Facebook F8 App Confirms Messenger As A Platform, Parse For IoT

A notification just sent out by the official app for Facebook’s F8 conference later today reads “The Garage and Demo areas are now open! Just revealed: Parse for IoT, Messenger as a Platform, and the Teleportation Station.”

[Update: Facebook just launched its Messenger Platform. Learn what it does from our article here.]

The alert seen by Multiple peopleseems to indicate that Facebook will reveal a version of its mobile app building suite Parse for “Internet Of Things” devices. It also appears to confirm our scoop from last week that Facebook will announce a Messenger platform at F8. We reached out to Facebook about the exact meaning of the notification, and the company has “nothing to add on this.” Pointedly, no denial or note that this is a hoax.

Facebook previously said that all its major products would see announcements at F8, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, along with Parse and Messenger. Judging by the notification’s text, it may have accidentally been sent early when it should have gone out mid-day tomorrow after the F8 keynote from 10am-11am PST when the major product announcements will be made.

Last week, we reported that Facebook will be announcing at F8 that it plans to turn Messenger into a platform for other services, with an early focus on content. New sources say that Messenger and its platform will be one of the main concentrations of F8.

 

But the Parse information is an interesting development we haven’t heard about yet.

If this is actually an accidental but legit Facebook message, it points to the company yet again expanding its horizons to consider how and where it could enable communications between people beyond its core Facebook platform.

The acquisition of Oculus VR (more on that below) was one sign of how Facebook has been looking to expand that idea to new platforms and devices. But Facebook’s contemplation of IoT is not new, with execs at the company wondering aloud back in 2013 about where Facebook’s social graph could fit into a wider network of connected objects.

(And I’d argue that moves like making Messenger into a platform are signs that Facebook is not exactly as tied to the concept of sharing with your wider social graph in a public way as it used to be.)

Parse, too, has been dabbling with the idea of IoT for a while, although not directly. You can see how and why this would make perfect sense and use of the Parse framework. And potentially, it could position Facebook to provide a development layer for the explosion of connected hardware that we are seeing these days.

As for the teleportation?

One thing we can think of is that Facebook is taking its Oculus VR activities up a notch, and inviting developers to come along on the journey. Facebook has been widely demonstrating the capabilities of the new Crescent Bay edition of the VR headhead over the last several months at different events. And given that today is actually the one-year anniversary of the acquisition, this could be a ripe moment to open up the platform to more input from developers.

(There is also a more prosaic option: the “teleportation” hinted at here could refer to developers having a better way of simulating apps. I hope it’s the other thing, though.)

What do you think the stray F8 message is about? Let us know in the comments below.

Facebook F8 App Confirms Messenger As A Platform, Parse For IoT

Nanigans Raises $24M To Fuel Asian Growth And Expand Its Ad Tools Beyond Facebook

Leading Facebook ad company Nanigans is announcing that it has raised $24 million in Series B funding.

In this case, it’s is taking money from a big Asian investor — Chinese Internet company Cheetah Mobile. (Cheetah led the round, while Avalon Ventures and Wellington Management Company also participated.) Naturally, one of the goals is to accelerate Nanigans’ growth in that region.

Nanigans co-founder and CEO Ric Calvillo noted that the company already has an Asia-Pacific office in Singapore that’s doing “pretty well.” He also suggested that there’s still a particularly large opportunity in China — even though Facebook is still blocked by China’s “great firewall,” Calvillo said Chinese businesses are advertising on the social network to reach audiences outside China.

Until now, Nanigans had raised just under $9 million in funding — not much, when you consider that it currently manages $500 million in annualized ad spend, and has offices in New York, San Francisco, London, and Sydney, plus its headquarters in Boston and the aforementioned Singapore team. Calvillo said the company has been “essentially bootstrapped” thus far, covering its costs by building a profitable services business around its ad-buying technology.

Less than a year ago, however, the company began to switch from the default ad business plan (offering additional services and charging a commission on ad spend) to a software-as-a-service model. At this point, Calvillo said about 70 percent of Nanigans’ customers have moved to an annual subscription, and by the end of June, it should be up to 100 percent.

