The Weather Channel and Kik, The Weather Company
Kik Opens Platform with Launch of Bot Shop
WATERLOO, Ontario, April Five, 2016 – Kik Interactive, maker of talk network Kik, today opened their platform to third-party developers with the launch of the Bot Shop. Bots provide a low-friction way of delivering joy, engaging, and useful services through talk. Now anyone can build a bot for Kik, which has more than two hundred seventy five million registered users. Approximately forty percent of U.S teenagers use the app.
Kik’s Bot Shop is launching with four categories – entertainment, gaming, and utilities – and fifteen bots, including Funny Or Die, Riffsy, Sephora, The Weather Channel, and Vine. Kik has also named four launch playmates – imperson, Massively, Outbrain and Sequel – that will be tasked with helping developers and companies build bots. Kik is inviting all developers to embark making bots via its bot API, available at dev.kik.com.
“We want our users to have more joy and engaging practices in Kik without having to leave the app,” said Ted Livingston, founder and CEO of Kik. “We’ve been innovating in talk in the last few years and have found that the best results come from low-friction practices that don’t hurt the plainness of talk. Bots produce that.”
The arrival of Kik’s Bot Shop comes amid a series of consumer Internet trends that suggest the time is ripe for talk bots. In 2015, 1.Four billion people used a talk app, according to eMarketer. At the same time, people have stopped downloading fresh apps in large numbers. More than seventy percent of U.S. total smartphone app usage comes from just two hundred apps, according to a June two thousand fifteen report by Nielsen. And a late two thousand fourteen examine by Comscore found that that two-thirds of smartphone users downloaded zero apps in the last month.
“When we built the Funny Or Die bot on Kik in 2014, we were able to concentrate on building a superb practice for our fans without worrying about user acquisition, and within the very first three months, we were talking with 1.Five million Kik users,” said Patrick Starzan, SVP marketing & GM social media at Funny Or Die. “We’re looking forward to continuing to shove the boundaries of talk as it becomes central to mobile computing.”
“Our mission at Outbrain is to serve audiences the best personalized content practice, wherever they are,” said John LoGioco, EVP at Outbrain. “Messaging is the next frontier and where audiences are already spending their digital lives. As the bot revolution unfolds, we’re excited to help publishers supply good content practices in Kik.”
To coincide with the Bot Shop launch, Kik will release three fresh talk bots features: web bubbles (“wubbles”) for sharing rich media content in conversation threads; suggested responses to help expedite text input; and a mention feature that permits bots to participate in conversation threads involving numerous parties, including groups.