17 October, 2024
13 years later, Snapchat finally rolls out native support for iPads
Snapchat is officially rolling out native support for iPad, the company announced in the app’s latest release notes. Since Snapchat’s launch in 2011, the social networking app has only been available on iPads as an iPhone app with large black borders around it, not as a native app for the iPad’s bigger screen.
With this new update, support for iPad is rolling out 13 years after Snapchat launched on iOS.
“Snapchat now offers native support for iPad,” the App Store release notes simply state. “This means that Snapchat will fill an iPad’s full screen, providing you with a larger canvas when capturing Snaps and allowing you to see more friends on the 2nd and 4th tabs.”
The new app increases accessibility on iPads, while also serving as a bit of a testing ground for new features, as you can play around with tools, AR experiences and AI on a bigger screen. It’s unclear why Snap has waited until now to bring its app to iPad, nor has the company disclosed if it will offer any new experiences for iPad users.
Unfortunately, the new app still isn’t fully optimized for tablets as it can only run in portrait mode, not landscape mode.
The launch of the native app comes as TikTok released an update last year that was designed to take advantage of larger screens like iPads and tablets. The update started allowing people to use the app in landscape mode and navigate the app more easily. By releasing native support for iPads, Snapchat is better poised to compete with TikTok, and possibly get more eyes on its TikTok competitor, Spotlight.
It’s also worth noting that another Instagram has yet to launch a native iPad app, which gives both Snapchat and TikTok a bit of a competitive edge over the Meta-owned platform.
Google Cloud rolls out new GenAI products for retailers
Google wants to inject a little generative AI into retail. Or to try, at least.
To coincide with the National Retail Federation’s annual conference in NYC, Google Cloud today unveiled new GenAI products designed to help retailers personalize their online shopping experiences and streamline their back-office operations.
As to whether they perform as advertised, this writer can’t say — TechCrunch wasn’t given the chance to test the new tools prior to this morning’s unveiling. (They’re set to launch sometime in Q1.) But the slew of announcements show, if nothing else, how aggressively Google is attempting to court GenAI customers.
One of Google Cloud’s new products, Conversational Commerce Solution, lets retailers embed GenAI-powered agents on their websites and mobile apps — sort of like a brand-specific ChatGPT. The agents have conversations with shoppers in natural language, tailored product suggestions based on shoppers’ individual preferences.
Branded chatbots are hardly new. But Google says that “sophisticated” models like PaLM are powering the agents, which can be fine-tuned and customized with retailers’ own data (e.g. catalogs and websites).
Complementing Conversational Commerce Solution is Google Cloud’s new Catalog and Content Enrichment toolset, which taps GenAI models including the aforementioned PaLM and Imagen to automatically generate product descriptions, metadata, categorization suggestions and more from as little as a single product photo. The toolset also let retailers generate new product images from existing ones, or to use product descriptions as the basis for AI-generated photos of products.
Now, when eBay launched a similar AI-powered product-image-to-description capability a few months back, it didn’t take long before sellers began complaining about its performance — pointing to misleading, unnecessarily repetitive and in some cases downright untruthful text.
I asked Amy Eschliman, managing director of retail at Google Cloud, what steps Google’s taken, if any, to address concerns around such hallucinations. She didn’t point to specific measures but stressed that Google’s “continuously improving” its tools and that human review is a core part of the Catalog and Content Enrichment workflows.
I’d certainly hope there’s human review where the stakes are high. It’s not inconceivable, after all, that a misleading AI-generated image or description in a product catalog could land a retailer in hot water with shoppers — or on the receiving end of false advertising allegations.
“Human-in-the-loop is a best practice that helps with enterprise use cases to ensure high-quality, mitigate bias-related risk, improve trust and transparency, improve and continually train the model, while complying with regulatory and business policy,” Eschliman said.
In a related announcement today, Google took the wraps off a retail-specific Distributed Cloud Edge device, a managed self-contained hardware kit to “reduce IT costs and resource investments” around retail GenAI. (Google’s long offered Distributed Cloud Edge as a service, but it’s now targeting retailers more directly.) Available in a range of sizes from single-server to multi-server configurations, Google says that the edge cluster is designed to fit into stores from convenience marts and gas stations to fast casual restaurants and grocery stores — powering customers’ GenAI apps.
“With the … control plane running locally, Google Distributed Cloud Edge provides retailers non-stop operations even when their location is disconnected from the internet for short periods of time (days),” Eschliman said. “Retailers now have access to a small cluster of Google Cloud-managed nodes that can be conveniently installed in nearly any store. With this fully managed hardware and software, retailers can now run existing software with distributed AI to enable mission-critical operations in the store at all times.”