Why the shift? Well, Calvillo described the SaaS model, particularly one with a yearlong commitment, as “a litmus test” that determines whether customers are really buying the technology or just viewing you as “a glorified agency.” If you can convince customers to make the switch, then you’ve got more reliable revenue, and you’re valued more highly by investors — in fact, Calvillo said the transition was “what allowed us to do the round.”

And yes, while discussing the move, Calvillo repeatedly referred to Wall Street, so before I had to ask, he went ahead and addressed the IPO question: “If we’re going to do a round of funding and possibly a public offering two or three years from now, we need a strategy that works for a public company — and that has to be a SaaS model.”

Nanigans will also be expanding its tools beyond Facebook, a process that began last fall when the company added support for Twitter-owned MoPub. Calvillo said Nanigans clients have asked to use the company’s ad optimization and analytics technology with other types of advertising, both in display and social media.

Still, he pointed to a challenge in moving to new ad channels — ad-buying is often “siloed” between different teams within each company. So even if there’s an advantage in having one product to manage all of your digital ad spend, it also has to be “best of breed” in each category. He also emphasized that as Nanigans expands, its “number one priority” will continue to be improving the Facebook product and keeping up with shifts in Facebook’s ad platform.

“That’s why it’s taken us so long to be multi-channel — they have a very high bar,” Calvillo said.

Nanigans Raises $24M To Fuel Asian Growth And Expand Its Ad Tools Beyond Facebook

Determinazione Juve: obiettivo semifinale Champions

Il primo round è andato, la Juventus è riuscita a conquistare la vittoria nel match d’andata contro il Monaco valevole per i quarti di finale di Champions League. Chi immaginava che avremmo assistito ad una partita piuttosto semplice per i ragazzi di Allegri ha dovuto ricredersi ben presto. La squadra francese non è arrivata per caso a questo punto, ha una difesa piuttosto solida ed i suoi contropiedisti anche se giovani sono molto pericolosi. Ne sa qualcosa Buffon che ha dovuto compiere un autentico miracolo ad inizio partita su Ferreira Carrasco. In queste competizioni oltre a commettere meno errori possibili gioca un ruolo fondamentale anche la fortuna. E sicuramente la fortuna martedì sera ha girato dalla parte dei bianconeri visto che il fallo di Carvalho su Morata, in cui l’arbitro ha concesso il rigore, non era esattamente in area. Piccola svista che ha permesso alla Juve di portare a casa la vittoria di misura grazie alla rete di Arturo Vidal, il redivivo Vidal che sta pian piano ritrovando la forma migliore.

Nella gara di ritorno allo Stadio Luis II i bianconeri dovranno offrire una prova di sicuro più convincente, sulla falsariga di quella vista nel return match contro il Borussia Dortmund in cui si sono imposti con un perentorio 3-0. Non sarà facile per la Juventus, servirà grande concentrazione e spirito di abnegazione per conquistare le semifinali di Champions che mancano da oltre un decennio. Ci credono i tifosi bianconeri e per questo motivo i biglietti per la trasferta di Montecarlo sono stati spolverizzati in poche ore. Per fortuna, facendo un giro sul web, c’è ancora qualche sito che permette di acquistare i tagliandi per questa partitissima. Per chi volesse seguire dal vivo la partita tra Monaco e Juventus può comprare qui il biglietto.

Secondo voi la Juve riuscirà nell’impresa di agguantare la qualificazione al turno successivo? indubbiamente la vittoria conquistata allo Juventus Stadium è un buon inizio, ma mercoledì prossimo dovrà scendere in campo meno timorosa per non commettere errori tecnici che possono costare parecchio. Staremo a vedere quel che accadrà. Una cosa è certa, rivedere una squadra italiana in semifinale di Champions League sarebbe una gran cosa per l’intero movimento calcistico italiano che ormai tra troppi anni è in declino.

Determinazione Juve: obiettivo semifinale Champions

Giphy + Messenger, Giphy’s First Mobile App, Brings GIF Search To Facebook Messenger

Giphy has launched its own app called Giphy + Messenger that integrates directly with Facebook Messenger.

