Category: Apps

It’s not all fun and games in social media

Posted on by Martin Newman

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but in the super-competitive world of social media the copycats go for the kill.

In digital, where the cost of developing products of your own is increasingly weighed up against that of simply mimicking someone else’s successful idea, a war is being waged over selfie filters.

At stake is the future of Facebook and Instagram, and the growing monopolies they control.

Because to stay relevant beyond the generation of millennials that have hoisted them up among the world’s most lucrative and influential companies they are desperate for a younger demographic.

Pioneered by Snapchat, filters (quirky, fun graphics superimposed on photos and videos) are in mobile phone terms the addictive equivalent to young people of making slime, collecting Shopkins or worshipping unicorns.

Four years ago Mark Zuckerberg offered $3 billion for the company in an “if you can’t beat them, buy them” approach, but was turned down. Since then things have turned nasty.

Evan Spiegel’s Snapchat app facially maps features and dubs them with moving graphics such as rabbit ears or sunglasses. Music and other special ­effects add to the variety.

They have been an enormous success for the company, recently valued at $30 billion, as were their “Stories” posts that lasted for 24 hours.

All of these features have been unashamedly imitated by their rivals.

Facebook and Instagram (which Facebook owns) even took the same name “Stories” for their daily picture and video collections. And by doing so they’ve eaten into Snapchat’s value and arrested its progress.

Instagram’s copycat filter has been so successful it boasts 200 million daily users, more than Snapchat’s.

Those waking up to Instagram’s new filters yesterday could not have failed to notice some appeared to be virtual copies of Snapchat.

As intellectual property rights expert Kimberlee Weatherall, from Sydney Uni’s law department, says: “No one gets to own a good idea.”

She added: “When it comes to competing over a great business idea there is no IP, no trademark, no Passing Off law that applies.”

But Snapchat isn’t the only trendsetter and ideas leader in the sights of Facebook and Instagram.

The company’s live video streaming functionality has already driven the originator, Meerkat, out of the market and blown its key competitor, Twitter’s Periscope, out of the water.

Using their enormous global audiences, Facebook and Instagram are increasingly flexing their muscles to drive competitors out of business and to even influence the news cycle.

Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have ­Cornered Culture, said yesterday: “Data is king… and they are in control of it.”

(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph)

Agile outcomes & keeping your place at the table: Lessons from HackFood 2015

Posted on by Martin Newman

It was late in the afternoon of Day 3 at HackFood 2015 that my moment of clarity pivoted for, what proved to be, the final time.

The weals on the back of the crumpled print-out of the lean canvas were testament to how often it had been ‘gone over’ and ‘last’ reckonings scratched out.

Our FoodieBuzz app had been socialled within an inch of its life, promos made and terminated and the pitch turned on its head from a platform for customer acquisition to customer retention.

Epiphanies generally strike once and are final, but when you keep turning inside out an idea, until a new beast emerges that is different enough to stand on its own, those moments arrange themselves in a thread made of compromises, insights and brutal reasoning.

Held at Fishburners in Sydney’s Ultimo by FoodTechAus, HackFood was a case in point – a mongrel dog of DIY and vision for sale.

The first food tech industry hackathon in Australia, it came with a rough agenda and loads of enthusiasm.

But anyone expecting coruscating wisdom to kickstart a new and unique product were set straight on the first night when a succession of similar pitches strained to uniquely distance themselves from products already in the marketplace.

The 24 60-second proposals on day one boiled down to 12 teams formed in a loose endosmosis of like minds, and by the end of that first evening one team (maybe the best) was already gone – Skipper Dan (direct-to-market seafood sourcing), hooked by one of the industry ‘observers’ that came along on the first night to find something that could be sold and spirit it off.

Most products took their cues from known applications. Old ideas repackaged, re-angled from impossible expectations to mundane reality. It was all about redefinition and agility in an industry still slow coming off its mark into a digital today.

By the end of the weekend Chewsr, a menu ordering app that narrows choice rather than expands on it, had won the taste test. A cattle temperature monitoring device and app to stop cows getting sick in container ships was the even more prosaic runner-up.

The lessons were clear: Small ideas not big, simplicity over complexity, the quickly achievable over the problematic, take what works and make it better, or different enough to find its own stream of custom.

The market, as often as not, is your competition and your rival may become your investor or your buyer.

Cannibalisation by established firms is the chief threat to this way of thinking but the ability to redefine your goals without flipping the logic behind them keeps your place at the table.

And in food tech that is the only game in town.