OMD FWD w/c Oct 24th
During the announcement of Google Home at the opening of the Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, mentioned that 20% of mobile queries are now voice searches. While the market for virtual assistant slowly heats up, a MindMeld survey found that there has been a significant increase in the number of people now using voice assistant and voice search capabilities within the past 6 months. Transactional queries will become even more common as virtual assistants integrate a range of third-party services such as OpenTable, Spotify, WhatsApp, Uber and Ticketmaster. While the topic of voice and virtual assistants can be a conversation starter with tech hobbyists, it is also true that the general public is now starting to take interest in this field.
HEADLINES
- Facebook announced updates to Pages for business, adding integrations with third-party e-commerce platforms and an enhanced Recommendations feature for people to link directly to businesses they rate highly.
- UK retailer Game has come under fire from some gamers for charging £5 to try PlayStation VR for 10 minutes. Long heralded as a watershed for VR in the mainstream, PlayStation say they had “hundreds of thousands” of pre-orders.
- Nintendo announced Switch, “one of the most revolutionary consoles ever” – a unique hybrid between a traditional console and a handheld, released Spring 2017.
INSIGHTS
- The state of mobile commerce in five charts.
- Google announce that 20% of searches (on their mobile app and Android devices) are voice.
- Flip Dive: a case study in mobile ad monetisation.
COOL
- A new series of Humans comes to the UK and with it a smart campaign featuring a Facebook Messenger bot and product recall website.
- Play “digital dress up” with this Shakespeare Magic Mirror.
- Unilever create a chatbot to create unique stories that help teach kids how to brush their teeth.
DEEP READS
- Apple wants to get in your house before you buy it.
- Google’s in-house VR filmmaker on making VR movies you’d actually want to watch.
- Two views on AI from people worth listening to, both courtesy of Wired. The first from their co-founder Kevin Kelly, and second from recent interviewee, the soon to be outgoing (sob) POTUS.
Share anything you see through the week with the hashtag #OMDFWD