With the expansion of Facebook Messenger into its own developer platform, as announced today at F8, Giphy joins a few exclusive apps that will debut on the new platform. In other words, Facebook Messenger just got very Giphy.

Giphy is a betaworks-backed GIF search engine that has raised more than $23.9 million in funding by transforming a searchable GIF database into its own platform, where publishers can utilize GIFs more easily and messenger apps (like Slack) can tap an API to offer GIFs directly within their own apps.

With today’s launch, however, Giphy is building its app off of Facebook’s platform instead of the other way around.

“We built out iOS and Android apps because they allow us to own and share our brand,” said COO Adam Leibsohn. “They’re also perfectly aligned with the platform ethos that Facebook and the Messenger team are building. And our apps make sure hundreds of millions of people get to know and love Giphy, all of our awesome GIF content and our GIF search.”

Users who download the Giphy + Messenger app will be able to search through Giphy’s entire database, choose a particular GIF, and insert that GIF directly into Facebook Messenger with a single tap. Facebook Messenger Platform gives attribution to the apps that integrate with it, meaning that all Giphy GIFs in Facebook Messenger will have a little Giphy logo on the bottom.

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Giphy recently acquired Nutmeg, a Gif messenger app, as its first public step toward mobile. CEO and cofounder Alex Chung said at the time that the company would be launching its own mobile apps soon, so today’s launch with the Facebook Messenger Platform makes sense.

Giphy + Messenger is exclusive to Facebook Messenger, but Chung says that there will be more Giphy apps that integrate with other platforms coming soon. And with the recent acquisition of Nutmeg, which lets people easily send GIFs in iMessage and SMS specifically, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Giphy more directly integrated with iMessage sometime in the near future, though Chung declined to comment on the specifics of future apps.

Giphy + Messenger is available on both iOS and Android.

Giphy + Messenger, Giphy’s First Mobile App, Brings GIF Search To Facebook Messenger

Facebook’s New Comments Plugin Syncs Conversations Between Sites And FB Pages

Facebook unveiled a new commenting system at F8 today that should help keep conversations in sync across FB itself, on brand pages and on sites that use its embedded comments. The revamped commenting from FB now lets you see comments both on the web pages where they appear, and on links shared on FB itself, and also see replies made in either place across both essentially in real-time.

The unification of comments on both sites using them and their Facebook pages should help social platform managers track conversations more easily. It might help address some of the complaints people have about FB comment spam, since the comments will now populate in both locations and could have posters thinking twice about what they offer up.

Replies that appear in multiple places at once should also help drive greater engagement, and bring in potential new audiences that are seeing the conversation in one place but otherwise might not be aware of it.

The new commenting tools are currently in testing with Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and a number of other publishers ahead of a wider launch.

Facebook’s New Comments Plugin Syncs Conversations Between Sites And FB Pages

Facebook Will Now Let You Embed Facebook Videos On Other Sites

Facebook wants to be your source for everything — whether or not you’re actually on Facebook.

Today at F8, Facebook introduced the ability to embed Facebook videos on other websites.

While you’ve been able to upload your videos to Facebook for ages, embedding them anywhere else was a bit of a pain. You could tear through the video player’s source code and try to get something working — but in most cases, it was easier to just turn to YouTube.

Now you just click the “embed” button and get a blurp of code, much like what you’d expect to see in any of the myriad video hosting sites. Paste that code into your blog, and the Facebook-hosted video should pop right up.

It’s a small, but clever move. Want to upload something to Facebook, but also want it on your blog? Generally, that meant uploading it once to Facebook, and once to something like YouTube. Now, you’ll only need Facebook — and Facebook will be the one getting those oh-so-important video views.

Facebook Will Now Let You Embed Facebook Videos On Other Sites

Facebook Announces Analytics For Apps

As if turning Facebook Messenger into a platform and laying the groundwork for virtual reality video on the News Feed weren’t enough, Facebook just announced Analytics for Apps, a new tool for marketers who want to better target campaigns based on aggregated social data.

Available today, Analytics for Apps gives you a web dashboard that lets you see a cross-platform look at how your apps are performing in terms of audience engagement and conversion rates.

