Tag: kik

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Kik adds executives: plans to double workforce

Waterloo-based Kik announced two all-star additions to its executive lineup today.

Kik-team

Jae Kim, former head of strategy and operations at the U.S. headquarters of Line, the Japanese messaging, will manage Kik’s growing U.S. operations and the roll-out of services on its popular mobile messaging platform. He will be based in Los Angeles.

Alim Dhanji, tasked with scaling Kik’s workforce and culture, will assume the role of Chief People Officer, based in Waterloo.

“What really drew me and the rest of the team to them was the fact that they were great culture fits – humble, hardworking and team players – which is extremely hard to find when hiring for senior roles,” Ted Livingston, Kik’s CEO, said in a news release.

Kik’s recent raise of $50 million from Tencent, the holding company of China’s WeChat, created a need for new high-level executive roles to advance the company, now valued at more than $1 billion, to the next stage.

Doubling Kik’s workforce from the current 110 in the next year will be quite the job, but Dhanji sounds ready to take it on.

“My experiences have really been about scaling an organization, both organically and through mergers and acquisitions, and working with leadership teams to build the right capabilities within the organizations,” Dhanji told Communitech News. He has held senior executive roles at Citigroup and KPMG, and most recently was a senior vice-president at TD Bank Group.

Scaling culture is a stumbling block for many high-growth companies as they transition from startup to full-fledged company.

“Our emphasis is on making sure we continue to foster collaboration and communication in all our offices,” Dhanji said.

Some tactics include HR programs that “help unify our culture” and the continuation of Friday standup meetings, which connect all Kik offices via video conferencing, but Dhanji said it ultimately comes back to recruitment.

“We’re a knowledge-worker organization; we don’t produce widgets that you can get on a shelf, and so for us it’s really about finding the best talent and finding talent that fits within our culture,” he said, adding that people are a competitive advantage.

And Waterloo Region is a great first stop for talent.

“Waterloo continues to be a really core area to attract the best talent,” he said. “We have just been enjoying exceptional talent from the university, but also Waterloo [Region in general], given that it is a hub for tech talent.”

Kik will be looking elsewhere as it rounds out its teams in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Although Dhanji has his work cut out for him, he’s looking forward to the new opportunity.

“It’s really a compelling product and it’s exciting the potential that Kik has to accomplish in the West what WeChat has accomplished in the East.”

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Kik’s new QR codes can do more than just add friends

Even though QR codes never really took off in the United States, they’re overwhelmingly popular in Asia.

kiksMessaging apps like Snapchat have made them ‘cool’ again and Kik wants a piece of the action.

Today it’s announcing Kik codes, which are a new way to add friends, get straight into group conversations and talk to brands.

Kik’s new codes can be scanned by quickly pulling down on the friends list in the app, which opens the built-in scanner — when you add someone using their code, they automatically add you back too.

It’s even more useful for getting you straight into a group conversation without the hassle of needing to be added by someone else. All you need to do is scan the code and you’re in.

Those QR codes are smarter than most, though, when it comes to working with businesses.

Each code can have data embedded in it, such as the location it was scanned at, which is passed along to the business at the other end. That allows a bot to quickly message the person back with a relevant deal, like a pizza coupon, based on their location.

Businesses can customize the data stored in each code, but Kik codes can’t be visually customized like Snapchat’s because the company believes they need to be recognizable and functional before it explores that.

The company announced earlier this year that it has 200 million active users but has now grown to 240 million and more than half a billion messages have been sent to bots. These new QR codes are an enticing way to extend that network further.

Kik codes are available today in the company’s updated apps.

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Kik valued at $1-billion

KIKMessaging app gets $50M investment from China’s Tencent

Canada has another unicorn – a startup valued by private investors at $1-billion. Waterloo, Ont.-based chat app Kik joins the rarefied ranks of Shopify and others to become one of the few Canadian companies to garner the label following a $50-million (U.S.) investment from Chinese Internet giantTencent. The company said the investment brings its total valuation to $1-billion (Canadian).

Kik’s messaging app is immensely popular with 13- to 24-year-olds in North America and has 240 million registered users. Tencent is the $200-billion Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. arch-rival and owner of WeChat, a Chinese social messaging platform that Kik has aspirations to become. It’s a strategic partnership to help the startup win mobile messenger supremacy, and perhaps put Waterloo, home of BlackBerry Ltd., back on the map.

Mobile chat apps are central to today’s smartphone-governed lives and increasingly offer more than just chat functionality. Many Asian messenger apps have already evolved, such as Kakao (South Korea), Line (Japan) and WeChat (China). Recognized as the most sophisticated in this space, WeChat allows users to do things such as browse e-commerce stores, read the news, pay bills and order taxis or takeout, all alongside the app’s core messenger and social-media functionalities. In a nutshell, it’s the all-encompassing app, the platform within a smartphone.

And Kik is set on becoming something just like it for North American users. Last November, Kik founder Ted Livingston published a piece on the Medium website titled The Race to Become the WeChat of the West. It’s a race the company is intent on winning, which is why in April the company hired well-known Silicon Valley investment bank Qatalyst Partners to help it find the right partner – Tencent was a natural choice.

