Here’s Why Facebook Keeps Copying Snapchat - Fortune

Here’s Why Facebook Keeps Copying Snapchat Posted: 03 Aug 2016 06:48 AM PDT Facebook has been trying to copy Snapchat for so long it has become a kind of running gag in tech circles. The social networking giant started trying to duplicate the ephemeral-messaging app’s core features even before it offered $3 billion in a failed bid to buy the company in 2013. And the reason why says a lot about what makes the service so powerful. The latest copy cat attempt came on Tuesday, when Facebook-owned Instagram introduced a new feature called Stories that lets users share a collection of photos and videos that disappears after 24 hours. The new offering is fundamentally identical to Snapchat’s Stories, right down to the name. Depending on how you count, this is the fourth or fifth such move by Facebook. The first was an app called Poke, which offered messages that disappeared automatically. It was released in 2012 and shut down in 2014. In 2013, Instagram premiered Instagram Direct, a private-messaging feature, and in 2014 Facebook debuted an app called Slingshot, which it also later mothballed. Each of these attempts has tried to imitate one or more of Snapchat’s core features: 1) It is private, and therefore there are no public likes or favorites or comments, and 2) Its messages are “ephemeral,” which means that they automatically disappear after a specified period of time. In the early days, those attributes meant Snapchat was dismissed by many observers as a “sexting” app, designed to allow teens or twenty-somethings to send intimate photos. But it turned out to be far more powerful than just that, which in turn has helped the company raise multiple rounds of funding, to the point where its theoretical market value is now $19 billion. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom put his finger on one of the things that has made Snapchat’s features so appealing to younger users. He admitted that his company’s new feature was essentially a copy of Snapchat, and said that this was because “we need to have a place where you feel free to post whatever you want without the nagging fear of, did someone like that or not?” Although the Instagram CEO didn’t provide any figures on Instagram sharing, the Journal quoted from internal documents that said more than half of all teen users of the app delete their posts if they don’t get enough likes or favorites. In other words, the fact that updates are public creates a kind of performance anxiety for many users, something Facebook and Twitter users have also mentioned. Snapchat you used far more per day; once you shared a single Instagram photo, that was it, you didn't want to overdo. Insta had to fix this. — Daniel Roberts (@readDanwrite) August 2, 2016 Posts on Snapchat, by contrast, don’t have any public likes or favorites or comments, or follower counts. Justin Kan, who sold his streaming-video startup Twitch to Amazon for $1 billion in 2014, pointed out in a Medium post earlier this year that a lot of the social and psychological friction that other services have simply isn’t there with Snapchat. And as a result, engagement levels are much higher. On Snapchat, the frictional cost is low: the content doesn’t have to be that good, because it is going to disappear anyways, and everyone else’s content isn’t that great either. There’s no public view count, follower count, likes count, or any other social dick-measuring contest. The only problem for Snapchat is that messages that disappear automatically aren’t a great environment for advertising, or for creating content that is engaging across a broader cross-section of users—something that Instagram has proven to be very good at. That’s why Snapchat has created newer features such as Discover, which features media content; and Memories, where users can save posts and stories. Many younger users don’t seem to have any interest in these other features, however. They simply want to continue sharing their private photo and video messages without any pressure to perform or to rack up likes and followers. Can Instagram convince them that its new Stories feature is good for that as well, or will it just seem like a shameless copy-cat with no ideas of its own? In a sense, Snapchat wants to become a little more like Instagram so that it can appeal to advertisers, while Instagram wants to become a bit more like Snapchat so that it can lure younger users who don’t like the social pressure of a public feed. Which one reaches its goal first remains to be seen—and there are tens of billions of dollars in value resting on the outcome. This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Here’s Why Nike Will Stop Selling Golf Equipment - Fortune

Here’s Why Nike Will Stop Selling Golf Equipment

Posted: 04 Aug 2016 06:30 AM PDT

Nike announced on Wednesday that it will transition out of the golf equipment business, another sign that the sport is failing to draw new participants.
The company said in a statement that it will “accelerate innovation” in its golf footwear and apparel business. At the same time, it will move away from selling equipment for the pastime, including clubs, balls, and bags.
Nike golf gear rocketed in popularity in the late 1990s and the 2000s, thanks to the dominance of Tiger Woods, whom Nike sponsors, but the segment has also declined alongside Woods’ personal and professional struggles. It was Nike’s worst-performing division last year, with sales of $706 million.

