Commenting on the news Li stated, “I am honored to have spoken at this prestigious event and look forward to Cheetah Mobile’s continued relationship with Microsoft to develop products that solve real-life pain points and increase efficiency for people and businesses.”

Cheetah Mobile and Microsoft have been working together since 2017, when it integrated Microsoft’s intelligent voice assistant Cortana into its popular launcher app, CM Launcher. Cortana not only allows CM Launcher users to easily control the app with voice commands, they can also use voice commands to make voice calls, read the news, create and manage events, set reminders and perform web searches, all without leaving the app.

Microsoft and Cheetah Mobile expanded their partnership in July 2018 with the release of Cheetah Translator, a portable translation device developed using text-to-speech and translation technology from Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) and OrionStar, a Cheetah Mobile-invested AI company. The device is light-weight and easy-to use, while providing accurate and reliable translation, making it the perfect accessory for travelers. Cheetah Translator operates on OrionStar’s self-developed Orion Voice OS, the number one smart voice OS in China, with a 30% market share. Orion Voice OS currently powers smart speakers from Xiaomi, Midea and Ximalaya, as well as Cheetah Mobile’s entire line of robotics products and smart devices.

Unlike similar translation devices that feature two or more buttons, Cheetah Translator’s one-button design reduces the number of operations required of users. Whether it is selecting the language, translating or changing volume, it can all be done with one button. In fact, the translation engine provided by Microsoft and OrionStar automatically detects which language is being spoken and translates accordingly without the need to manually switch between languages. It currently supports Chinese, English, Korean and Japanese, with more languages to be added soon.

Li continued, “The major advantage that Cheetah Mobile has in AI products is its combination of user thinking, product thinking and AI technologies. By focusing on users’ needs in specific scenarios, Cheetah Mobile uses the most suitable technology to solve those needs, and Cheetah Translator is the embodiment of this goal. There are no borders between machines and people anymore. Cheetah Mobile’s goal is to provide users with AI products that are truly intelligent and truly useful.”

Microsoft Shanghai Tech Summit was held at the Shanghai World Expo Center from October 24 to 27, 2018. The Summit brings together Microsoft‘s top global technology experts, famous domestic entrepreneurs, industry leaders, entrepreneurial pioneers and technology enthusiasts gather together to discuss hot topics, share the latest & most cutting-edge gains, the most competitive strategies and techniques, as well as industry solutions under digital transformation, to jointly improve business productivity and predict the development trend of the industry.

About Cheetah Mobile Inc.

Cheetah Mobile is a leading mobile Internet company with strong global vision. It has attracted hundreds of millions of monthly active users through its mobile utility products such as Clean Master and Cheetah Keyboard, casual games such as Piano Tiles 2, and live streaming product Live.me. The Company provides its advertising customers, which include direct advertisers and mobile advertising networks through which advertisers place their advertisements, with direct access to highly targeted mobile users and global promotional channels. The Company also provides value-added services to its mobile application users through the sale of in-app virtual items on selected mobile products and games. Cheetah Mobile is committed to leveraging its cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies to power its products and make the world smarter. It has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange since May 2014.

About OrionStar

OrionStar is an AI company in China that is controlled by Fu Sheng, CEO and chairman of Cheetah Mobile. The company was established in September 2016 by a group of technology industry leaders and product specialists from Silicon Valley, Japan, Taiwan, Beijing, and Shenzhen. OrionStar has developed a complete robotics technology chain, including a voice-controlled operating system, Orion Voice OS, visual recognition technology, indoor mapping and navigation system, and a back-end robotics platform, Orion OS. OrionStar is committed to using AI technology to develop the next generation of ground-breaking technology products and free people from the burden of overly complicated tasks, make homes more intelligent and create a better world through technology.

For more information about Cheetah Mobile and its products, please visit www.cmcm.com

The post Cheetah Mobile Vice President Keynotes Microsoft Tech Summit 2018 in Shanghai appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The app’s innovative three-tiered security defense system and easy-to-use interface allow users to safely and conveniently secure and manage their cryptocurrency assets.

By leveraging its extensive mobile security and product development experience, Cheetah Mobile “has truly created a safer mobile wallet,” a provided media release notes.

So how does it work?

SafeWallet employs a unique three-tiered security defense system that protects users in three key areas, including user behavior, phone security and asset management to provide maximum protection for users’ digital assets and prevent them from being lost or stolen.

SafeWallet currently supports both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), with more currencies coming soon.

SafeWallet has no access to your private key and may not, under any circumstance, initiate a transaction using your private key on your behalf.

“Cheetah Mobile’s move into the blockchain industry represents a significant moment for our company,” said Edward Sun, SVP of Cheetah Mobile. “Similar to our AI strategy, we are committed to staying at the forefront of the latest technological trends, and mobile asset security is an area that we believe we can have a strong impact.”

SafeWallet is currently available on Google Play, with an iOS version expected to be released shortly.