In an example on stage at F8, Facebook demonstrated how a company could compare how marketing campaigns were performing across different demographics. Instead of looking at who simply clicked on an ad in Facebook, you’ll be able to see how far different groups got in the sales process, so you could change your strategy to introduce more products that might appeal to a lagging group or focus on the demographic that requires the least effort to land a conversion.

The move bolsters the value Facebook provides to marketers, who already heavily rely on the company’s ads to get users into their phone and tablet apps as well as to get them back after that first install. It’ll be interesting to see how this new analytics platform does compared to Mixpanel, which just raised $65 million back in December, and Yahoo’s recently-announced Mobile Development Suite.

Facebook Announces Analytics For Apps

With New Support For Mobile Ads, Facebook’s LiveRail Isn’t Just For Video Anymore

Facebook is expanding LiveRail, the video ad platform that it acquired last year, with support for non-video mobile ads.

Facebook’s Deb Liu announced the new features today while on-stage at the company’s F8 developer conference. Basically, it means that mobile publishers will be able to manage a variety of mobile ad types from within LiveRail and also improve the targeting using Facebook’s anonymized data — Liu pitched this as a way to extend the company’s “people-based approach to monetization.”

You can find more details in posts on the Facebook and LiveRail blogs. Facebook says that LiveRail will support both native ads (where the ads are formatted to resemble the content) and more traditional units like banners and interstitials. The company says:

Starting soon, we’ll be enabling better control, efficiency, and higher yield across video and mobile display formats. This will allow publishers to manage and optimize yield across all of their advertising opportunities, including ads directly sold to advertisers and ads from programmatic sources like demand side platforms (DSPs), ad networks, and agency trading desks. Advanced controls will allow publishers to prioritize buyers, block certain ad categories, run real-time reports, and get suggestions for optimal inventory pricing.

Both Bloomberg and Ad Age had reported that something like this was in the works, suggesting that this turns LiveRail into a competitor for both Google and Twitter-owned MoPub.

Facebook says it will start testing these new capabilities in the next few weeks.

Update: To get more context around the announcement, I spoke to Elizabeth Closmore, global head of product evangelism, strategy, and partnerships at social media company Sprinklr. Describing this as “a very bold move,” Closmore suggested that this could also lay the groundwork for the reported deals to host content from news publishers like The New York Times and BuzzFeed.

“I certainly think they’re related,” she said.

What’s the connection? Well, Closmore noted that the main reason publishers would make these deals would in the hopes of increasing their reach. The expanded Liverail could increase their reach further still  (albeit in the form of advertising), into “a massive netowrk desktop apps and mobile apps.”

Similarly, Closmore said today’s announcements (not just the LiveRail news but Facebook’s new support for embedding Facebook videos on other sites) should be a boon for Sprinklr clients, giving them more capabilities to take their Facebook content and campaigns beyond Facebook itself.

With New Support For Mobile Ads, Facebook’s LiveRail Isn’t Just For Video Anymore

Facebook’s Parse Launches New IoT Service, Debugging Tool And More

Parse, the platform-as-a-service company Facebook acquired in 2013, today revealed a couple of new features at Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco: Parse for IoT, Enhanced Sessions to improve app security, support for React and a new debugging tool.

Out of these, the IoT announcement would have come as quite a surprise if Facebook hadn’t spoiled its own announcement thanks to an errant notification from its conference app last night.

As Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar noted during the F8 keynote this morning, Parse started out as a mobile backend service, but as more and more devices come online, the service also wants to offer services for the Internet of Things. The first step here is the launch of an SDK for Arduino, but Parse also plans to launch SDKs for other platforms.

Moving into the Internet of Things is a smart move for the service. It pretty much offers a comprehensive backend service for mobile apps already (which is what it started out as, after all), but IoT offers a logical next step for the service, even though this may seem like a stretch for Facebook at first. Parse isn’t the first service to offer an IoT platform, of course. Others in this space include industry heavyweights like IBM and Citrix, as well as the likes of Arrayent, SeeControl and others.

