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An assortment of beacons from (starting upper left) Gimbal, Kontakt.io, Estimote, Radius Networks, GPShopper, Aruba “Beacons are already dead.”That’s what Euclid Analytics’ CEO Brent Franson thinks. His company provides engagement and analytics solutions to retailers and, he told me, his firm is happy to work with beacons.If they did something customers really wanted.Beacons offer hyper-granular marketing directed at customers standing in specific spots in stores, like in front of counter 2B. The idea has been that retailers could then direct product info or a discount coupon about the socks on counter 2B to that customer’s smartphone, standing right there.But, Franson told me, the reality if different for retailer-focused beacons. (There are, of course, use cases for beacons outside of retailers.)First, it’s a significant amount of effort for that scenario to take place. The beacons must be installed and maintained, and fleet maintenance is sometimes problematic, because the devices u…

Advertisers and publishers have no choice but to go “LEAN” — lightweight, encrypted, AdChoices-supported and non-invasive.Why? There’s the recent founding of the Coalition for Better Ads and the updates to the IAB LEAN standards. There’s ad blocking and the fact that people don’t want to use their mobile data for advertisements. There’s Google announcing it will begin to enforce new policies, starting in January 2017, in which publishers using ad formats that interfere with the user experience, such as pop-ups and standalone interstitials, will be penalized with lower Google rankings. Plus, Google charges advertisers more for serving “heavy” ads.Speeding up load time doesn’t just improve the ad experience for consumers — it dramatically affects ad viewability, according to new research from Thunder, a programmatic creative platform (disclosure: my company).The data show that the lightest ads have the highest viewability, at 52 percent to 70 percent. In ads under 50KB, there is a 3 per…

For email service providers (ESP), getting the email delivered to an inbox is the central metric.To help boost these capabilities, New York City-based ESP Return Path announced this week it has purchased San Diego, California-based Email Copilot. Return Path sees itself as a leader in deliverability, and offers a Deliverability Benchmark report.The Copilot, founded in 2011, provides real-time monitoring, reporting, and analysis of deliverability info, presented as a “dynamic visualization.” Terms of the deal were not announced.[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

via Marketing Land

A year after introducing Story Explorer as a way for people to view the events documented in Live Stories from many different angles, Snapchat is narrowing its aperture.Snapchat has removed the Story Explorer feature from its Live Stories, a Snapchat spokesperson confirmed. The discontinued feature may be as much a victim of its own tangled user experience as of Snapchat’s heightened editorial efforts around Live Stories.When Snapchat introduced Story Explorer in November 2015, CEO Evan Spiegel described it as a way to “provide depth” to its Live Stories, which stitch together the snaps people publicly post from live events, such as music festivals and sports games, into a “like you were there” stream. If Live Stories were Snapchat’s version of a live(-ish) TV production, Story Explorer was like putting people in the control room, which was the feature’s promise and maybe its problem. Within a few weeks of Story Explorer’s introduction, Snapchat arranged a deal with the NFL to use it i…

If you’re trying to repair your personal reputation online, chances are you have already figured out that you might need one or more websites devoted to your name to help displace something negative in the search results. Beyond setting up YourName.com, what other options are there? Here are a few secrets that may help you get the search results all shiny again with less effort!As part of good, proactive online reputation management and personal branding, I advise that everyone should own the basic “YourName.com” domain, particularly if one’s name is unique. If your name is common, like “John Smith,” it may not require as much proactive concern, but it would still be useful and recommended to set yourself up with a domain that features your proper name.Some use this as a place to park their resumes online, and I’ve seen people simply redirect their proper name domains to their LinkedIn profiles or Facebook pages. If you ever run into a hater or a crazy person, you ought to own your na…

Netflix has just snagged its best feature ever, yes the most popular streaming service has now got an offline feature which obviously lets you download shows to watch it later. Netflix has announced this feature and claims that it will cover “many of your favorite streaming series and movies.” The feature is currently limited mostly Netflix originals and thankfully Netflix has segregated the downloadable shows separately, you know just so that you don’t have to skim through every title to figure out if it’s downloadable.This is indeed huge, Netflix users can now watch downloaded shows while traveling or even when they are stuck in a routine subway commute. The significance of this feature is only more pronounced in a country like India wherein reliable and high-speed internet in public places is yet to be realized. All you need to do to get the feature is to simply update the app from either the Playstore or the Apple Store. The shows can be downloaded in two qualities, Standard and H…

Amazon’s aggressive pricing and promotion of it own hardware products made them top sellers over the past holiday weekend. According to a release out from the company, Amazon had its “best-ever holiday shopping weekend for devices.”Amazon, which doesn’t disclose precise sales figures, said that the “Echo Dot, Amazon Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, Fire tablet, and Amazon Echo were  . . . the best-selling products from any manufacturer in any category across all of Amazon.” It reported that “millions of Alexa devices” were sold.According to a pre-holiday analysis from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), Amazon has sold roughly 5 million Echo devices in the US since the Echo’s launch in 2014. CIRP also says that Amazon has roughly 65 million US Prime members, who spend an average $1,200 per year on Amazon. A separate analysis found that 30 percent of Prime customers order from Amazon every week.According to several studies Amazon is the top search engine for products.…

