In today’s mobile world, many prefer to communicate through texts, DMs and social media over phone calls and face-to-face conversations. The downside, of course, is the challenge of articulating exactly what’s on your mind with words alone. In verbal conversations, nonverbal cues such as inflection of voice, eye contact (or lack thereof), and volume speak “louder than words”. However, when communicating digitally, we’ve evolved to rely on visuals to illustrate the points we’re trying to get across. Today, we’re excited to introduce Tenor: a new company name that better hones in on the helpful role our GIF Keyboard plays in mobile communication. As Tenor, we’re also announcing an SDK for Android developers, and we’re pleased to have TouchPal, the keyboard with 450 million+ users across the world, as our first SDK partner company. Read on for more on these updates and stay tuned for more as we’ll be unveiling more on our new brand direction over the coming months.
So why Tenor? Since our company launch in 2014, people have been using our GIF Keyboard to visually communicate thoughts, feelings and emotions. We’ve quickly grown to develop the largest mobile GIF sharing audience in the world, and we want our brand to best reflect how people are using our product today: to add tone to your text conversations. For consumers, Tenor will continue to be a mobile-first company, focused on delivering exactly the right GIF for the right moment. Across Tenor’s network, over 150 million people per month are performing billions of searches for GIFs and videos.Our unparalleled mobile dataset provides us with meaningful information about what our users are searching for, and these insights power our matching engine. The matching engine is how we deliver the right GIF for every moment and feeling. It also allows us to offer more engagement with the content provided by our partners, including: 21st Century Fox, Disney, Dreamworks, Lionsgate, NBC, Paramount, Showtime, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, Viacom and more.
Given people are using Tenor’s GIF Keyboard five times a day, our SDK for Android environments is an amazing opportunity for partners to drive user engagement and make mobile messaging easier, more nuanced and fun. Through our SDK, TouchPal will now be able to offer its users full access to Tenor’s rich feature set, including our unique matching engine and one-tap sharing of GIFs and videos, to increase overall consumer engagement. In addition to this new SDK offering, we’ll continue to expand our API program which currently powers GIF sharing for companies such as Twitter, Facebook Messenger, Google’s Gboard, Kik, LinkedIn, Vodafone and more.
Our brand is evolving, and we are more dedicated than ever to providing the perfect GIFs to communicate what text and emoji alone can’t. We look forward to introducing new elements of the brand in the coming months, so continue to check back for future updates!
Originally published at tenor.com on August 9, 2016.
