The online advertising business continues to grow at double-digit rates, according to the latest report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (a trade group for online advertisers and publishers).
According to the report, which was prepared for the IAB by PricewaterhouseCoopers, digital ad revenue in the U.S. reached $49.5 billion in the first half of 2018, up 23 percent year-over-year. And more of those ad dollars are shifting to mobile, which accounted for 63 percent of the total, compared to 54 percent during the same period last year.
“We’re really looking at that as advertisers catching up to consumer behavior,” said Sue Hogan, the IAB’s senior vice president of research and measurement.
PwC U.S. partner David Silverman suggested that the growth of mobile commerce and direct-to-consumer brands are also playing a big role, with new technologies giving digital advertisers “the ability to efficiently and effectively target consumers who are likely to be interested in a purchase, driving the cost of acquiring that customer down.”
“You can then plow that profit back into your business … the digital advertising market is helping to fuel that growth,” Silverman said.
Meanwhile, video advertising is up 35 percent to $7 billion, with mobile video accounting for 60 percent of the total. Digital audio ad revenue is up 31 percent to $935 million, and social media revenue is up 38 percent, to $13.1 billion.
Although the IAB report is only focused on ad spend in the United States, many U.S. companies are likely affected by GDPR regulations in Europe — one recent study suggested that the regulations have reduced ad tracking in Europe while helping Google. When I brought this up, Silverman said there hasn’t been a big impact in the numbers thus far. (GDPR took effect in May.)
“I do believe this is one of the headwinds that the industry will be facing and we will need to have response to those challenges,” he said. “But we have not, to date, seen a major impact on growth.”
Source: TechCrunch
About a year ago, David Hyman, former Beats Music CEO and co-founder of music startup Mog that eventually sold to Beats Music, did something that was “very abnormal for me — career-wise,” he told TechCrunch. Hyman was an entrepreneur in residence at a giant real estate company. Because the music industry has changed so much, he said he didn’t want to do another music company.
While at this real estate company, Hyman said he started riding electric scooters everywhere, realizing that “it was so much better to get on a rideshare scooter than to drive my car or take an Uber.”
One day, Hyman rode one of these shared electric scooters to a grocery store in Oakland to buy some ice cream. Once he got back outside, the scooter was gone. He proceeded to look for the closest scooter, which was about one-quarter mile away, he said. But as he was approaching the scooter, someone scooped it up. That’s when Hyman said he had his epiphany.
“I just want one when I open my door and I want to take it on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) and jump off and go wherever I want,” Hyman said. “And so that embarked on a journey to find one to buy, but I couldn’t find a good one to buy in the U.S.”
Hyman was looking for one that was portable and lightweight, with good range, torque and motor power. He landed on one he found on Alibaba, but still wasn’t completely jazzed about it.
That’s where Unagi, founded by Hyman, comes in. Launching on Kickstarter today, Unagi is looking to raise $30,000 and start shipping the scooters in January.
Unlike the other electric scooter startups that have cropped up over the past year, Unagi is taking a different approach. Hyman is betting that after people become accustomed to riding electric scooters via the likes of Bird, Lime, Spin, Skip and so forth, they’ll realize it’s cheaper to just buy their own. Though, Hyman admits he does not have any data to back up that hypothesis.
“A lot of people are going to go through the decision cycle I went through, which is that they prefer ownership,” he said. “I don’t know if that’s one percent of the market or five percent of the market or 10 percent. I actually have nine UC Berkeley MBA students right now helping me figure out the market size.”
The Unagi scooter itself is undoubtedly beautiful. That’s in part thanks to a design partnership the company formed with a firm out of China. The scooters are manufactured across 15 different Chinese plants, but Hyman said the company might start assembling the scooters in the U.S.
“There’s this tax people talk about called the Trump tax,” he said.
Right now, Unagi’s minimum production goal is 300 scooters upon launch, but Hyman thinks it’ll probably be somewhere between 500 to 1,000.
