InMobi unit Glance goes live to lure more users to its lock screen

Senior executives at Unicorn, backed by SoftBank Group, believe it is the “next big frontier for content consumption on the Internet” after text, images and long and short format video.

Glance Live is “a very authentic, genuine and engaging content format for Gen Z,” Piyush Shah, co-founder of InMobi Group and President and Chief Operating Officer of Glance, said in an interview on Sunday. of the pandemic, where people were in the digital world but yearning to experience the offline world.

All live interactions will take place on the Glance lock screen or the so-called ‘screen-zero platform’, which now comes pre-installed on new Android smartphones in India for brands like POCO, Samsung, Vivo and Oppo including Xiaomi.

According to Counterpoint Research’s Quarterly Mobile Application Tracker, released on September 21, Glance achieved 150 million active users in India in the second quarter of 2021. This was 8% higher than the previous quarter. “One in every four Indian smartphone users is now active on the Glance platform, which provides an interactive lock screen experience to Android smartphone users,” the research note said.

Glance has 18 content categories, including sports, movies, commerce, gaming, health and education, and is available in eight Indian languages ​​as well as Bahasa (Indonesia) and Thai (Thailand).

The lock screen has an advantage because “it’s a real estate that’s with you most of the day”, Shah said. “Our lock screen has a very low opt-out rate,” he claimed.

Three-year-old Glance acquired short video platform Roposo in 2019, bought e-commerce platform Shop101 in June, and in July launched Glance Collective, a joint venture company with Collective Artists Network, which works with celebrities and top creators. To build a brand. .

The startup’s business model covers three broad areas, including mobile advertising, creator- or influencer-driven commerce, and digital commerce. According to Shah, Glance plans to launch digital commerce in the “next three months or so”.

Unicorn also makes efficient use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to personalize and automate content across different categories. It has automated about 95% of all content on Glance. There are 60-70 data scientists in the group, whose number is likely to increase to “200-300 in the next 2 to 3 years”, Shah said.

“InMobi, through Glance, Roposo and Shop101, remains at the top in terms of advertising, engagement and transformation in commerce. As literally millions of apps vie for the limited screen real estate on the consumer’s smartphone, so-called screen-zero apps or lock-screen apps are the next frontier for marketers and Glance is well positioned there,” argued chief executive Kashyap Kompela. The executives of Diya technology industry analyst firm RPA2AI Research.

Glance, funded by Google and Mithril Capital, has about 1,200 employees, or about 48% of all employees in the initial public offering-bound InMobi group. However, InMobi’s Marketing Cloud and Telco Cloud (formerly known as TrueFactor) still account for about 90% of the group’s revenue.

“The eye is at the beginning of its monetization journey and, therefore, it constitutes a very small percentage of the InMobi Group’s total revenue numbers,” Shah said.

According to media reports, is Reliance Industries Limited considering an investment of about $ 300 million in Jhalak? “I would not like to comment on that. This is just speculation. I think we are fully prepared to take Glance’s ambitions big on a global scale and of course we will always be on the lookout for the right opportunities to partner. “

“I would say we just raised funding in December ($145 million led by Google, and participation from existing investor Mithril Capital). So, there is no real need for fresh funding,” he said.