When it comes to buying a phone on a limited budget, there are many things that make a difference. Right from the availability to battery performance to build. Since two years now, the budget smartphone category has grown stiff in competition, especially with the Chinese giants selling millions of handsets online, but then what good a phone is if you have a hard time buying it.Today, we are taking a look at Xiaomi’s popular Redmi 3S vs Lenovo’s Moto E3 Power. Priced almost same, the difference is substantial, and if you have a hard time figuring out, the details will help.AvailabilityBefore we go ahead, and deep dive into the finer details, availability of any device plays a major role. Even though Xiaomi phones have broken records on selling millions of handsets, grabbing one in flash sale is not easy for many. On the other hand, Moto E3 Power is readily available on Flipkart. Having said that, the demand for Redmi 3S has subsided in recent times and credit to Xiaomi for keeping up w…

When it comes time to launch a new product, the majority of marketers in the US, the UK, and Australia are now turning to social media.Five by Five, a marketing communications firm that specializes in product launches, polled more than 700 marketers in these countries and found that nearly three-quarters (74%) of them consider social media to be the highest-priority medium to promote new products.Sales promotions and email were the second and third most popular launch marketing medium, respectively.According to Five by Five creative director Martin Flavin:“Social media has become the most important way to generate buzz for new products and services before they appear. Shareable content and social engagement allow brands to create a groundswell of pre-launch interest in a way no other channel can match.”Social media is now more popular a launch marketing medium than PR/press, television and direct mail.Is social enough?Social’s popularity among marketers for product launches isn’t just…

Coolpad has now launched two new budget smartphones, dubbed Note 3S and Mega 3 in India today. While the Coolpad Note 3S is the successor to the company’s Note 3 launched last year, the Mega 3 aims to draw attention of consumers with the inclusion of a third SIM slot. The smartphones will go on sale via Amazon starting December 7.The Coolpad Note 3S and Mega 3 incidentally shares the same footprint as both the devices share a 5.5-inch HD display upfront. That said, Coolpad has carried forward the same 5.5 inch HD (1280x720p) IPS display from the last gen Note 3 to their recently launched Note 3S. The Chinese firm has however played around with the externals of the Coolpad Note 3S, and has made use of glossy plastic shell in place of the matte plastic polycarbonate shell found in the last generation Note. Under the hood, the Coolpad Note 3S packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor this time around. In fact, it sports a Snapdragon 415 octa core chip with cores clocked at 1.36GHz each. This…

Earlier this year Asus has launched the Zenfone 3, Zenfone 3 Deluxe and the Zenfone 3 Ultra at the Computex 2016. The Zenfone 3 Deluxe was, in fact, the first phone to be powered by the Snapdragon 821. While Asus had made the Zenfone 3 available after the launch the Indian buyers had to wait for a while for the other two. Today Asus has announced the availability of Zenfone 3 Deluxe (ZS570KL) and the Zenfone 3 Ultra (ZU680KL) in India priced at Rs 62,999 and Rs 49,999 respectively.Zenfone 3 Deluxe Specifications5.7-inch FHD Display, Corning Gorilla 4Snapdragon 820/821 with 6GB RAM23-Megapixel Primary sensor with Sapphire cover, 6-element largan lens, OIS. 8-Megapixel Secondary Sensor with 85-degree wide angle lensFingerprint sensor, NXP Audio amplifier and Hi Res HD audio supportAndroid Marshmallow with ZenUI 3.03000mAh battery with Qualcomm QuickCharge 3.0 SupportWi-Fi 802.11, LTE Cat 13, Bluetooth 4.2, hybrid SIM slot and WiFi repeater capabilityZenfone 3 Deluxe comes equipped with …

With social media reach and engagement rates having dipped so precipitously over the last year or so, paying to play is the only option for most brands now.But what about businesses and brands that can’t afford to advertise on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like? Not everyone is willing, never mind able, to carve out the budget necessary to keep their content in front of a critical mass of relevant followers on a regular basis.Those organizations can be particularly creative or incredibly persistent, but the most effective strategy they can embrace may be to get all hands on deck in the form of an employee advocacy program.Of course, to go in this direction, every team member needs to be on board with their new tack, despite an abundance of reasons to be uncooperative, unknowingly or not.Employers need their employees working together toward the same goal if this social media strategy is to be effective. And in many cases, that’s just not going to happen anytime soon without prop…

While on one end, Samsung’s flagship side of things is going quiet for the year, the budget segment is only getting busier. With a range of phones in the On, J and C series, Samsung has been making all possible combinations with the specs to push the phones. And why not, it’s working for them! In the recent IDC reports for smartphones sales in India for 2016, Samsung has a healthy share of around 20%. Following up on the recently launched J7 Prime with just an addition or two on it, Samsung launched the Galaxy On Nxt in their Galaxy line up. This phone does bring some changes which we liked but coming at a price of little more than Rs 18,000, does the Galaxy On Nxt justify itself? And how does it perform as compared to many others out there that come at a much lesser price? Regardless of you being a Samsung fan, read on as you make your purchase decisions as we roll out our full review.If it is a Samsung Galaxy, it has to look like one! And the Galaxy On Nxt doesn’t stray too far from…