Glance: A revolutionising way of consumption of content in India

Many people hooked into entertainment today invest a decent amount of time on Internet-connected smartphones accessing smartphone applications. In reality, studies have shown that, as opposed to searching the mobile site, mobile users spend 90% of their time on applications. What several people do not know, though, is that many of the applications they often use were scheduled to crash, and tech analysts everywhere were quite surprised by the success.

Laying stone base 

The business was founded in 2007 by Naveen Tiwari, Mohit Saxena, Amit Gupta, and Abhay Singhal under the name mKhoj. It was also the first Indian Unicorn Entrepreneurship venture. As Glance was designed for the Indian user, it provides different complexities correlated with local language tastes. Glance also uses algorithms, close to what Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram do, to construct a customised collection of glances for any user. With Glance, users can ingest content on their Android lock-screens in 'tiny moments' or more specifically, glance at content, without having to unlock their devices.

Glance: the journey of India's first unicorn

No more brief glances! That's what InMobi, India's first unicorn, is betting on with Glance, the latest lock-screen web-first product offering of the mobile advertising business that revolutionises the way India absorbs content. With Glance, the Android lock-screen service shows you high-quality, short-form content that will certainly catch your attention every time you look at your mobile phone. 

Glance, which serves media content, news and casual games on the Android-powered mobile lock screen, has accumulated 100 million active users a day. Glance utilises AI to give its customers a customised experience. With locally appropriate news, stories, and casual sports, the service fills the otherwise barren lock screen. 

Glance today has over 26 million daily active users (DAUs) in India alone, far surpassing the figures of other successful short video sites such as Tik Tok. And apps now have a total of 22 minutes of their time spent on Glance.

Society catering 

The goal of InMobi's mobile-first Glance platform is simple, says Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi: providing visually rich content that informs and entertains consumers, whether it is a factoid entertainment, a sporting event outcome, a news snippet, or a fashion suggestion. And all this, one lock-screen at a time. So, there's no software for Glimpse. Instead, the service is pre-installed on Samsung, Xiaomi, Gionee, and Vivo manufactured cell phones, which together account for a whopping 65 per cent of all new smartphones sold in India, or more than 90 million handset unit shipments in 2018 alone. Glance has garnered 100 million (DAU) daily active users and 100,000 installs by providing news, media content and interesting games on the locked screen of Android-powered smartphones.

Funding and alliance 

In September 2019, through PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital, Glance raised $45 million to scale up its market outside India and expand its product offerings. Expansion to the Southeast Asian markets of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore is the main motive for collecting funds. Then the platform, Mithril Capital, raised $145 million in December 2020 for Google. InMobi Group founder and CEO Naveen Tewari reported that the new round has not yet been completed and $30 million to $55 million could be bagged more.

Progress in the future 

In cooperation with the world's leading smartphone manufacturers, Glance aims to officially open its service in Indonesia and other markets in Southeast Asia. The company has three branches and, next year, it plans to go public. The service is currently available in India, with more than 80 million subscribers in its main market, in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. In the next two years, the organisation plans to carry out Glance around the world. What's interesting about Glance is that without using sites such as Google or Facebook, it meets a client. Glance is simply supposed to be complementary to the ecosystem of the software.