The post Cheetah Mobile Rolls Out SafeWallet Cryptocurrency Wallet appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

MMW is told that nearly 100 designers from 10 countries attended the event, where they listened to speeches by Cheetah Mobile executives, learned more about CM Launcher and Cheetah Keyboard, and received awards for their outstanding performance on the CM Design platform in 2017.

Established in 2015, CM Design has quickly developed into a popular venue for some of the world’s top up-and-coming graphic designers. Through the platform, Cheetah Mobile is cultivating a growing community of highly talented individuals and teams from around the world, capable of responding to the latest trends and bringing users the themes they want.

“We are building a robust system to connect designers and users,” said Edward Sun, SVP of Cheetah Mobile. “Not only does CM Design provide freelance designers with an easy-to-use platform to earn money, our crowd-sourcing model also benefits users, as they are given access to a massive collection of stunning themes to personalize their mobile experience.”

If you are interested in learning more or joining CM Design, click here.

The post Cheetah Mobile Honors Up-and-Coming Graphic Designers appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is an exclusive guest contributed post from Johnny Li, VP, Global Sales & Business Development at  Cheetah Mobile.

With 86% of marketers currently using influencer marketing as part of their content marketing strategies, now is a good time to be an influencer. But, from a brand perspective, are influencers really worth the resources? Let’s find out.

If I were to take a quick scroll through my Instagram feed, it would be chock-full of pictures either taken by influencers or featuring them in some capacity, advertising one product or another. There’s an influencer for nearly every industry, from food to fashion to pharmaceuticals. From a marketing perspective, this could be a good thing: whatever product you’re selling, you’ll be able to find an influencer to feature it. On the other hand, the more influencers there are, the less influential each one will be — as paradoxical as that sounds. Customer attention is a finite resource.

Marketers like influencers because they save them from having to make all of their content themselves. Instead of having to expend effort by brainstorming campaigns for each individual social media platform, they can instead outsource the work to people who have more knowledge about the medium they’re engaging in and the audience they speak to. Additionally, hiring an influencer helps guarantee that a select audience will see your product, thus raising awareness of your brand.

That being said, anyone conducting an influencer campaign has to look beyond the number of followers someone has. After all, a fashion influencer might have 10 million followers on Instagram, but if a sponsored post only gets 50,000 views, those millions of followers didn’t really add any advantage. Too often, brands only go for the big name influencers, the Kardashians and Hadids of the world, and not for the people who will best serve their brands. Using influencers that are more relevant to your brand needs is not only better for marketers, it’s also better for the influencers themselves, as they are more likely to engage and retain their followers if they promote products that interest their existing follower base.

Letting influencers be “on-brand” for themselves is crucial. Don’t try and turn them into something that they’re not — otherwise, what’s the point of using them in the first place? Picking the right people is important, and so is making sure that they’re right for the platform you want to advertise on. As with any advertising campaign, an influencer campaign should remain aligned with your brand’s values, but not so much so that it looks like the brand created the content itself.

For any brand looking to use influencers, they should know what the potential return on their investment will be. In one survey, 78% said that determining the ROI for an influencer campaign was “a top challenge in 2017,” a startlingly high figure given how many marketers are currently engaged in influencer campaigns. In another study, 86% of UK marketers said they “weren’t entirely sure how influencer fees are calculated,” and 38% were unable to tell if using influencer campaigns had driven an increase in sales. What these numbers show is that far too many marketers engage in influencer campaigns simply because they see it as the next big trend in marketing, and not because they have a concrete goal in mind.

Any brand can use influencers, but using them well requires an understanding of what a successful influencer campaign looks like. This will vary according to brands: some brands value reach, others engagement; still others might see influencers as a way to get a sales lift. Regardless of the goal, marketers have to be on the ball and make sure that they are the ones dictating the terms of success, not the influencers themselves. If marketers are not able to accurately measure the results of a campaign, then influencers are not being held accountable for their work or the expected ROI.

Despite the promise that using influencers holds for brands, they still represent only one way of reaching out to your target audience. The ideal way to maximize overall reach would be to utilize influencers alongside other forms of media, including branded content and paid media. By diversifying your outreach strategy, you ensure that your content is seen by as many people as possible.

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t be conducting influencer marketing just for the sake of doing influencer marketing. Utilizing influencers whose “brand” aligns with your own will make any content they produce seem more organic, which in turn will encourage their audience to engage with it naturally. Additionally, it only makes sense to have influencers produce content that is line with their own personas, as that’s what made them influential in the first place. Having a more developed strategy for influencer marketing, then, will be better for influencers and the marketing community overall. Both brands and influencers need to get more mature about how they define influencers — otherwise, the bubble of influencer marketing might burst.

The post Exclusive Op-Ed: How To Value Influencers appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

As you might imagine, ARCam was built on Apple’s ARKit introduced with iOS 11 and is available now for download at ARCam App Store.

“ARCam is a new, streamlined app that allows people to have more fun with their phone camera than ever before, by creating images that pop with augmented reality,” explains Jill Shih, Vice President of Product & User Experience at Cheetah Mobile. “The application allows users to insert popular emojis, location tags and digital time stamps into photographs and short videos which can be saved and shared on Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and sent via text and email.”

