The battle of Image Messaging.

6

October

2016

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In august, Instagram released its Stories feature, allowing its users to take, edit and post photos or videos that disappear in 24 hours. This caused a wide spread debate considering the fact that Instagram didn’t hide Stories was copied from Snapchat. In fact, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom even admitted that the Stories where a direct imitation by saying that Snapchat deserves all the credit.

However, next to the obvious similarities, the image massaging platforms also have a lot of differences. Instagram’s Stories for instance have a much wider reach. Where Snapchat is the ‘new guy’, Instagram has double the users as Snapchat, users who come to life because of these Stories. Because you already have your followers on Instagram, it’s easier to get your Stories to a larger crowd. As an example, Nike generated 800.000 views in 24 hours for an Instagram Story, posted on the first day the feature was available. The most popular post of Nike on Snapchat got only 66.000 views.

Where Stories is better at some areas, Snapchat beats it at others. Snapchat is, apart from the basic Instagram Stories drawings and colour filters, big on its geofilters, face-mapping filters and motion filters. Snapchat also has a much better approach for advertising. Where Instagram doesn’t have any non-aggressive space for companies to advertise trough Stories, Snapchat created a whole separate page with plenty of space for companies to advertise.

 

Joining the game

WhatsApp also noticed that the photo editing feature in social media is getting more and more important. Therefor they released a function that allows users to draw on their photos and videos.  They also added the option to put stickers on top of your photo, again just like snapchat. However this could possibly be a distraction for a bigger issue, since WhatsApp received a lot of criticism when it changed its privacy policy in order to share user’s phone numbers and data with Facebook.

 

Who do you think is going to win the game?

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Technology of the Week – Platform Mediated Networks In The Education Industry

29

September

2016

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http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4IVktnCnHY

In this blogpost we will discuss two platform mediated networks in the education industry.

A platform is a community that should have an useful function or service and allow 3rd party access. Furthermore, it is open and encourages regular participation in a multi-sided market between several partners.

Due to advances in technology and the spread of the internet, education is moving to the digital world. With the increase of tuition fees, a recent trend emerging is online education, specifically massive open online courses, short MOOCs, accessible to everyone.

Coursera offers those MOOCs and was founded back in 2012. It is a mediating network platform, connecting learners and academic institutions all over the world. Coursera offers over 2000 courses in a variety of disciplines.

At the moment, the Coursera offers three distinct course enrollment possibilities.

  1. The ‘free’ option includes material, online lessons and graded assignments but asks a  one-time-fee of $49 for an official certificate
  2. The fee-based option offers content for free, but a fee for graded assignments and exams.
  3. The specialized courses option allows users to follow several sub courses, with a total fee range between $300 and $600.

Another education platform is Duolingo, a free language learning platform. While translating the web, the developers discovered a new way to do this. A free gamified language teaching application, Duolingo was born.

Duolingo believes in a fair business model for language education. While using Duolingo, you create value and pay with your time. Duolingo generates some revenues by translating real-world text provided by clients and covers further costs by offering low cost language proficiency tests to users.

Having introduced two mediated network platforms, the question arises what gives them the competitive edge or where they may lack behind? Therefore, one has to look at strengths and weaknesses of both platforms.

Both platforms share the following strength:

  1. Widely accessible
  2. Less expensive than their alternatives
  3. Large variety of content
  4. Big online community

Although both platforms share similar strengths, they each have unique weaknesses.

Duolingo

  1. Content is mostly centered around the English language
  2. Speaking: oral part lacks practice as focus is on written material
  3. The teaching methods can be subverted with other strategies.

Coursera:

  1. Costs for specific courses
  2. No academic feedback from a professor
  3. No official diploma, just certificates who are not yet widely recognized.
  4. Only mediator, no control over content

Education is moving towards digitization and will continue to do so. People will keep searching for cheaper alternatives to get education. Online education platforms will be able to foster its positive network effects due to the increased number of users. As the competition will keep increasing in the following years, differentiation will become more and more important. Online content is becoming more widely available, easily accessible and will forever change the way of learning as we know it now.

 

Group 60

459556 – Moritz Schaifers

460853 – Femke Sytstra

387024 – Max Oudenbroek

380957 – Shichen Yang

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The ‘bank’ of tomorrow, FinTech

24

September

2016

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FinTech, short for financial technology, is booming. It includes all online innovative financial products and services that are revolutionizing the way we handle our money. This disruptive technology changed the way all types of business entities operate and even the way we manage our personal finances. As an example, nowadays you can pay with your mobile phone, invest with just one click and anonymously transfer money across the entire world.

Characteristic for FinTech is that the development of FinTech mostly takes place outside the established financial institutions such as banks. This may be mostly caused by the fact that, over the past few decades there was a lot of general distrust and loss of confidence in our traditional banking system.

Currently there is an explosive growth in FinTech start-ups and they are accelerating change rapidly. Banks are already expecting to lose 23 percent of their revenue, while the FinTech companies are aiming at 33 percent of the market. The most popular areas for FinTech are payment and loans, security and cloud-based services. However, its applications are wide spread in the financial world.

An excellent example of a fast growing FinTech is the Dutch company Adyen. Ayden represents the core principles of a bank, supporting financial transactions. Adyen reflects this by facilitating almost all forms of online payment. With the support for over 250 payment methods and more than 150 currencies, it is no surprise that Adyen won the FinTech Company of the year 2015.

FinTech has changed the way companies do business. For example, where new businesses had to turn directly to their local banks or look for a conventional investor, now FinTech takes over. Entrepreneurs can now choose from crowdsourcing to mobile payments. Every single person with a new idea is now able to pitch this directly to the world and get funding from people they have never met.

FinTech has a very positive outlook according to many experts, but what do you think will happen in the next couple of years?

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