Google says that pricing and availability info will be released in Q1.
My question after being pre-briefed on all this was, frankly, are retailers really clamoring for GenAI?
Perhaps. At least the giants of retail.
Walmart yesterday announced that it’s investing heavily in GenAI search to better understand the context of queries and let shoppers search by specific use cases (e.g. “unicorn-themed toddler birthday party”). Amazon, meanwhile, has been leveraging GenAI to summarize customer reviews, help sellers write product descriptions and image captions and better enable buyers to find clothes that fit their size.
In a poll Google conducted, Google says that 81% of retail decision makers feel “urgency” to adopt GenAI in their business while 72% feel ready to deploy GenAI technology today — specifically in the areas of customer service automation, marketing support and product description generation, creative assistance, conversational commerce and store associate knowledge and support.
But considering some of the rocky rollouts of GenAI in retail recently (see: Amazon’s review summaries exaggerating negative feedback), I can’t say I’m convinced that the retail industry will rush to adopt GenAI en masse — from Google Cloud or any other provider. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.
Linktree surpasses 50M users, rolls out its social commerce program to more creators
Link-in-bio startup Linktree said on Wednesday that it has surpassed 50 million users.
The figure represents a significant uptick from the 2.7 million users the company had in 2019. The company has been growing consistently, adding nearly 10 million users (or Linkers, as Linktree calls them) in the span of just five months: In December, the company told TechCrunch that it had 41 million users, and it reported over 47 million users this March.
Linktree is considered one of the top link-in-bio tools on the market, with its rivals owning a significantly smaller portion of the pie: competitor Later has around 7 million users, whereas Beacons has more than 2 million.
“It’s astounding to see the scale we’ve reached by being Linker-first — now empowering more than 50 million Linkers with a space that they own, to grow and monetize,” Linktree’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Zaccaria, said in a statement to TechCrunch.
The company said it is also launching the beta of its social commerce offering. The new program, which was in alpha back in March, lets creators add storefronts to their link-in-bio pages and take a 12% to 15% commission on sales. All users will be able to apply to join the program later this year.
The experiment initially launched with a few brands (Revolve, Sephora and Urban Outfitters) and was only available to a few creators. Starting today, Linktree is opening it up to more users and has added over 2,000 brands, including Adidas, Lululemon, New Balance and Net-a-Porter. Creators can access a huge product catalog featuring thousands of items that they can highlight on their storefronts.
The company also added a new feature in tandem with the beta launch: Users can now upload user-generated content to promote relevant content from their social media accounts alongside recommended products.
Linktree’s social commerce offering could prove helpful to influencers, as it gives them the means to effectively monetize their audience. The global market for social commerce is predicted to reach $1.2 trillion by 2025, according to Accenture.
“The goal of the program is to supercharge the organic social commerce activity we’re seeing on-platform, making this easier for both Linkers and brands,” Lara Cohen, Linktree’s vice president of brand development, told TechCrunch. “We estimate that Linkers are driving upwards of $6 billion in annual [gross merchandise value] via their Linktrees already. We want to reduce friction and increase conversion by cutting down the number of clicks required to make a purchase, and enabling customers to discover the products that Linkers love directly on their Linktrees.”
The new program is indicative of Linktree’s intention to evolve into a more versatile service with more revenue streams.
Linktree had over 240 million commerce clicks from links in the past month, converting to approximately $300 million in monthly commerce sales, a company spokesperson said, citing proprietary data.
Linktree acquires link-in-bio platform Koji in its second investment of the year
Linktree has come a long way since its inception in 2016, and is today used by everyone from part-time content creators to celebrities like Demi Lovato, Paris Hilton and Robert Downey Jr. Even The White House uses the link-in-bio solution to direct U.S. citizens to online resources.
The company also made significant investments in the past year, acquiring two smaller startups in the link-in-bio space, Koji and Bento. Linktree declined to comment about what it plans to do with both platforms.
But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. In June 2023, Linktree laid off 27% of its workforce, seeing many employees in Australia and New Zealand let go from the company. In a memo to staff, Zaccaria said the layoffs would help Linktree shift its focus to furthering growth in the U.S., the company’s largest market. The layoffs followed a round of cuts in 2022, which saw 17% of staff let go.
Linktree has raised more than $165 million in funding to date and is valued at more than $1 billion.
Linktree is now allowing users to highlight links better with featured layout function