Tag: mobile technology

New WeChat feature could put a new twist on mobile advertisements

Tencent, one of China’s largest Internet and e-commerce organizations, has held a commanding and lucrative place in the mobile space for some time, but the company is eager to find yet more success therein and beat back competition coming from companies like Alibaba. Tencent has launched a new service for its popular WeChat application that may take mobile marketing to a new level and make mobile ads more attractive and valuable to certain businesses.

Tencent aims to mimic the marketing success that social media platforms have seen through marketing

Social media marketing has long been a very powerful way to engage consumers due to the fact that so many people use social media platforms on a daily basis. For Facebook and Twitter, marketing is a primary revenue stream. For Tencent, marketing could be yet another way to monetize its WeChat application, which is the most widely used social application in Asia.

New service allows companies to place advertisements on the social pages of their competitors

Tencent’s new WeChat service allows companies with verified WeChat accounts to pay fees to have their advertisements placed on the social pages of other companies. The revenue collected by these fees will be split between Tencent and the companies that will be hosting the advertisements. Advertisers will be able to target specific demographics through this new service, meaning that WeChat users will see ads based on their interests, age, gender, and location.

Tencent manages to successfully monetize app through mobile commerce

Tencent has already successfully monetized its WeChat app through allowing it to serve as a mobile commerce platform. The app can be used to pay for certain goods and service, as long as the company selling these goods and services supports mobile payments. By involving itself in the mobile marketing field, Tencent may be able to make itself more attractive to companies and not just consumers. This could help Tencent compete with Alibaba in the mobile space. Both companies have taken a strong position in the market, seeking dominance among a consumer base that is becoming increasingly mobile-centric.

This hiring only adds a larger amount of certainty that Apple is indeed pouring itself into wearable tech.

The latest technology news with regards to the iWatch is now crossing over with the announcement that Nike made earlier this year that it would be downsizing its Fuelband team as it changed its focus from having been on hardware toward software, instead.

This caused many to believe that the Fuelband would soon be finished, but it opened up an opportunity for Apple.

At the same time that nobody seems to know whether or not Nike will be moving ahead with its own wearable technology, Apple appears to be snatching up the former members of the Fuelband team and many are justifiably assuming that those individuals are being added to the experts working on the so called iWatch. The latest in hiring in this field has included two of the execs that had been a part of the efforts for the fitness band, and who are likely now placing their focus on the first smartwatch from the iPhone maker.

The two new members to the assumed iWatch team include Jon Gale and Ryan Bailey formerly of Nike Fuelband.

These two experts in mobile technology is only helping to add more fuel to the very powerful fire regarding rumors of a smartwatch that the industry believes will be released by Apple as early as October of this year. As is the policy of that electronics company, no official announcements or confirmations have been made regarding the device, as they never speak to any future developments until the official unveiling.

That said, the types of announcements that Apple has made, in combination with the patents that have been purchased and the type of hiring that they have done has made it so that there is little doubt left that some form of device in the wearables category is on its way.

Gale had been a Senior Firmware Engineer on the Nike team and has now been hired by Apple as a Sensing Systems Engineer. Bailey was at Nike as a Senior Test and Validation Engineer but is now a Mechanical Design Engineer at Apple. Both are presumably working on the iWatch.