Twitter buys Stories Template Maker Chroma Labs

Twitter has acquired California-based Chroma Labs that develops tools for short-form Video and photo creation and was founded by seven Facebook and Instagram workers in 2018.

The Chroma Stories app lets users fill in stylish layout templates and frames for posting collages and more to Instagram Stories, Snapchat and more. According to Sensor Tower, nearly 615,000 people have installed the Chroma Stories app. During the past year, Chroma Labs has enabled creators and businesses around the world to create millions of stories with the Chroma Stories app.

Chroma Labs' co-founders include Instagram 'Boomerang' inventor John Barnett, CTO Alex Li, who was an engineering manager on Facebook Photos and Instagram Stories, and Joshua Harris who was a product design manager on Facebook's augmented reality team. With Chroma Stories, users can choose between retro filters, holiday-themed frames and collage templates.

Twitter acquires Lightwell

Twitter’s ongoing, long-term efforts to make conversations easier to follow and engage with on its platform is getting a boost with the company’s latest acquihire. The company has picked up the team behind Lightwell, a startup that built a set of developer tools to build interactive, narrative apps.

Lightwell says that its toolset, which previously required a subscription, will be made available for free this week as part of the acquisition. Users won’t need to login or create an account, and they’ll be able to layout, prototype, and export to iOS without a plan. Published apps built with Lightwell won’t be affected, but the team notes that it’ll no longer actively support or add new features to Lightwell.

In recent months, Twitter has redoubled its efforts to make conversations among users easier to follow on its platform — and less toxic. Within its invite-only prototype mobile app, Twitter, it’s implemented new visuals intended to make replies more distinguishable from strung-together tweets, along with timelines connecting replies to other users within larger threads.

The company Hullabalu developed Lightwell software to create an original story series for children called The Adventures of Pan, which became a top seller in over 38 countries and racked up millions of downloads. Lightwell enables designers to create and ship animations across devices without developers having to recreate them by hand in Apple’s Xcode development environment, with support for properties like ambient motion, rotation, layout constraints, and scroll views as well as screen transitions and audio mapping.

Twitter to acquire ZipDial

Micro blog and social network service Twitter is in talks to buy Bangalore based startup ZipDial. The deal is said to be closed to $30 Million- $40 Million. ZipDial offers a unique marketing solution where consumers can give missed calls to a number to engage with an advertising brand. If the deal works out, ZipDial would be Twitter’s first acquisition in India.

The basic functionality of this startup revolves around people who call numbers, but hang up before the call is answered. This simple alert then becomes the basic for a number of other, commercial actions, and analytics to track everything. This proves beneficial to Twitter, who can try to engage with users who do not log into Twitter. ZipDial founded by Valarie Wagoner, Amiya Pathak, and Sanjay Swamy in 2010, has been working with Twitter for a while.

In past, it entered into a partnership with Twitter India to allow those without the Internet or smartphone to follow superstars by giving a missed call to a particular number. User could later engage with the actor by “tweeting” through SMS. It offers a service for users to dial/hang up on a number to activate receiving a tweet stream from a specific Twitter account. Last year, Facebook also announced the use of missed calls for generating leads from their ads for customers. The entire service was run and design by ZipDial.

It could be data play for Twitter, as mobile advertising becomes a big revenue earner for the company. ZipDial brings in user preferences for brands in tier 2 and tier 3 cities where smartphones are yet to make an entry. Earlier Twitter had acquired mobile advertising startup Namo Media last year. The combined platform will improve the social media power’s ability to deliver ‘native ads’ promotional material that blends into mobile apps and mobile websites.

Twitter partners with TV channels in India

Television partnerships are a key way in which the company is looking to monetize its user base globally. Last year, it paid $67 Million for Bluefin Labs, a startup that uses analytical to tie social media charter to television. In order to increase its user base globally, San Francisco based company, Twitter Inc. is speeding up its partnerships deal with television channels in India.

The move is expected to help Twitter, as it increases the conversation around hit shows and helps the channels by getting new viewers to tune in. The company also launched its Amplify product, which helps networks monetize content, last month with Star Sports and Vodafone. Twitter already has a tie up with Airtel DTH, which allows customers to view tweets on their television screen. More deals in the space are underway. The channels are also using Twitter to discover more audiences for their shows, for instances shows like Roadies, Big Boss, and Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa etc. promote tweeting to boost viewership. Star Plus is debuting the promo for the Aamir Khan hosted Satyamev Jayate on the site by asking fans to tweet with a hashtag.

Apart from this, Twitter Inc. has announced its plans to raise $1.3 Billion in its first debt offering by issuing convertible senior notes. Until now, Twitter has made around 41 acquisitions. Twitter has recently introduced new product experiences, launched new web profiles with a number of new advertiser tools. The firm has also acquired three companies as Gnip, TapCommerce, and SnappyTV. The company has also acquired mobile advertising startup Namo Media for a deal amount of around $50 Million. The company has launched “pay by tweet” service with American Express and “Keyword Targeting ad feature.” It had collaborated with WPP to increase its advertising revenues and offers text based password recovery service.

Second screen devices such as Tablets, Ultrabooks, and Smartphones are likely to be principal force behind social TV experiences. TV and video content providers such as cable companies have a great opportunity to target heavy users with Social TV in order to reduce potential churn. Twitter had also added a new video sharing feature on Mobile with two of the World Cup Advertisers Visa, and Adidas.

Google, FB, Twitter blocked in China

More than 2600 foreign websites are blocked in China. Some websites are opened in regions like Hong Kong and Macau but in mainland China, many of the websites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, BlogSpot, YouTube, Bloomberg, Wikipedia, and Picasa are still blocked. There are several reasons why these websites are blocked in China.

Recently, the Google search Engine was temporarily unblocked in China, during U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Beijing for a series of high-level talks. This disruption of Google began in the run-up to the 25^th anniversary of the government’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Google and all services like Google Play, Maps, Docs, Drive, and Google+ were blocked since 2010 in China. The reason for blocking these sites was they did not fall in the law of China and serve the interests of people. China manages it media according to their law. China does not want other websites to create rumors and bias against China. China has its own popular search engine as if Google called Baidu and popular version of Twitter called Weibo.

China had kept YouTube out because it has its own domestic video sites called Tudou and Youku and it wants them to grow and prosper. Introduction of Alibaba after Baidu has pushed US giant Google to third place in Chinese market. As if Facebook, China has domestic Social Networking, sites called Renren and Kaixin001. Skype is also illegal to use in China and government support homegrown services by China Telecom and China Unicom. These are more expensive than Skype because they require monthly registration.

Other online services are also facing disruption in China, which includes South Korean Naver Corporation Line and KakaoTalk. Flickr and Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage are also disrupted in the country. China is quickly becoming the most aggressive and protectionist country in the world. Perhaps after a few years government will be pressured to let these foreign internet companies back in and negotiate a return but then these firms will have been left in dust by Chinese rivals.