Connect with us

FACEBOOK

How Partiful has become the hot invitation app for startup founders

Published

on

hybrid events

Since The New York Times has called it the “least cringe” invite platform of 2022, Partiful has taken off among young tech workers — and now, e-commerce founders. 

Founded in 2020, Partiful describes itself as “Facebook events for hot people,” and has a bold, graphic Gen Z-friendly aesthetic. First adopted by tech employees, it’s also been referred to as the Eventbrite for Generation Z.  

Partiful has become popular for hosting birthdays, happy hours and other private events. Once users have RSVP’d, they’re also able to see other people’s profiles and react to their attendance status using emojis. In the past year, Partiful has also quietly become the RSVP app du jour among CPG founders and startup employees, who like its simple features like attendee profiles and calendar reminders. According to several founders and retail industry folks, social distancing hindered industry gatherings — and Partiful creates a quick and seamless way to bring people together again. While the platform still lacks some key features, some people are considering eventually using it for official brand events and popups.

Currently, the invite tools are open and free for anyone to use regardless of event size. 

Partiful did not respond to a request for insight on the platform’s future business model. But the company currently has job postings for product designers and mobile engineers, which could mean an app is coming soon. In November, Partiful also closed a $20 million Series A series led by Andreessen Horowitz. Even still, the startup’s snarky social media accounts have made it clear the founders are in no rush to make money from the platform.

So for now, people in retail startup circles are taking advantage of Partiful’s tools to find each other and network — albeit with more of a “party” sense. 

Over the past few months, Omsom co-founder Kim Pham has been hosting “quarterly bored meetings” using Partiful. The series invites founders and adjacent retail industry people to casually mingle over drinks, at a private location that’s only visible to attendees.

Networking is important for many CPG startup founders, who are constantly looking for growth opportunities such as brand collaborations and potential investments. “But for a lot of us who launched our businesses during Covid, we’ve felt more alone,” Pham said. She added that during the first year of building Omsom, which launched in 2020, she and co-founder Vanessa Pham “were pretty much building it solo” without much in-person support.

“It may seem silly, but a lot of those events aren’t just for professional networking,” Pham said. “They help create connections to other founders who could become close confidants, mentors or even friends.” 

That said, young founders like Pham aren’t rushing to attend stiff networking happy hours. In February Pham and friend Azora Zoe, the founder of sustainable homeware brand Goldune, organized a Partiful invite for the aforementioned quarterly bored meetings. 

Pham said the ease of setup and room for creativity are the two biggest draws for startup people. The platform’s UX also allows for a lot of personality with a fairly low lift, she added. Since Partiful exclusively uses SMS for communication, there are no emails that potentially end up in spam folders. 

Other industry people like Partiful’s instant reach, especially when putting out a call for colleagues to meet up in cities like New York or San Francisco.

CPG consultant Nate Rosen, who is currently working on launching a beverage brand, said that Partiful’s mantra “feels very unapologetic” about creating a fun and casual atmosphere. 

The site also helps fill a niche digital invite void.

“Since people stopped using Facebook, there hasn’t really been a good option to organize and host industry events,” Rosen said. For the most part, Rosen and CPG startup colleagues were organizing events using a mixture of email, texts and calendar invites.

Once in-person events resumed, Rosen and a few colleagues began organizing a monthly “CPG happy hour” in New York City using Partiful. “We can easily throw up an invite page at the last minute and send it to a wide range of people,” Rosen said.

For recurring events like the monthly happy hours and Rosen’s newly-launched quarterly brand panel event, Partiful’s archived events data also help.

“It shows who went to what event, which is helpful because I don’t always remember to invite everyone,” Rosen said. Partiful has also proven useful for organizing meetups at trade shows and conferences while traveling, he added.

In January, Rosen began using Partiful to co-host a panel called “the consumer council,” which has attracted executives from brands like Belgian Boys and men’s skincare startup Huron. “We’ve already had founders of brands like Lunar seltzer and Myvino attend, so we’re going to try to do it once a month,” Rosen said.

For now, Partiful is mainly being used for internal gatherings and industry networking. 

However, CPG incubator The Naked Market is experimenting with Partiful for official branded events. The company used the site to host a private DJ set with Joe Jonas for his brand, Rob’s Backstage Popcorn, at Expo West earlier this month; The Naked Market has a joint venture with Rob’s Backstage Popcorn. 

Harrison Fugman, co-founder and CEO of The Naked Market, said the incubator launched at the end of 2019 right before the pandemic and it wasn’t until the past few months that they started doing physical events.

“We wanted the event to be jovial and celebratory, and turning the first night of the show into a dance party was the perfect recipe for networking with the rest of the CPG community,” Fugman said. The Naked Market got a lot of feedback that Partiful’s reminder feature was helpful for Expo West attendees. “It was great being able to push out real-time updates so everyone could make sure they were there during the DJ set,” Fugman said.