“What they are doing in China is what we want to do in the West, and they said they could help us do that,” Mr. Livingston said. “It was really a mutual coming together.”

Although the company is not yet profitable, its collects revenue from brands that sign up for accounts on the app, Mr. Livingston said. The high valuation is not rare for companies in the mobile space, where much of the value is tied up in the so-called network effect – the idea that by building a massive number of users first, revenue will follow.

The funding will be used primarily to grow the Kik team and to expand offerings on the app, and is not a precursor to a sale. “This is just a straight financial investment,” Mr. Livingston insisted. “There’s no strings attached; it’s an investment as a venture capitalist would make, but we will benefit from the informal advisory and sounding board Tencent will be for us.”

The money and advice will certainly be much needed in this so-called race, which, while still early, has already whittled out other contenders.

“It’s about building a chat ecosystem, with all these services from food to shopping to games … that live and exist and grow on top of the core chat,” Mr. Livingston said. “And I would say the only two companies that get this in the West are us and Facebook.”

Boris Wertz, founder of Version One Ventures and a long-time watcher of the chat-app space, believes Kik did well by knowing early on that it would be a platform, although even with the lead “it’s difficult to out-Facebook Facebook,” he added. “[Facebook has] so much scale and funding and on top of that is running a very aggressive product with Messenger. Kik needs to find a large enough niche to build its platform around.”

So far, Kik’s niche has skewed young (the company claims about 40 per cent of U.S. teens use the app), which is a benefit in terms of capturing the future market, as well as helping shape user preferences and habits early on. “It’s with youth that we see the opportunity to build an ecosystem; we are not trying to get them to switch services, but to adopt services.”

Nevertheless, whether North American users will embrace this next-generation chat app still remains to be seen. “Sure, people look at WeChat and think, ‘How cool that you can get all these products and services,’ but it might well be because there was no bigger social network that took off in China,” Mr. Wertz noted. “Can it work as well where you have very strong social networks already in place?”

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Why Kik's Users Have Swapped 350 Million Texts – With Bots

When you’re one of the most popular messaging apps among teens in the United States, you can’t resort to traditional banner ads.

You probably can’t use cutting-edge, programmatic advertising techniques that track, divvy up and target your users with just the right personalised ad, either.

You need the next big thing in mobile advertising, and right now that just might be brand bots.

Brand bots are automated accounts that run on messaging services like Kik that “chat” one-on-one with thousands of human users. The bot marketing phenomenon has been gaining strength on messaging apps that skew towards younger users, like Kik and Tinder, which has an estimated 50 million monthly active users.

Kik has 200 million registered users, more than a third of whom are aged between 16 and 24, and it’s taking on 250,000 new users each day. More than 10 million of them have already chatted with brand bots since Kik introduced Promoted Chats in November 2014. (Unsanctioned bots, typically porn bots run by spammers, had been running rampant on the mobile chatting platform for years.)

In the seven months since Kik launched Promoted Chats, more than 350 million messages have been sent and received between human users and promoted chat accounts. That’s a lot of chatting with completely artificial entities. Many of the brands behind these bots are media companies like Funny or Die, Moviefone, or content platform Massively.

One example of the brand bots at play: Massively recently launched a campaign to promote horror flick Insidious 3. Instead of the usual static or video ads, it created a bot that represented the movie’s heroine Quinn Brenner. The Brenner bot can hold a stilted conversation with a Kik user, telling them things like, “Some weird stuff has been going on.”

For movie studios the marketing potential here must be tantalizing. If they can program their bots to be moderately realistic, chat app users can feel as though they’re chatting with fictional characters and develop a stronger bond with a movie or TV show.

DNA Studios, the producers of sci-fi film Ex-Machina, set up a clever marketing stunt on Tinder earlier this year in which a chat bot played the role of their main female character, an android in the film. During chats with other Tinder users, the bot would eventually sent a link to the film’s website, revealing her artificial origins.
More 60 companies have Promoted Chat accounts on Kik. Funny or Die’s bot has chatted with an astonishing 1.5 million users, while accessories retailer Skull Candy’s had chatted with 300,000 within the first three months of its launch. “That surpassed their Twitter TWTR -1.52% following, which took two or three years to build,” says Kik press office Rod McLeod.

Waterloo, Canada-based Kik uses something like a freemium business model with its promoted chats. Brands like Skull Candy can set up their accounts for free, but if they want to acquire more users they have to pay Kik for the access. Nearly all 60 brands on the platform have gone on to pay for access to more users.

Kik CEO Ted Livingston believes this is the future of how companies will engage with their customers. Nobody is downloading apps anymore, he says. “This is why official accounts are doing so well in China. You don’t have to download a new app. You just chat with new friends.”

Livinston is referring to China’s most popular messaging app WeChat, which has more than 500 million monthly active users and is on the forefront of the trend for messaging apps to become fully-fledged hubs for communication, entertainment and commerce — a modern-day portal to the web.