“We’re committed to being the undisputed leader in golf footwear and apparel,” Trevor Edwards, president of Nike Brand, said in the statement. “We will achieve this by investing in performance innovation for athletes and delivering sustainable profitable growth for Nike Golf.”
A steep decline in participation rates among younger generations, namely millennials, has dogged golf and the retailers that sell its apparel and gear. The number of people playing golf in the United States, which accounts for about half the global golf market, has shrunk from nearly 30 million in 2000 to an estimated 23 million, according to Reuters.
Nike rival Adidas—which has been on a roll of late, having raised its 2016 guidance for a fourth time in July—reported a rare piece of good news for the golf industry on Thursday. It said revenues at its golf business rose 7% in the second quarter, buoyed by double-digit growth at the TaylorMade golf brand. That’s notable since Adidas announced in May that it, too, was getting out of the golf business to focus on sneakers. It’s looking for a buyer for the unit.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Why Investors Are Being So Patient With Elon Musk - TIME Business

Why Investors Are Being So Patient With Elon Musk Posted: 04 Aug 2016 03:54 AM PDT Like Apple under Steve Jobs and Amazon under Jeff Bezos, Tesla Motors has an image deeply entangled with that of its founder. Only with Tesla, which on Wednesday reported a $293 million loss for the second quarter of 2016, success still lies in an often-delayed future. And so Musk is even more crucial to what Tesla is, because that future must be filtered through his vision. That makes the quarterly calls where Musk discusses Tesla’s earnings as important to investors as the earnings numbers themselves. And Wednesday’s call was no exception. Tesla closed the books on a wild quarter that featured a $2.6 billion bid to buy Solar City, a high-profile and fatal crash of a Tesla in autopilot mode, and production problems that Musk described this way: “Man, it was hell.” But analysts were focused instead on what lies ahead. The clearest evidence of that came from the first question, which didn’t concern the $35,000 Model 3 due next year or even solar panels, but came rather from left field: Was Tesla going to merge with SpaceX, where Musk also serves as CEO? Musk, who earlier ruled out this idea on Twitter, politely said that the “little cooperation” between the companies didn’t justify a merger. The question highlights an issue facing Tesla and Musk alike. People understand that Elon Musk has a bold vision, but they have a harder time understanding how he’ll achieve it. Musk has tried to spell things out, most explicitly in the Master Plan, Part Deux he posted two weeks ago. And yet the how-will-he-get-there conundrum not only persists, it stands at the heart of the debate raging between the bulls and bears. That debate is no closer to being resolved. During Wednesday’s call, Tesla’s stock seesawed between a gain and a decline in after-hours trading, ending up essentially unchanged from the official closing price of $225.79 a share. That pattern echoes what’s been playing out in Tesla’s stock for some time. Since August 2014, shares in the automaker have risen as high as $280 and fallen as low as $150, and yet today sit unchanged from two years ago. Investors have essentially chosen to give Musk a pass this quarter, even though Tesla’s loss of $1.06 a share was 54 cents worse than Wall Street had expected. Tesla offered some silver linings around that disappointment. Gross margins were improving and could be as high as 25% or 30% in the final weeks of 2016. Tesla is also producing 2,000 Model X and Model S vehicles a week and aims to steadily increase that figure to 2,400 by the fourth quarter. But the company is also spending heavily to prepare for the production of the Model 3, a more affordable model that could deliver enough volume to make its car operations profitable. On the call, Musk said that unit volumes of its cars could triple or even quadruple from current levels by the end of next year as the Model 3 ships. Meanwhile, mini-SUVs and small buses built on the Model X platform will move toward production as well. That sounds enticing for patient investors. But Tesla has a history of not meeting its ambitious targets. Asked about the July 1, 2017 production date for the Model 3, Musk said, “I don’t expect us to be at full production on July 1, but I have to drive all suppliers and internal efforts to that date, knowing that some will fall short.” In other words, July 1 is a soft target, an internal yardstick for suppliers to meet or else. Not so much a date when antsy consumers can expect to start receiving their orders. Musk also held court on a variety of topics, such as autonomous driving (“What we have under development is going to blow people away. It blows my mind, and I see it all the time.”), the machinery that manufactures Teslas (“When it looks more like an alien dreadnought, that’s when you know you’ve won.”), energy-storage sales (“I think it’s really going to go ballistic.”), and the pesky media (“Tesla can’t sneeze without there being a national headline.”) If the Tesla sneeze-watch is relentless, it’s because Tesla sits at the center of two emerging industries, clean energy and self-driving cars, often propelling both forward. Should the company fail to deliver on its promises or run out of money trying, it would hurt investment in both initiatives. It’s hardly new that Musk’s vision is taking more time and money than expected to achieve, but there’s some encouragement to be found in his refusal to compromise on that vision.