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Two stories about Snap’s camera hardware projects emerged yesterday in the moments leading up to the company’s $17 a pop IPO pricing.
First, The New York Times reported that Snap was working on a drone that captures images from a bird’s eye view, and then TechCrunch divulged that Snap is considering selling 360-degree cameras.
This talk of unmanned aerial vehicles and 360-degree cameras gives an inkling into Snap’s vision for itself as a camera company and the types of products it has planned for the future. There isn’t, however, a release date on either of these projects. They remain strictly tentative, and there’s no saying if they’ll eventually see the light of day or stay in the purgatory of R&D:
- It's unclear whether Snap drones are a go. There’s no insight on whether Snap will make drones available for consumers, or if this project will get repurposed for another initiative or nixed altogether. If Snap does start selling drones, the appeal for consumers would be the ability to capture hands-free images of themselves and the world around at nearly all angles. This would add to Snap’s suite of camera products beyond its smartphone app and Spectacles.
- The drones market is a tough one to crack. The drones space is intensely competitive. Snap would have to face up to companies like Parrot and drone giant DJI, which has over 50% of the consumer drones market in the US. Snap will also be wary to avoid the fate of Lily — a company Snap considered buying that eventually shut down despite making $34 million in pre-order sales — as well as GoPro, which had to embarrassingly recall 2,500 defective drones.
- 360-degree cameras seem more plausible. This is a more nascent market with no clear leader yet. Outside of functioning as a standalone product, 360-degree cameras could provide a basis for Snap to make a more meaningful play into AR/VR. In particular, adding 360 cameras onto Spectacles, if Snap can figure out how to do this, would result in a strikingly more compelling version of the camera-equipped sunglass product.
- A couple more ideas Snap's contemplating. The TechCrunch article notes that Snap is also exploring a mounted action GoPro-like camera as well as a stereoscopic camera that could take 3D images. This latter technology is also interesting to consider relative to AR/VR. Stereoscopic images combine two photos of the same object taken at different angles to create an impression of depth and solidity, similar to how the iPhone 7’s dual-lens camera works.
In one fell swoop last fall, Snap rebranded from Snapchat, announced its camera-equipped Spectacles product, and declared itself “a camera company." Its commitment to improving its camera platform by investing in product innovation and taking risks is evident its endeavors with drones and 360 cameras. We will see whether this strategy translates into meaningful revenue via hardware sales down the line.
Mobile-app makers and content creators are vying for consumer attention in a crowded and noisy market.
Even if an app can stand out enough to prompt a consumer to download it from among a list of millions, it then faces the challenge of enticing him or her to use it enough times to recuperate development, maintenance, and marketing costs. To make matters worse, those marketing costs have hit record-high levels over the past year as discoverability has become more challenging.
And while consumers are spending more time in apps, most of that time is spent in a few favorites. Consumers spend almost three-quarters of their total smartphone app time in just their three favorite apps, according to comScore.
But it's not all doom and gloom: There are numerous tools at a publisher's disposal to engage and re-engage consumers, and there are new products and solutions coming to market that can help alleviate some of the issues around this app engagement crisis.
Jessica Smith, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on app engagement that explores the current state of the app market, the issues around engaging consumers, and the tools at a publisher's disposal. It also identifies best practices for the implementation of some app engagement tools, and presents the pitfalls that some publishers fall into in this pursuit.
Here are some key takeaways from the report:
- The app market today is challenging and volatile. It's difficult to stand out, and most apps have to be offered for free in order to entice consumers who have too much supply to choose from. This puts greater emphasis on engaging consumers after they've downloaded an app in order to recoup costs.
- Consumers are more difficult to engage today, as most have dozens of apps installed on their devices yet spend most of their time in just a select handful of favorites.
- There are numerous solutions at hand for mobile app publishers and content creators seeking to engage consumers. Push notifications, in-app messaging, and app message centers with badges are three tools publishers can use to engage consumers.
- While many publishers mistakenly rely solely on push notifications for app engagements, this is a poor practice because many consumers don't allow push notifications and those that do can easily be overwhelmed when they receive too many.
- The best solution often includes leveraging two or three of these tools to engage consumers with the right message at the right time. The technology in this market has grown increasingly sophisticated, and publishers that don't diversify their approach run the risk of annoying their consumers to the point of abandonment.
- There are emerging engagement technologies that will change the current app engagement norms and present new ways for app publishers to communicate with users. The mobile ecosystem is changing quickly as technology improves and consumers become more comfortable conducting more activities on mobile devices.
In full, the report:
- Identifies the major challenges in today's app market and explains why employing good app engagement practices is more important than ever before.
- Presents the major app engagement tools currently available.
- Examines the pros and cons of each app engagement tool while outlining some pitfalls that publishers encounter in implementing them.
- Prescribes best practices for adopting various app engagement tools or strategies.
- Assesses how the market will likely change over the next five years as emerging technologies change both consumer behavior with mobile devices and introduce new tools with which to engage consumers.
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