Alibaba’s new social app uses photo identification to find friends
Computing & Tech
The Real app targets Chinese college students, a prime audience for shopping and social media sites.
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Spotted: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is piloting a new social media app aimed at college students. The app, called Real (Ruwo in Chinese) uses face recognition and face scans to find friends and communicate.
The app is Alibaba’s latest bid to capture college-age social media users. The app uses the slogan “Real life, real you” and allows subscribers to use face recognition to log in.
Users can take a photo of someone and the Real app will use the image to find the person online. There are also features filters, stickers and photo editing.
Alibaba has been widely successful as an online market place. But it has struggled to create a social media app that can compete with other popular Chinese social media platforms.
Real is still in a pilot phase and is only being tested by invite-only. The test group appears to be select college students in Alibaba’s home town, Hangzhou.
7th October 2019
Website: alibaba.com
Contact: alibaba.com/contact
