Along with tackling the premise of information asymmetry in its online web shop, L’Oréal has acted upon a very strategic and innovative way of testing make up with the use of an app that integrates augmented reality within its system. Instead of going to crowded drugstores, being frustrated by the fact that trial makeup is not the most hygienic way of testing the product on your face, and the disability to test products within a short timeframe, this application enables you to test a large variety of L’Oréal’s products anytime and everywhere. In order to establish Makeup Genius L’Oréal cooperated with Image Metrics, a company that creates facial recognition software for video games and movies. This technology enables you to use the front-facing camera as a virtual mirror.

Makeup Genius enables you to have a drastic way of trying on make up with using nothing but your phone. Makeup Genius scans your face and allows you to select from a large range of L’Oréal’s products. The results are extremely realistic, which makes it seem as if you’re actually wearing the products. In order to make this Augmented Reality application, L’Oréal invested 18 months to develop, test, and enhance the application. While developing, the multinational incorporated thousands of products and over one hundred unique facial expressions. You can try out just eyeliner or create complete looks. Once you like what you see, you can save your look and share it with friends, as well as purchase the products online.

Furthermore, another way Makeup Genius removes the hassle of the in-store experience is by allowing you to scan the products and try them on virtually. Since the launch of Makeup Genius, many magazines have appraised the application. Fast Company even perceived L’Oreal to be one of the most innovative companies of 2015 (Mala, 2015). Additionally, more than 10 million people have downloaded the application and have tried on more than 25 million looks altogether, while using more than 65 million products (which is thus 65 million more makeup trials of L’Oreal’s products) (Makeup Genius, 2015).
This implementation of AR reduces information asymmetry in a very significant way, allowing customers to witness the traits of the products in a real life manner, whereby certain ambiguities about the product performance are slightly diminished. However, the product does not allow a customer to witness whether the product quality and user-friendliness is compatible with their expectations.

Will you be the new Makeup Genius user? Would you download the app and use AR to buy cosmetics of L’Oréal?

In February 2014, WhatsApp was sold to Facebook for an unbelievable figure – 19 billion dollars. Within the next few weeks, it was all over everybody’s blogs, Facebook statuses, lunch conversations, and even kids in school were talking about it. People could not understand that a company whose only product is a messaging app could be worth that much money.

WhatsApp is not the only messenger out there. Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, LINE, WeChat, and many others are also stakeholders in the industry. They proved to be a cheap alternative to operator-based text messaging via SMS, and they provide many more features that SMS doesn’t have. According to statistics, in August 2015, WhatsApp has an active user number of 800 million, Facebook messenger has 700 million, and WeChat has 600 million. If we just do a simple math and not include all added features that each messenger provides, all chat messengers have a combined valuation of over 200 billion dollars. That’s half of Google or 4 times more than Yahoo!.

Interestingly on the contrary side, all these messaging apps struggled to figure out their revenue model. Evan Spiegel, the co-founder of Snapchat, acknowledged in an interview the extreme difficulty of making a feasible one. Many internet companies are backed by ads revenue. Google, for example, revealed in their multiple annual reports that more than 90% of their revenue comes from ads. One of their many services, Google Adsense, analyzes a web page and provides advertisements that best fit the content of that page. However, most people on messengers send private messages to their friends, and it is impossible to insert any ad into the conversation. Out of privacy concerns, it is also unlikely to run algorithms on user’s messages to provide personalized recommendations.

Realizing this limitation, apps began to expand their service into other communication areas, such as emojis, playing games with friends, sending money, interesting new content, etc. This is a very successful first step. In 2013, LINE reported in their Q2 quarter report, that out of their $100 million quarterly revenue, game purchase and in-game purchase accounted for 53%, and emojis accounted for 27%. Snapchat is piloting the new discovery feature that pushes sponsored content to the user. With the existing ads before playing video revenue model, the company stated that their revenue is estimated at $50 million dollars this year.

In addition to these efforts, LINE and WeChat also aim to build up their own ecosystems. WeChat launched a feature to send money to multiple friends in January 2014. It targets the Chinese tradition of giving monetary gifts to friends and family for auspicious blessings on special occasions. On 2015 Chinese New Year’s Eve, more than 1.5 billion “red envelopes” were sent on a single day. WeChat also keeps a semi-bank account for a user. Besides sending money to friends from the account, the money could also be used to make purchase, refill phone cards, call a taxi, pay utility bills and many more. WeChat has built a successful image within China and it has penetrated into many aspects of people’s life.

In conclusion, the entire messenger ecosystem is very enormous. The user-to-user communication nature allowed exponential growth in the user base. With the vastly and constantly growing user base, companies are able to reach billion dollars valuation within a very short amount of time. The next step, to achieve their billion dollars revenue, companies are experimenting to expand their services into our daily life. LINE and WhatsApp have built up their ecosystem that allows users to call taxis, stream music, order foods, and we can predict soon other companies will have similar strategies to expand their verticals.

