Want to catch up with what happened in the digital world this week? Our weekly Cheat Sheet fills you in on everything you missed while you scrambled to meet deadlines and put out fires.
Read about Twitter pushing into video and music, Google releasing updates for its YouTube app, Bing introducing its new “Pinit” button, Stipple optimizing e-commerce with a single image and Yahoo launching its new weather app.
1. Twitter plans to feature TV and music
With all the updates and changes that Twitter has been making lately, the most notable feature might be the potential application of video advertising on its social network. Twitter has been making efforts to partner with networks such as Viacom and NBCUniversal in order to incorporate streamed videos within its tweets. Content owners can benefit from this platform simply by finding a sponsor who will promote their content through a short video. The revenue that is generated from the video would be distributed between the content owner and Twitter. Another Twitter feature that is making its debut this week is Twitter #music. This new service will change the way people engage in music, as well as the way brands engage consumers by targeting keywords within a tweet. These new campaigns seem like they would only optimize audience interaction by providing more content, but it will be quite interesting to see what else Twitter has in store.
2. YouTube launches live streaming for iOS devices
Google has launched an updated version of its YouTube app for iOS, which now comes with live streaming capabilities. This is a pretty big deal for consumers who regularly use their mobile devices to watch TV content. YouTube offers a variety of live content ranging from the State of the Union Address to concerts like Coachella, which was held last weekend. In addition, the new app has a “Send to TV” function allowing users to queue up videos from their phones and watch them on their TVs. Google has recently worked on other initiatives, such as Super Sync Sports, to turn mobile devices into controllers for desktop experiences, which feed into the “Remote Possibilities” trend featured in our 2013 Trends Report.
3. Bing integrates Pinterest to image search
Microsoft has found a solution finding the original source of a high-resolution image to post onto Pinterest. Photos on Bing’s image search will now come with a standard “Pinit” button on the detail page that will automatically link back to the original, high-resolution source. Bing is making it simple for people to search for images within a specific website and pin images without having to install a separate bookmarking tool. While this is a fairly straightforward execution, we may start seeing Bing increasingly highlight Pinterest boards, or pins, within search queries.
4. Stipple expands its e-commerce capabilities with in-image stores
Stipple made it possible to embed e-commerce directly into images; now, it is launching a new feature — Stipple Shopping allowing brands to create a full online store within a single image. Stipple Shopping allows consumers to browse different images of a product, see related products and purchase right from the image. The in-image store integrates with the existing merchant database and purchase system to make the experience more seamless and help shoppers feel more confident in making a purchase.
5. Yahoo reveals its pretty iOS weather app
This week, Yahoo released a beautifully designed weather app for the world to see. The new application seems to focus on displaying content in a very simplistic way. A user initially sees the current temperature, local time, high and low temperatures of the day, as well as an up-to-date weather description of what it’s currently like outside. Users can view crowdsourced photos of a city’s climate and gather more information from the app by simply scrolling down the screen. Compared to the other apps that Yahoo has released, this new weather app just might make the sun shine.