The closely-watched Internet Trends report from Mary Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, said this week that messaging platforms like Kik, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, LINE and Snapchat were “aiming to create cross-platform operating systems…. for more and more services.”

On WeChat, you can order food, play games, send money and order a taxi among other things. Increasingly, WeChat is replacing the browser as a means to access websites for companies and organisations too.

“There are more official accounts created on WeChat than there are websites put on the internet in China,” Livingston says, citing direct sources at WeChat.

Call them official accounts, promoted chats, or brand bots, they’re already an established business model among chat apps in Asia. Livingston claims the model is helping his bottom line, though at this point he’ll only hint about their impact on revenue.

“I can’t give numbers,” he says, “but it’s working quite well.”

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AC Grad Kik introduces in-chat browser

Facebook has developed an app platform for Messenger, but underdog rival Kik has continued its focus on putting the entire web in chat after upgrading its in-app sidebar browser into a full-blown browser for its messaging app.

The change means that Kik users can now summon a full browser inside their chats with friends. Previously the browser was limited, since it was loaded from the sidebar as part of the chat window. This change translates to a more immersive experience, which lets Kik’s 200 million registered users surf the web while talking to friends; for instance I could listen to Soundcloud while chatting. It also gives them the option to easily share web pages and services in chats.

To read the full article, click here.

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NBC News Partners with AC Grad Kik

NBC News has launched an official account on Kik, a mobile-first chat network with more than 200 million users.

The news division’s account will allow Kik users to find and share real-time news content tailored to topics of their choice.

Users can search for and send a message to the username ‘NBCNews.’ After sending a keyword such as ‘politics’ or ‘technology,’ they will receive story and video content from the news site.

NBC News will also be able to push messages to Kik users, including popular videos or breaking news items.

To learn more, click here.

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AC Grad Kik strives to become the third great network

Kik’s pursuit of the youth market has kept the Waterloo, Ont.-based company largely off the mainstream radar.
“I think we’re the most under-the-radar company of our size in Canada, certainly. If you were to go to the average Canadian and say, ‘Have you heard of Kik?’ probably everybody would say, ‘No,’ ” Mr. Livingston said.

“And yet, on Christmas Day, if you were to look at the top free apps on iTunes, Kik was the only Canadian company in the top 100 (at No. 7).”

Securing mainstream attention isn’t a priority for Mr. Livingston. He’s primarily focused on adding new users, many of them teenagers. The company claims it adds 250,000 users a day, but won’t say how many actually stay as active users.

Mr. Livingston said his goal is to create the “third great network” (after telephone and the Internet). That goal may seem far-fetched for a mere chat app, but if Mr. Livingston is to achieve it, he must boost Kik’s profile. “We need a much bigger reputation,” he said. “We need to be known as a hot company.”

Founded in 2009 by a group of University of Waterloo students, Kik has raised a total of $70.5 million, including $38.3 million late last year.

To read the full article, click here.

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AC Grad Kik adds video option for its 200 million registered users

Mobile messaging app Kik has added native video capture to its service as it lays the groundwork to offer more interactive content options for its 200 million registered users.

An update to Kik for iOS and Android today now lets users record videos of up to 15 seconds from inside their chat windows. The feature includes a full-screen playback option, and videos will loop continuously.

The new addition is pretty smooth, but video capture is a standard part of any communications service these days.Kik Video SMKik — which offers a sophisticated in-chat browser for sharing web content — admits it is playing catch up here.

Now that it has established its own video platform as a base, however, the Canada-based company plans to go forth and be more creative. Or, at least, offer its users the chance to unleash new shades of creativity on its service.

To read the full article, click here.

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AC Grad Kik hits 200 million users

Kik just passed 200 million registered users, but CEO and co-founder Ted Livingston played down that milestone, telling TechCrunch in an interview that it “doesn’t really matter all that much.”

Livingston also dismissed monthly active user counts, a metric that is increasingly presented by companies, as “meaningless”. He joked that Kik doesn’t release its own MAU number because it “hasn’t had time to juice the numbers.”

Livingston welcomes a more quantified approach along the thinking of Twitter and Medium founder Ev Williams, who recently lamented the tech industry’s obsession with measuring “a mile wide, and an inch deep.”
“For a chat app that depends on frequent, meaningful conversation among peers, engagement is the golden goose,” he said.

To read the full article, click here.

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AC Grad Kik Mobile holding a Hackathon event in partnership with University of Waterloo

Partnering with the University of Waterloo, Kik will be holding a “Hackathon” event in which students would have the chance to prove their hacking and development skills. Working individually or in groups of up to 4, participants will have the opportunity to bring to life any creative idea in regard to web design or a mobile web app. During the event they will have the chance to work with the Kik Messenger development team.

While the prizes for the Kik Hackathon have not been officially revealed, UWaterloo students will be presenting their talent in front of a panel of judges, which includes the CEO of the company, Ted, as well as Associate Director of Velocity for Kik Wes Worsfold among others.

The Kik Hackathon will take place between the 30th of January and the 1st of February in the SLC of the University of Waterloo.

Look here for more details.