Unagi comes in a couple of different models — a 250 watt for $890 and a $450 watt for $1,190. Both of the models have three riding modes: beginner (9.3 mph max speed), intermediate (12.4 mph max speed) and advanced (15.5 mph max speed).
Compared to other electric scooters you could own, Unagi is a bit more expensive than its competitors. The Xiaomi Mi retails for $599 on Amazon while the Ninebot scooter costs $777.
But Hyman said he’s not necessarily looking to get the price down, noting how you “pay a premium for beautiful design. That’s just the reality of it.”
Hyman also pointed out that Unagi is built with carbon fiber instead of aluminum, as well as magnesium alloy handles.
I rode the scooter once and didn’t feel entirely confident about the brakes, which are all electric (versus electric plus mechanical, or electric plus disc brake), on the downhill. Hyman took a look at the scooter I’d been riding and didn’t see any apparent problems with it. Minus the braking issue, the Unagi is fun to ride and will even get you up some hills in San Francisco.
For future models, Hyman said he’s thinking about security and locking mechanisms. He envisions including GPS tracking to make it easier to recover your scooter if it gets lost or stolen. Unagi is entirely bootstrapped but is today launching a $30,000 Kickstarter campaign.
Source: TechCrunch
There are bargains to be had, oh, yes. These are the deals that deserve your dollars.
Source: CNET
Atolla, a skin care startup that got its roots at MIT, is launching a Kickstarter campaign to to help people achieve their skin goals. Atolla uses machine learning to identify skin health issues and then recommend the right skin care products based on what affects your skin.
Atolla comes as a monthly subscription, with the idea being that you test your skin every month to see how it changes depending on the season. The kit allows you to test for oil, moisture and pH. Every month, you receive a customized product based on the data extrapolated from your skin.
“So we’re thinking that if we do this measurement for people like just once a month, after about a year we can start to predict how their skin’s going to change,” Atolla co-founder Meghan Maulpin told TechCrunch. “It’s like, we know that your skin gets this percent dryer in the winter so before you actually have the issue of super dry skin, we already know that you need to use something that’s like this.”
Testing your skin takes just about 10 minutes (I tried it) and is pretty straightforward, thanks to on-screen directions from Atolla’s mobile app.
Atolla’s vision is to build a longitudinal dataset that looks at skin concerns across demographics, geographies and lifestyles. Atolla use two distinct machine learning models. The first is to create skin archetypes based on all the factors that may affect someone’s skin and the second is to predict how someone’s skin may change.
“What we’re really trying to build is a database that represents all different types of like skin attributes, and understand what the actual skin types are,” Maulpin told TechCrunch. “So it’s not just about like, number of data, it’s also diversity.”
Maulpin and her co-founder Sid Salvi met at MIT while in graduate school last year. Following acceptance into MIT’s Delta V accelerator for students, the two opened up a handful of pop-up shops in New York City. Fast forward to today, and Atolla is gearing up to start shipping to consumers in February.
Source: TechCrunch
The buoyancy force gives you the boost that helps you float and do cool maneuvers in water. This experiment lets you see it in action.
Source: Wired
Comcast’s low-cost Internet Essentials program, which provides internet access for just $10 per month, has expanded to include U.S. veterans. One million veterans now qualify for the service.
The post Over a million veterans now eligible for Comcast’s Internet Essentials program appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
‘Tis the season for savings at Microsoft. The Surface-maker is offering some nice Black Friday deals on its Surface Pro 6, Go, and Laptop 2 hardware. You’ll also find deals on notebooks from HP, Dell, and Lenovo.
The post Microsoft takes up to $330 off of Surface PC bundles in Black Friday promo appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
The company hopes to do for podcasts what its Music Genome Project did for streaming songs.
Source: Wired
Inside these closed online communities, outside voices are discredited and dissent is often met with hostility, doxing, and harassment. Sound familiar?
Source: Wired
And, once again, the best somewhat-affordable Android phone comes from OnePlus.
Source: Wired