Zynga Inc (ZNGA)

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ZNGA: LAUNCHES WORDS WITH GIPHY FEATURE IN WORDS WITH FRIENDS,GIPHY USERS SEND 1 BILLION GIFS EACH DAY








Application program interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. An API specifies how software components should interact and APIs are used when programming graphical user interface (GUI) components.








GAMING | MOBILE
ZYNGA LAUNCHES WORDS WITH GIPHY FEATURE IN WORDS WITH FRIENDS
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By Brandy Shaul on Oct. 28, 2016 - 4:00

Mobile and social game company Zynga announced the release of Words With Giphy, a new feature within its Words With Friends multiplayer word game that integrates Giphy’s full search API to allow users to search Giphy’s entire database of GIFs after playing or checking words.
With this feature, after users play tiles or check words in the game’s dictionary, they can shake their devices to see GIFs that match their words.
Users can share GIFs with their opponents in the app, and they can also post GIFs to social media. Users can also send GIFs to friends via text message. Finally, iOS 10 users have the ability to send GIFs when they’re playing games in iMessage.
In a statement, Danny Chang, technical partnerships manager at Giphy, commented:
Words With Giphy is an incredibly creative example of an app using our API to augment their existing user experience. Words With Friends cleverly gives users a tactile way to translate words into an animated vernacular that effortlessly extends across their global audience. Their use of the accelerometer is also unique among all of our API partners for its deep search functionality. It’s really exciting for us to partner with Zynga in using our technology in such an original way, bringing Giphy to millions of Words With Friends players around the world.
The new version of Words With Friends is available to download for free on the iTunes App Store.


Source:
www.adweek.com/socialtimes/zynga-launches-words-with-giphy-feature-in-words-with-friends/646720








FORBES


OCT 26, 2016 @ 10:44 AM 4,204
GIPHY PASSES 100 MILLION DAILY USERS WHO SEND 1 BILLION GIFS EACH DAY, REVEALS GV AS INVESTOR
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Alex Konrad ,
Forbes Staff

Staff writer for venture capital, startups and enterprise tech.

Cleveland’s Andrew Miller slamming his fist against his glove after getting out of a jam in Game 1 of the World Series against the Cubs. Halloween greetings from David S. Pumpkins, a recent Tom Hanks character on Saturday Night Live, that don’t exactly scare. Beyoncé cheering at an awards show. A dancing skeleton cartoon.
Those are a few of the looping clips you might see today if you open up the Giphy app. The library and studio for all things GIF is a pop culture free-for-all, covering everything from the presidential election to sports, recent and vintage TV shows and references that you’d only get if, say, you grew up with the movie ‘Clueless’ as a one-liner bible.
And while the reasons for sharing a GIF might be more whimsical than serious, Giphy’s increasing stranglehold on the mindshare around them is not. 100 million daily active users now request a GIF from Giphy across one of its mediums each day, the company says, with Giphy serving up more than 1 billion GIFs overall on a daily basis.
That number would put four-year-old Giphy at 2/3 as many users as Snapchat, which disclosed 150 million global daily active users in September, depending on how you count viewing a GIF as a user action. “Put that next to some of the larger companies in the world,” says chief operating officer Adam Leibsohn. “It’s scale that is pretty meaningful and material.”

Giphy’s gallery in New York shows off GIFs like they’re fine art. (Credit: Giphy)
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GIF givers connect to Giphy across a range of websites and apps. Facebook Messenger, Slack, Twitter, Tinder and many more popular services all connect to Giphy’s library, which has its own search engine for tagging and surfacing specific types of GIF. (Leibsohn pronounces it with a hard “G,” by the way.) But Giphy’s own website and app are now “a big chunk” of the company’s daily traffic, its COO says.
Giphy doesn’t own the GIF, which started out as an image format in 1987, but has exploded in popularity in recent months. What it can try to own, however, are the key partnership and reach at each point of the GIF distribution chain that will make it synonymous with the term. The company runs its own studio in Los Angeles for customers such as Converse, FOX, McDonald’s, Nike and Paramount; it’s in-house GIF-makers have made GIFs viewed one billion times since April using everything from 3D animation to puppets. Giphy also works directly with artists and shows; its partnership with South Park Studios and Viacom to make GIFs of the popular cartoon have been watched 830 million times. (Election GIFs have been watched more than one billion times.)

The startup is trying a little bit of everything, it would seem, in part because investors keep giving it tens of millions in funding to explore without expecting significant revenue in the short-term. Leibsohn argues that Giphy’s different business segments are strategic. “We are deliberately working on owning the GIF stack,” he says. “We are creating the GIF stack, the GIF ecosystem.”
Despite the emergence of a host of digital sticker companies from the personalized cartoons of Bitmoji, which Snapchat acquired, to Kim Kardashian’s own emoji (Kimoji, naturally), investors believe Giphy can outlast them all. In February the company announced a $55 million Series C funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early investor in Snapchat. But another firm joining the round late, and secret until now, was GV, the firm known previously as Google Ventures. Partner M.G. Siegler had been looking at Slack and found that many of the use cases he observed of Slack users included them sending GIFs through Giphy. “It became clear this was as much about communication,” Siegler says.
GV joined the funding round in a second close and has been working with Giphy quietly for the past few months. Siegler says his firm is happy with Giphy focusing on its “insane growth” over making money for now. “You don’t want to be doing anything to inhibit that. A lot of experiments are taking place, and we will see which avenue ends up the one that resonates.”
Eventually Giphy will likely need to prove to partners that it can bring measurable results in sales. The owner of the rights to a popular film in syndication, for example, might offer up the movie to Giphy to chop into GIFs to promote at the front of its searches for a price. Then when the movie aired next, the partner would want to know just what sort of business boost its GIFs created in viewership. Liebsohn says that for now, marketers are excited to open up a new market and put their brands into messages they wouldn’t be able to touch otherwise. “We are inventing new ways of measuring it,” he says. “There’s more to follow.”
Giphy has more stats in its 2016 “State of the GIF” here.

Follow Alex on Forbes, Twitter and Facebook for more coverage of startups, enterprise software and venture capital.


Source:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/10/26/giphy-passes-100-million-users-reveals-gv-as-investor/#1e397042448e