ARCam offers six different weather icons such as a mustachioed sun, angry lightning cloud or sleepy moon. The emojis are happy, sad, angry, love-struck and of course the obligatory smiling poop. You can add a digital time or date stamp, as well as your location featuring a rotating tag. One can also change the size of the emojis, rotate them and even have them bounce off each other.

ARCam is available now for download at ARCam App Store.

The post Cheetah Mobile Launches ARCam Augmented Reality App appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is an exclusive guest contributed post to MMW from Ian Wu, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Cheetah Mobile.

The post Op-Ed: Influencer Campaigns: What Works and What Doesn’t appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post by Todd Miller, VP Global Sales at Cheetah Mobile.

Still want to talk stats?

When it comes to proof of the importance of being in this market, you just have to look at the number of international companies spending billions in acquisitions and partnerships to get a toehold in North America.

According to economic research firm Rhodium Group, Chinese companies alone will invest up to $30 billion this year, double what was spent in 2015. Chinese acquisitions of U.S. assets and businesses hit a record $8 billion for the first eight months of the year alone. Compare that to the previous record of $8.9 billion set in 2007, according to data from Dealogic. And that was for the full year.

From Movies to Oil and Gas to Apps

This year we’ve seen truly blockbuster deals starting with Dalian Wanda’s $2.6 billion acquisition of AMC Entertainment, the U.S. movie theatre chain, and Sinopec’s $2.4 billion investment in a number of oil and gas developments from Devon Energy. And of course there’s the ever popular tech sector. App marketing company AppLovin has agreed to a friendly takeover by a Chinese private equity firm for $1.42 billion.

Far from ebbing as an economic powerhouse, although India and China have seen explosive economic growth in the last decade, in other metrics the tide of U.S. influence continues to rise.

Still A Leader

After all, U.S. corporations still represent 128 of the most influential institutions in the world according to the Fortune 500 list. While the global marketplace has become more diverse, the U.S. is still a leader in innovation. It leads in R&D spending which predictably results in a constant stream of new products and services. Often that next big thing that the rest of the world is copying sprouts from the American spirit of invention.  And who’s gonna buy that breakthrough time-saving device? Let’s not forget that the U.S. is still ranked number one in global consumer spending.

What about the art and science of persuasion? The U.S. is a global leader in industry sectors that tend to spend a lot on influencing choice: public relations, marketing, including technology, retail, and financial sectors.

Most industries rely on positive consumer sentiment for their products and services to some extent. Brand management plays a key role in building and maintaining a company’s reputation. It’s natural that an agency’s market footprint is disproportionately higher in the U.S. than elsewhere. And the U.S leads in using new tools, such as social media marketing, and continues to set the trends.

Cheetah Next Steps

It was during a trip to Silicon Valley that Cheetah’s founders made two important decisions: to pivot from a PC-based strategy to mobile and to target the U.S. for its expansion plans. Cheetah leapt even further into the European and U.S. market with the acquisition of MobPartner in 2015 for $58 million. Cheetah Mobile now has 623 million users all around the world, but for reasons set out above — the U.S. is key to it running a truly global operation. And the company has deepened its investment in Silicon Valley with the recent opening of its new U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. Cheetah Mobile’s dual-headquarter strategy – Beijing and Silicon Valley – straddles the two central hubs for the mobile Internet, enabling it to leverage opportunities across both countries.

For now the bulk of its workforce remains in China, but establishing a name and presence in the U.S. will mean a global advantage. After all, 80 percent of the company’s user base comes from outside of China, which makes it unique among Chinese tech companies.

Yes, there have been some growing pains, as the company integrates the infrastructure of acquired parties and builds out its own regional sales teams. That’s been the challenge for my first 100 days with the company.

But now Cheetah is poised to have a focused and streamlined offer for U.S. agencies and advertisers. And that’s access to big data insights from more than 600 million monthly active users, harnessed to target a global market place, whatever the vertical.

Finally, much has been made of the ascendency of the Chinese economy. As Forbes pointed out recently, the global influence of the U.S. was captured by the old adage that “when America sneezes, the world catches a cold.” Today, those symptoms now appear when China does the same. But when Chinese companies want to become truly global players, they come here.

The post Op-Ed: The Path To Global Success Still Runs Through the U.S. appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In fact, the team at Cheetah is the lead investor in Nanigans’ $24 million Series B financing.

Nanigans is a worldwide provider of social and mobile advertising software and advertising automation software.

According to a release shared with MMW, its customers run over $500 million in annualized ad spend using its software.

“We are pleased to announce this strategic investment in Nanigans,” says Sheng Fu, chief executive officer of Cheetah Mobile. “Nanigans plays an important role in the social and mobile advertising ecosystem, as evidenced by its strong customer base and the large amount of ad spend managed using Nanigans’ software. Investing in Nanigans advertising automation software is a significant step for us as we actively build up our advertising platform and enhance our capabilities globally.”

The post Cheetah on the Prowl for Nanigans appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.