That said, Partiful not being a full-fledged invitation platform poses limitations. For example, attendees aren’t able to automatically download event invites to their calendar. 

“I will absolutely be considering using the platform for Omsom events,” Pham said. But first, she’d like more customization options for the landing page to be able to integrate a more branded experience.

Similarly, Fugman said that when it comes to corporate events, Partiful “definitely has some shortcomings compared to competitors, but it did the trick.” 



Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

FACEBOOK

What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem

Published

on

What went wrong with 'the Metaverse'? An insider's postmortem


It’s now two years since Facebook changed its name to Meta, ushering in a brief but blazing enthusiasm over “the Metaverse”, a concept from science fiction that suddenly seemed to be the next inevitable leap in technology. For most people in tech, however, the term has since lost its luster, seemingly supplanted by any product with “artificial intelligence” attached to its description. 

But the true story of the Metaverse’s rise and fall in public awareness is much more complicated and interesting than simply being the short life cycle of a buzzword — it also reflects a collective failure of both imagination and understanding.  

Consider:

The forgotten novel

Ironically, many tech reporters discounted or even ignored the profound influence of Snow Crash on actual working technologists. The founders of Roblox and Epic (creator of Fortnite) among many other developers were directly inspired by the novel. Despite that, Neal Stephenson’s classic cyberpunk tale has often been depicted as if it were an obscure dystopian tome which merely coined the term. As opposed to what it actually did: describe the concept with a biblical specificity that thousands of developers have referenced in their virtual world projects — many of which have already become extremely popular.

Event

GamesBeat at the Game Awards

We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited!


Learn More

Snow Crash.

You can see this lack of clarity in many of the mass tech headlines attempting to describe the Metaverse in the wake of Facebook’s name change: 

In a widely shared “obituary” to the Metaverse, Business Insider’s Ed Zitron even compounded the confusion still further by inexplicably misattributing the concept to TRON, the original Disney movie from the 80s.

Had the media referenced Snow Crash far more accurately when the buzz began, they’d come away with a much better understanding of why so many technologists are excited by the Metaverse concept — and realize its early incarnation is already gaining strong user traction.  

Because in the book, the Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world that’s simultaneously accessible by millions of people through highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools that are integrated with the offline world through its virtual economy and external technology. In other words, it’s more or less like Roblox and Fortnite — platforms with many tens of millions of active users. 

But then again, the tech media can’t be fully blamed for following Mark Zuckerberg’s lead.

Rather than create a vision for its Metaverse iterating on already successful platforms — Roblox’s 2020 IPO filing even describes itself as the metaverse — Meta’s executive leadership cobbled together a mishmash of disparate products. Most of which, such as remotely working in VR headsets, remain far from proven. According to an internal Blind survey, a majority of Zuckerberg’s own employees say he has not adequately explained what he means by the Metaverse even to them.

Grievous of all, Zuckerberg and his CTO Andrew Bosworth promoted a conception of the Metaverse in which the Quest headset was central. To do so, they had to overlook compelling evidence — raised by senior Microsoft researcher danah boyd at the time of the company acquiring Oculus in 2014 — that females have a high propensity to get nauseous using VR.

Meta Quest 3 comes out on October 10 for $500.
Meta Quest 3.

Contacted in late 2022 while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters, danah told me no one at Oculus or Meta followed up with her about the research questions she raised. Over the years, I have asked several senior Meta staffers (past and present) about this and have yet to receive an adequate reply. Unsurprisingly, Meta’s Quest 2 VR headset has an estimated install base of only about 20 million units, significantly smaller than the customer count of leading video game consoles. A product that tends to make half the population puke is not exactly destined for the mass market — let alone a reliable base for building the Metaverse. 

Ironically, Neal Stephenson himself has frequently insisted that virtual reality is absolutely not a prerequisite for the Metaverse, since flat screens display immersive virtual worlds just fine. But here again, the tech media instead ratified Meta’s flawed VR-centric vision by constantly illustrating articles about the Metaverse with photos of people happily donning headsets to access it — inadvertently setting up a straw man destined to soon go ablaze.

Duct-taped to yet another buzzword

Further sealing the Metaverse hype wave’s fate, it crested around the same time that Web3 and crypto were still enjoying their own euphoria period. This inevitably spawned the “cryptoverse” with platforms like Decentraland and The Sandbox. When the crypto crash came, it was easy to assume the Metaverse was also part of that fall.