In addition, Parse announced support for the React JavaScript library, which now makes it easier for React developers to access and store data from Parse. Also new are Cloud Webhooks and a new debugging tool that makes it easier for developers to keep track of issues with their API requests. On the security front, Parse is launching new Enhanced Sessions, which gives developers more control over data security.

The service is also launching a new version of its SDK today to support these new features.

Facebook’s Parse Launches New IoT Service, Debugging Tool And More

Facebook’s Messenger Platform Preserves WhatsApp’s Clarity Of Purpose

We demystified it last month, but Facebook’s $18 billion acquisition of WhatsApp should begin to make more sense to people today after the company announced that its Messenger service will become a platform for third parties — as TechCrunch first reported last week.

The Messenger Platform will allow developers to deeplink their apps into Messenger, and it will also become a communications channel for businesses and customers. These moves aren’t a huge surprise — they’ve been pioneered by Line and WeChat in Asia for years, and Facebook’s head of Messenger, David Marcus, gave plenty of hints in an interview with Wired last year. But, while the tech industry chews on the immediate implications, the path for WhatsApp is clearer than ever.

If Facebook is a platform (which it now is), then WhatsApp will continue to be a communications utility. WhatsApp’s simplicity is the yin to the yang of Messenger’s busy platform.

Facebook wants to reinvent how you interact with businesses — notifications/communications via Messenger not email pic.twitter.com/QemAhdgmx0

— Jon Russell (@jonrussell) March 25, 2015

“No ads, no games, and no gimmicks” has long been the ethos for WhatsApp’s founders, who instead stick to the business of connecting people. Initially that was via free messages — WhatsApp has eclipsed SMS in volume — and now it includes voice calls, which are slowly rolling out on Android devices first.

A note from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, via Sequoia Capital

If Facebook didn’t have Messenger — or WhatsApp had remained independent — there would be pressure to introduce games, business-consumer messaging or other features that are money spinners in Asia and way more lucrative than WhatsApp’s $1 per year subscription. (Though, for what it’s worth, I’ve not paid a cent for my three years using it.)

However, with Messenger adopting the platform approach and offering a more interactive experience, WhatsApp can be its antithesis and focus on basic communication.

There’s an argument that Facebook will bring WhatsApp under the Messenger Platform umbrella over time, which is easy to say when you consider that the service has 700 million monthly active users. But there’s likely a vast overlap between that user base and the 600 million that Facebook says use Messenger; duplicating features across the two would make no sense.

There’s also a strong case to offer a simplified chat app option. WhatsApp’s core strength is its ease of use. There needs to be a channel for users like my mum who don’t want bells and whistles, or those using low-end devices or spotty mobile internet connections.

Yes, WhatsApp may not make the kind of revenue per user as Messenger if it stays simple, but I’m willing to bet that Facebook is happier to have it as a differentiated experience that keeps non-Messenger users inside the Facebook ecosystem in some form. That’s better than losing them to a rival service. Besides, more subtle monetization options may be forthcoming for WhatsApp in the future.

Update: WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton told a panel at Facebook’s F8 group that “[Messenger] Platform is not top-of-mind for us.” WhatsApp is focused on product development, he added.

Facebook’s Messenger Platform Preserves WhatsApp’s Clarity Of Purpose

Tinder Hack Matches Unaware Straight Men, Odd Conversations Ensue

Flirting can be hard, especially through a screen. But these guys never had a chance, considering they were chatting with other heterosexual male users as part of a clever technological ruse.

A hack on Tinder isn’t anything new. More tech-savvy folks have actually dug into the app to automatically swipe right on every potential match, and then there are all the marketers that are tricking folks into chatting with a brand instead of a human.

But the Verge reports that a hacker recently set up a program that would use female dummy accounts to put heterosexual men into conversations with each other. Using Tinder’s API, the programmer was able to channel messages from one unknowing man to another, with both parties in the conversation believing instead that they were talking to a woman.

What ensued is… perfect.

Behold, my friends, that time all these straight guys were flirting with each other on Tinder:

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Tinder Hack Matches Unaware Straight Men, Odd Conversations Ensue