Recently a 19-year old Australian model Essena O’Neill stopped with social media. She didn’t just quit she also confessed that it’s all fake and that it makes people depressive. She used to earn 2000 dollars per photo but it wasn’t everything that she wanted.

This is what she said

”I had everything, but i have never felt so miserable in my entire life. Everything I did was about likers and followers”

She changed her Instagram captions now with some real life thoughts that occured during the making of the pictures.

Her action became a huge hit on social media and was seen on almost every social media platform.

This begs a lot of questions: Does social media make people miserable about themselves? Should social media be more safer for people with insecurity issues?

Comment below 😉

http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2015/11/03/dit-is-wat-een-leven-als-instagram-ster-met-je-kan-doen

Telegram is a very similar app to Whatsapp. Telegram is a free open-source platform with no ads. It’s a clean and fast interface that asks for no payments whatsoever. Signing up and using Telegram is actually very easy. The messenger uses your phone number as your ID and it allows you to interact with any contact in your phonebook, as long as they are using the app too. This is what actually makes this messaging app very similar to WhatsApp. However, Telegram offers more on this aspect.
Unlike WhatsApp, it is possible to specify a username which can then be used by people whom you don’t have their contacts to reach you even if they don’t have the phone number you used to register on Telegram. In addition, the fact that this person can contact you using your Telegram user name does not mean your number will now be visible to them. It won’t, which is why this messaging app is often considered to be very secure.
The biggest selling point of Telegram is security. Other than being an open-source platform, this messaging app also makes use of MTProto that features 256-bit symmetric encryptions, DH secure key exchange as well as RSA 2048 encryption. This is just how secure this application is, something that has even prompted the developers to offer a massive $200,000 for any hacker who can find a loophole in the system.
Just like WhatsApp, Telegram is a cross platform app. It works well on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Chrome, Mac and Windows OS. You can access this messaging app from any browsing platform using any web browser. It is also possible to log into all of the supported devices at a given time without any problems and messages will appear on all of them.
Another selling point of Telegram is that there are no restrictions of file sharing and types. You can share everything without having the limit the size. What I like about Telegram is that it is also cloud based. Unlike WhatsApp it saves everything on your phone. Telegram has everything in the cloud. Meaning if you lose your phone or change your phone for a new one, all of your messages and shares are there with you.
Because Telegram is cross-platform you don’t always need your phone. Let’s put it this way. Your phone is out of battery and you have a IPad that is working, you can still keep messaging with your friends with the iPad Telegram app. Unlike WhatsApp your phone doesn’t need to be online or on. Because with Telegram is cloud based.

For those who like their privacy a lot, Telegram has also the private chat function. Using a special encryption, Telegram creates a sort of self-destructing messages. So when the other party has read your messages, your sent messages will disappear.
I really like telegram and I use it a lot more then WhatsApp. It is more fun and because it is easier using it in you pc and other devices. Also using the sticker function instead of emoticons makes a lot more fun.
Would you consider Telegram?

Sources:
https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-secure-is-telegram

http://neurogadget.com/2015/09/28/whatsapp-vs-telegram-heres-why-we-recommend-

telegram-as-a-better-app/16374

http://neurogadget.com/2015/09/28/whatsapp-vs-telegram-heres-why-we-recommend-telegram-as-a-better-app/16374

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2871412/how-much-trust-can-you-put-in-telegram-messenger.html

Originally Facebook was founded as a social media platform where you can chat with your friends, share pictures and let your friends know what you are doing. But soon after Mark Zuckerburg founded Facebook, people started to share a lot of funny videos with bloopers or just sport videos. Facebook was meant to be a platform where users could share their own videos, like their own football skills or videos of their new-born baby for example. Nowadays Facebook seems to be a kind of YouTube, there are hardly interesting posts of friends in which they tell you what they are doing. When I open my Facebook app on my mobile phone the first thing I see when I am scrolling through my timeline are videos, a lot of videos. Should Facebook take measures to reduce the amount of videos on Facebook or is this also what we are calling a social media platform?

There is something to say for both sides, on the one hand it has nothing to with socializing with your friends. Nowadays you have to search for some status updates of your friends among all those videos, pictures and memes of Facebook accounts like 9GAG. When you have a lot of friends every minute there are some new videos on your timeline, that’s because Facebook shows you all the videos that one of your friends had liked. The most annoying about these posts is the fact that you can’t find anything back, when you saw a nice picture or video and you want to watch it again it’s almost impossible.

But on the other hand it is also very funny, when you are bored you can always keep scrolling through your timeline and watch some funny videos. Maybe without these videos and pictures Facebook was a lot more boring and maybe that will cause less Facebook users. When there were no videos on Facebook, only personal accounts it would be very boring on Facebook. Then you will have once in an hour a new post, so when you are bored you can’t just go and scrolling through your timeline.

