How the Smartphone has reinvented basic marketing

 

There was a time not so long ago, where the thought of creating a good quality marketing video meant spending a huge amount of money. As a minimum, you would need to buy a fairly expensive video recorder, tripod and microphone. Once you had recorded your content, you would then need to use costly editing software to get the video output into a finished shape.

Alternatively, you could contact a professional video production team to create your video for you. While the end product would no doubt be of good quality, the thousands that it set you back would ensure that you had no budget left for anything else that year. To put it bluntly, producing videos was too expensive for many businesses to consider, especially the ones who didn’t have a big marketing budget or startups that hadn’t amassed any significant profit yet.

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Google Home will be able to make calls to US and Canada

Google Home has speakers, it has a microphone and it is connected to the Internet and has all your gMail info. Soon, it will be able to take all of these capabilities and put them to good use by taking calls. You will soon be able to make voice calls to anyone in the US or Canada. It's not clear if this is a regional feature or if Canadian Google Home devices will be able to use the feature. 

Source: Google

Instagram isn’t done taking Snapchat's features, introduces ‘face filters’

Instagram adds one more missing piece to its Story feature: Snapchat lenses. Those augmented reality-based filters that lets you add things like bunny ears or a dog’s snout on you. Of course, Instagram can’t call these lenses so they opt to call them “face filters.” You can access the feature at the bottom right of the Story window. It looks like a face icon with sparkles on them. And just like Snapchat lenses, you can go through the different filters to play around with.

As Mashable’s Raymond Wong points out, this blatant copying of Snapchat might not look good but it has been paying off for Facebook. Last month, Instagram garnered 200 million daily active users using Stories, which is already more than the entire daily active user base of Snapchat.

VidCon founder opens crowdfunding for podcast-centric PodCon

You may or may not know Hank Green. And if you don’t, one easy association is his famous brother/author John Green. The duo make up the YouTube channel vlogbrothers. Hank has also started other famous YouTube channels like SciShow and Crash Course. He also created VidCon, an annual gathering of big YouTube and Vine personalities and other online video fans and enthusiasts. Now, he’s taking a stab at creating a same convention but for podcasts and aptly calling it PodCon.

The event is now being crowdfunded on Indieogogo and has raised US$30,456 of its $300,000 goal. If it gets the funding it needs, PodCon will be held in Seattle, Washington this December and will have things like workshops, panels, and live podcast recordings. Obviously, there aren’t that many concrete plans for the event yet. But Green partnered with Welcome to Nightvale’s Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor as well as Travis McElroy, who is best known for co-hosting advice show My Brother, My Brother and Me. There are a number of tiers to back so you can choose which one works for you. If you donate $90 or more, you get admission to the convention. 

Source: The Verge