Introducing Facer 4.0 and the Watchmaker Series

Today is a big day — We could not be more thrilled to be releasing Facer 4.0, a massive update to the largest watch face platform for smartwatches in the world. This release brings a number of long awaited features to the platform and marks a new exciting milestone for Facer: the introduction of a new high-end tier to our watch face offering, reserved exclusively to partners in the traditional watch industry — the “Watchmaker Series”.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the details of this release!

Introducing the “Watchmaker Series”

After having brought some of the most beloved movie, tv, and gaming brands to the smartwatch world like Star Trek, Tetris, and Garfield, we are VERY excited to be introducing a new tier of branded watch faces to Facer, reserved exclusively to partners from the traditional watchmaking world: the “Watchmaker Series”.

A recent survey of Facer users showed that almost 80% of them still wear traditional watches regularly for formal occasions and are interested in learning more about them on our platform. This “Watchmaker Series” will allow Android Wear and Tizen users to “test-drive” traditional watches from top tier watchmakers on their smartwatches, connect with their brands, and learn more about their history and craft.

The initial roster of the “Watchmaker Series” includes stellar partners from the Swiss, German, and US watchmaking world:

• Maurice Lacroix (Switzerland)
• ArtyA (Switzerland)
• Snyper Watches (Switzerland)
• MVMT (USA)
• Manufaktur Waldhoff (Switzerland / Germany)
• VAER Watches (USA)

We feel extremely privileged to have had the opportunity to work closely with these brands to recreate digital versions of their dials for the smartwatch world.

A total of 16 Watchmaker Series watch faces are available today with more coming in the next few weeks. This is only the beginning — The Facer team is committed to working closely with the traditional watchmaking world to cross the mechanical/digital divide and to support even more partners in their entry into the smartwatch world.

Introducing Facer 4.0 — bringing brands into the spotlight

To support the growing number of partners using our platform, we are launching Facer 4.0 today, a major update focused on our business offering, including verified accounts, a brand new look, support for promotional media, watch face analytics, copyright and trademark protection, and more!

Verified accounts

With the increasing popularity of Facer and its growing database of 30,000 watch faces, it has become more and more difficult for users to identify watch faces that are distributed by our partners and the ones that are merely created by fans inspired by their brand. To solve this problem, we are introducing the concept of the verified account and its now familiar blue checkmark badge to clearly indicate when a watch face and its designer are associated to a brand partner, or a user whose authenticity we could verify.

A brand new look

The Facer platform was updated with a clean new design to make the watch faces and their designers shine.

User profiles now include a cover image, a featured watch face shown in all its interactive glory, and links to the user’s website and social accounts.

Media carousel and Showcase View

Each watch face gets a new clean design as well, which includes a carousel of videos and images that the designer can upload to show additional views for their watch faces, or in the case of the Watchmaker Series to show what the real watch looks like.

Facer 4.0 also introduces a new Showcase view that users can use to see watch faces in full screen, without any distraction. This view is also included in the Facer Creator to let designers preview their watch faces on screen more easily before testing them on device using our “Send to Watch” feature.

And all of this is also coming to mobile…

The Facer mobile app is also getting a significant update with support for verified accounts, cover images, media carousel, and a major focus on videos to allow brands to effectively showcase their story and show their real watches in action to our users.

Introducing Wrist Selfies

Mechanical and luxury watch aficionados have already taken Instagram by storm but they are not alone — smartwatch wearers are following suit and are sharing their styles by taking wrist selfies and publishing them on their favorite social networks.

Facer 4.0 is introducing a new feature to make this even easier: Wrist Selfies. With Wrist Selfies, users can snap a picture of the watch face they just synced to their smartwatch and share it with their friends or publish them on social networks, straight from the app!

We cannot wait to see all your Facer watch faces on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and more!

But that’s not the only way to share your favorite watch faces on Facer…

Introducing HTML5 widgets

We are very excited to announce that all Facer watch faces are now embeddable as HTML5 widgets, anywhere on the web, thanks to our integration with embed.ly.

These embeddable widgets are fully interactive, display the watch face in real-time, and allow users to send a watch face to their watch with just one tap on the blue sync button.

These HTML5 widgets can be used by publications to curate collections of their favorite watch faces in an engaging format, and make it easy for their audience to try them on their own smartwatch with just a click on the blue Facer Sync button.

For watch face designers, they are a great way to showcase their creations on their own websites or blogs to drive more awareness for their watch faces, create a following, and drive more usage (which we are about to make much easier to track on Facer).

Introducing Facer Analytics

Starting with Facer 4.0, Facer partners will get access to analytics on their watch faces, allowing them to get a better sense of how successful their designs are and measure the impact of their promotional efforts.

The watch face analytics panel of Facer 4.0 will show designers a number of daily metrics, including:

• Watch face views: number of times the watch face was seen in the mobile app.
• Watch face purchases: number of times the watch face was purchased, (only available if the face is premium).
• Watch faces syncs: number of times the watch face was “synched” to a smartwatch.
• Concurrent Wearers: number of users currently wearing the watch face on their smartwatch.

We will be rolling out additional metrics throughout the rest of the year and progressively roll out this feature to more designers.

Introducing Brand Protector

Last, but certainly not least, we are excited to be introducing “Brand Protector”, a new feature designed to automatically detect and flag any designs published by users on the Facer platform that may infringe on existing copyrights or trademarks.

Brand Protector monitors the Facer platform and uses cutting edge machine learning and image processing technology to seamlessly detect content that is likely to be infringing.

When such a case is detected, the system notifies the participating brand owner who can then take the appropriate action.

Copyright and Trademark infringement is an issue we take very seriously on the Facer platform and we will continue to improve our detection systems to ensure that our brand partners are protected and can thrive in this new smartwatch ecosystem.

If your are a watch brand and would like to participate in the program, please visit our Partners page or email us at partnerships@little-labs.com

And that’s it for this release!!

We hope you are as excited as we are for Facer 4.0 and we can’t wait to have you try our brand new Watchmaker Series and share your first wrist-selfies on Instagram.

Thanks, and see you on facer.io!

~The Facer crew

👋 For general inquiries, please send us a note at hello@little-labs.com

🤝 For brand partnerships, please visit our Partners page or email us at partnerships@little-labs.com

📦 Download the Press Kit (images+videos) here