So I think Facebook should not take measures to reduce the amount of videos on Facebook, because I think that will lead to less popularity of the social media platform. The only thing Facebook probably can do is just show you the videos of Facebook pages you liked  and not all the videos that your friends do like. For me it is sometimes really nice to relax and watch the most stupid videos in my spare time. What do you think about all these videos in your timeline?

Today Facebook released a new feature called ‘Music Stories’. Right now it is only available for people who use a iPhone and have an Apple Music or Spotify account. With this new feature you can share the music you like with all your friends. You can post a link of a song you like on your timeline and your friends can listen to 30 seconds of the song.

Sharing your music with your friends is not new, many companies tried it before but it never really was a success. Apple tried to do something like this in 2010 with Ping (recode.net). Also Facebook tried it in 2011 with frictionless sharing. Ping failed because Apple and Facebook failed to work together and frictionless sharing was also not a success because people did not want to be annoyed by all the messages of what music their friends were listening to.

The new sharing function is really easy to use and only a small new feature. On Apple Music or Spotify you click on a link that you would like to share a song, you post the link you get on your Facebook, and on Facebook people can listen to 30 seconds of the song. If they have an Apple Music or Spotify account as well and they like the song, they can add it directly to their own playlists. This is a small video to show you how it works.

There is also a possibility that this is the start of something bigger. Facebook has not done a lot with music videos so far, but with ‘Music Stories’ they make a start. Right now all the music videos are on YouTube and especially on the Vevo channels. Vevo is owned by music labels. Right now they need to post everything on YouTube, but this contract expires next year. Also a lot of labels talk about how they dislike YouTube because you can listen to all the songs for free. With Facebook starting to make a move into music videos, maybe we can see Vevo shifting to Facebook in the future?

Kafka, P. (2015), Facebook Lets You Share Music With Your Friend, http://recode.net/2015/11/05/facebook-lets-you-share-music-with-your-friends/.

We all have experienced it, or have seen it at least… the internet troll. The one on Youtube that comments on every artist’s videoclip with: Justin Bieber is better than this stupid -insert artist here- The one that had to instigate a fight, what was just a meaningless disagreement about the birds in Mexico. The one that makes a fake account just to mess with people and many more examples of what we now call the Internet troll.

Since social media has been a household phenomenon, these so called ”trolls” are everywhere. On YouTube, Instagram, Tinder, Facebook etc.

An example of this occured in 2014. A 14-year old girl allegedly tweeted this message to the company American Airline.

Little did she know that, not everyone thought that this was a little joke she was making.

What Sarah thought was supposed to be an (untasteful) joke, turnt into a serious matter. Soon the police got involved and Sarah learned her lesson.

This is an example of person who is joking around on the internet. Though, joking around on the internet is not a new thing, there are boundaries.

Another example of trolling on the internet is the Dutch internet phenomenon called ”Bangalijst” where people put list of young girls on the internet who may or may not have been sexually active. These lists were spread around Twitter, emotionally harming young girls everywhere and making Dutch parents angry.

Another much recent example is when a football player of the Dutch footballteam posted a photo with some of his teammates. Nobody expected the amount of racially offensive jokes that people posted like: ” All of you are Black Petes” and FC Monkey.

There are many more of these examples and still happening everyday.  Why do people feel the need to say nasty comments about people? Why do people feel the need to bully people on the internet and why do people feel the need to bring someone else down?

An article by Jesse Fox explains why people feel the need to bully someone on social media. Here she gives 8 reasons why:

1. Anonymity
   Some people have the tendency to believe that they can say anything online and can get away with it. People make up usernames that aren’t linked to their real life so they basically have the feeling that they aren’t being watched cause their identity on the internet is not known.
2. Perceived Obscurity
   Though, websites like Facebook usually do have your real name, people seem to think that there is still a sense of obscurity/anonymity. People seem to think that their friends or family on Facebook won’t pay attention to all things that he/she posts on other pages.
3. Perceived Majority Status
   When people think they are in the majority of a certain statement/phenomenen/etc. they will more freely express their opinions about a certain topic.
4. Social Identity Salience
   Some people behave differently on social media then in real life. Julia might be very shy when she is with you in class, but might me one of the most offensive football hooligan. This is called deindividuation
5. Surrounded by friends
   On sites like Facebook, you are most definitely surrounded by friends and family. People seem to have a sense of security when you share your opinions about a certain topic when you are ”surrounded by people you know”
6. Desensitization
   Over time, we may get desensitized to the online environment. Whereas once we would have thought about the consequences of what we posted, now we just spout without thinking about it. We may see so many nasty comments that we think making one ourselves is no big deal.
7. Personality Traits
   Some people are just outspoken by nature and have no sense of empathy. Other tend to believe that they are morally right than others.
8. Perceived lack of consequences
   Some people just think that because it’s on social media, nothing wil happen and there will be no consequences. Those people are wrong, cause the Internet is not going anywhere and even know when you delete something, somehow it will always be traceable.

What do you guys think? Why do people tend to behave differently on social media than in real life? What goes on in the mind of these ”so called trolls”? Leave a comment 🙂