But the cryptoverse platforms failed in the same way that other crypto schemes have gone awry: By offering a virtual world as a speculative opportunity, it primarily attracted crypto speculators, not virtual world enthusiasts. By October of 2022, Decentraland was only tracking 7,000 daily active users, game industry analyst Lars Doucet informed me

“Everybody who is still playing is basically just playing poker,” as Lars put it. “This seems to be a kind of recurring trend in dead-end crypto projects. Kind of an eerie rhyme with left-behind American cities where drugs come in and anyone who is left is strung out at a slot machine parlor or liquor store.”

All this occurred as the rise of generative AI birthed another, shinier buzzword — one that people not well-versed in immersive virtual worlds could better understand.

But as “the Metaverse” receded as a hype totem, a hilarious thing happened: Actual metaverse platforms continued growing. Roblox now counts over 300 million monthly active users, making its population nearly the size of the entire United States; Fortnite had its best usage day in 6 years. Meta continues plodding along but seems to finally be learning from its mistakes — for instance, launching a mobile version of its metaverse platform Horizon Worlds.  

Roblox leads the rise of user-generated content.
Roblox.

Into this mix, a new wave of metaverse platforms is preparing to launch, refreshingly led by seasoned, successful game developers: Raph Koster with Playable Worlds, Jenova Chen with his early, successful forays into metaverse experiences, and Everywhere, a metaverse platform lead developed by a veteran of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.

At some point, everyone in tech who co-signed the “death” of the Metaverse may notice this sustained growth. By then however, the term may no longer require much usage, just as the term “information superhighway” fell away as broadband Internet went mainstream.  

Wagner James Au is author of Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For 

GamesBeat’s creed when covering the game industry is “where passion meets business.” What does this mean? We want to tell you how the news matters to you — not just as a decision-maker at a game studio, but also as a fan of games. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about the industry and enjoy engaging with it. Discover our Briefings.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

FACEBOOK

Social media blocks are “a suppression of an essential avenue for transparency”

Published

on

In this photo illustration the word censored is seen displayed on a smartphone with the logos of social networks Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube in the background.

Once praised as the defining feature of the internet, the ability to connect with physically distant people is something that governments have recently been seemingly intent on restricting. Authorities have been increasingly pulling the plug, putting over 4 billion people in the shadows in the first half of 2023 alone

Social media platforms are often the first means of communication to be restricted. Surfshark, one of the most popular VPN services, counted at least 50 countries guilty of having curbed these websites and apps during periods of political turmoil such as protests, elections, or military activity.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

FACEBOOK

Former Myanmar colonel who once served as information minister gets 10-year prison term for sedition

Published

on

Former Myanmar colonel who once served as information minister gets 10-year prison term for sedition

BANGKOK (AP) — A former high-profile Myanmar army officer who had served as information minister and presidential spokesperson in a previous military-backed government has been convicted of sedition and incitement, a legal official said Thursday. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Ye Htut, a 64-year old retired lieutenant colonel, is the latest in a series of people arrested and jailed for writing Facebook posts that allegedly spreading false or inflammatory news. Once infrequently prosecuted, there has been a deluge of such legal actions since the army seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021.

He was arrested in late October after a military officer from the Yangon Regional Military Command reportedly filed a change against him, around the time when some senior military officers were purged on other charges, including corruption. He was convicted on Wednesday, according to the official familiar with the legal proceedings who insisted on anonymity for fear of being punished by the authorities.

Ye Htut had been the spokesperson from 2013 to 2016 for President Thein Sein in a military-backed government and also information minister from 2014 to 2016.

After leaving the government in 2016, Ye Htut took on the role of a political commentator and wrote books and posted articles on Facebook. For a time, he was a visiting senior research fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a center for Southeast Asia studies in Singapore.

After the army’s 2021 takeover, he often posted short personal vignettes and travel essays on Facebook in which he made allusions that were generally recognized to be critical of Myanmar’s current military rulers.

The army’s takeover triggered mass public protests that the military and police responded to with lethal force, triggering armed resistance and violence that has escalated into a civil war.

The official familiar with the court proceedings against Ye Htut told The Associated Press that he was sentenced by a court in Yangon’s Insein prison to seven years for sedition and three years for incitement. Ye Htut was accused on the basis of his posts on his Facebook account, and did not hire a lawyer to represent him at his trial, the official said.

The sedition charge makes disrupting or hindering the work of defense services personnel or government employees punishable by up to seven years in prison. The incitement charge makes it a crime to publish or circulate comments that cause fear, spread false news, agitate directly or indirectly for criminal offences against a government employee — an offense punishable by up to three years in prison.

However, a statement from the Ministry of Legal Affairs said he had been charged under a different sedition statute. There was no explanation for the discrepancy.

According to detailed lists compiled by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, a watchdog group based in Thailand, 4,204 civilians have died in Myanmar in the military government’s crackdown on opponents and at least 25,474 people have been arrested.



Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending