Denny |
February 20, 2014
This recent news development will bring the latter company’s platform to a close on March 30.
In a recent news posting on the Distill website, it has announced that it has been acquired by Yahoo, in a move that many in the industry are assuming that has a great deal more to do with obtaining the mobile marketing talent from that company anything much else.
The platform for the company will remain fully operational through March 30.
The Distill service had been in a private beta phase and had been working with companies such as Box and Disney. Now, Yahoo has purchased this startup, which has come up with a collaborative system based on video, which is targeted at hiring technical talent. However, instead of putting that approach to use for drawing their own engineers, Yahoo plans to shut down the company altogether and simply hire the leading engineers who worked there in order to work on mobile marketing development.
The terms of this acquisition (which is also seen as a mobile marketing deal) have not yet been released.
About five months ago, Distill had just finished securing investments worth $1.3 million and had developed and created a system that made it possible for a potential new hire, such as an engineer, to be interviewed through a video conversation comparable to Skype. What made it stand out from a standard video conversation is that it could provide programming challenges to the candidate during the interview, itself.
Therefore if the interviewee was, for example, a graphic designer, then the video interview would be able to include a collaborative walk through of a portfolio so that its contents could then be discussed.
As the interview can be scheduled online and the prospect is sent a direct link in order to “meet” with the prospective employer, there is no need for exchanging user names or other contact details.
The engineers from Distill, who will now be working for the purpose of mobile marketing at Yahoo, have also worked on other major projects such as Tapjoy, which is a smartphone ad platform that is performance based.
Shoppers are making it clear that when it comes to shopping and buying, larger screens are king.
The latest development that has been becoming increasingly clear when it comes to mobile marketing news is that it is actually tablet commerce that is taking the hearts of shoppers, more than that occurring over smartphones.
Last year saw a doubling of overall mobile sales, bringing them to a striking $60 billion.
A report has just been issued by Javelin Strategy & Research, called “Mobile Payments Market: Tablet Shopping Surges as Mobile Retail Sales Top $60 Billion.” Within it, the trend toward tablet commerce was underscored, as it was evident that consumers appreciate the larger screen device for their shopping experience.
This trend toward tablet commerce shopping could be important insight for retailers.
The report reveals findings through surveys of 3,492 consumers that were conducted in June 2012, as well as the survey of an another 3,285 people last year in July. Yet another 3,509 people were also surveyed in November 2013 in order to generate the data seen in this research.
Executive vice president and research director of mobile at Javelin Research, Mary Monahan, explained that the mobile payments market has been surveyed by her company for about six years now, but that it has only been for the last two years that they have compiled historical trend data. The reason is that the survey in 2012, the questions on the survey were changed, making it so that the results from previous years could not be compared other than to an anecdotal level.
The survey results from 2013 showed a solid distinction in which retailers can find important insight, said Monahan. She pointed out that consumers are choosing tablet commerce to an increasing degree when they are shopping online on mobile devices. She stated that “Tablets played a dominant role in mobile shopping this year, accounting for approximately one-half of all mobile sales.”
Last year, tablets brought in $28.7 billion in mcommerce, which is five times the total of $5.1 billion that had been brought in the year before. Considering the level of penetration that smartphones have when compared to that of their larger screen counterparts, this figure is very interesting and shows that consumers find that tablet commerce offers something above and beyond what their cell phones are providing.
