twitter tells me it wants to focus on tags that will pipe content into the right conversations instead of beautifying the media. That’s a different tack than YouTube, which just started rolling out augmented reality face filters.
Historically, Twitter has been extremely slow to launch product changes for fear of disturbing its long-time loyalists. But Twitter tells me it’s turning over a new leaf and pushing the new camera out the door even with rough edges so it can start getting feedback and iterating. That’s much closer to how Facebook builds than the Twitter we’re used to. The move aligns with the recent release of Twitter’s beta prototype app twttr that launched this week. Twitter seems to finally understand that waiting to perfect each feature and being scared to experiment has left Twitter behind its rivals.
People who love Twitter can’t find the same hellscape of constant conversation anywhere else, and the new camera probably won’t change that. But shifting toward visual communication without debasing itself to chase the Stories trend could make Twitter more comfortable for a world that increasingly talks through images.
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