Editor’s note: Jack Krawczyk is head of monetization at StumbleUpon, the discovery platform. Jack was a founding member of Google+ and tweets about stuff.
Have we forgotten that being social means connecting with the people in your life? In today’s world of growth hacking and viral marketing, we have taken social to mean acquiring likes and followers so that we can post a photo to Facebook… → Read More
Editor’s note: Somrat Niyogi is the CEO of Miso.
Every time I turn on the TV, I see Twitter. Hashtags and Twitter handles are on TV shows. There are dedicated pages to world events like the Olympic Games. Even entertainment news reporting has been transformed because the general population can get in touch with what’s happening in the lives of celebrities instantaneously. → Read More
David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, has sent his first tweet. Despite joining Twitter in January 2010 his verified account had never tweeted anything — until a few moments ago. Why Cameron feels the need to tweet now can be explained by growing rumblings of discontent in the Conservative party about the direction of his leadership. → Read More
ROCKZi, the social news service launched in July by search startup Blekko, has released a new feature allowing users to embed their “news boards” on other websites.
VP of Marketing Mike Markson describes this as a way for people to showcase their knowledge in a given field, without actually having to constantly hunt down new content. For example, EarthEcho, the environmental nonprofit founded… → Read More
One of the most frustrating things that can happen at work is finding out that an important email is locked away in a colleague’s inbox, and you can’t get a hold of some crucial information until that colleague comes back online. That’s a problem that startup AffinityLive is trying to solve with its new product AffinityLive Sync.
CEO Geoff Mcqueen describes Sync as “Yammer combined with Dropbox… → Read More
Little Bird, a startup that helps PR agencies, marketers, and media companies identify influencers on virtually any topic, is launching in private beta today.
The company was founded by tech blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick — an an early TechCrunch writer who’s best-known for his long stint at ReadWriteWeb. He left his full-time role at RWW last November to start his own company, which was… → Read More
HashTip is a new mobile app targeting savvy shoppers, primarily moms, who want to share tips with each other about kids’ products, activities and deals. (OK, cue snarky comment about how we already have Pinterest for that.) But unlike Pinterest, HashTip isn’t about posting “inspirational” imagery, it’s more heavily focused on social commerce. The service augments its tips with extra info… → Read More
DEMO Fall 2012 wrapped up in Santa Clara today, where 77 startups took the stage to show off their apps, services and products. The young companies were given six minutes to pitch their ideas and impress the audience, collectively competing for the $1 million advertising prize that went to the idea with the most promise. → Read More
As Jon Ferrara what he thinks of today’s CRM software, and he’ll tell you, patently, that it sucks. Ferrara is the co-founder and former CEO of GoldMine, one of the pioneers of customer relationship management and salesforce automation software back in the ’90s. He sold GoldMine in the ’00s for $100+ million, but returned to the game in 2009 based on the belief that CRM was still broken.
The… → Read More
After cutting its full-year projections for bookings and earnings, Zynga’s shares fell more than 20 percent to an all-time low in after-hours trading. The company’s shares are trading at $2.22, down more than 21 percent from today’s close of $2.82.
It’s been a hard road for the company since its IPO last December. Not only have numerous executives left (many of them brought over from EA), but… → Read More
The passage of the JOBS Act earlier this year cemented that not just in practice, but in policy. As a result, it’s been a huge year for crowdfunding platforms — especially Kickstarter, which has raised $50 million for games alone in 2012. But with the increased attention, we’ve started to spy potential holes in the crowdfunding model.
Two problems in particular stand out and two startups are… → Read More
We’ve already seen that the new Facebook Exchange for retargeted ads is delivering impressive results for advertisers. Now a startup called Perfect Audience aims to make those campaigns accessible to a broad range of startups, small ad agencies, and other advertisers.
Co-founder and President Brad Flora says the current batch of ad companies offering access to Facebook Exchange are serving… → Read More
Facebook today announced that it now has 1 billion monthly active users, but although it is a social network, that doesn’t mean that many on there are using it for social causes. Today the company said in a developer blog post that the top 25 nonprofits with Facebook Pages are connecting with over 32 million people worldwide. That works out to just 3.2% of its monthly active user base. → Read More
“Frictionless sharing,” the Facebook Open Graph mechanism which some news sites and video apps have poorly used to boost their own virality at users’ expense, has been one of the more controversial changes Facebook has made in recent months. Social news readers, for example, broadcast the articles you read to your Facebook friends, and led to embarrassment as users caught themselves… → Read More
The proliferation of smartphones has made it incredibly easy for us to take numerous photos and record videos, but it has also left us to deal with massive media archives stored on our devices. When you need to locate one specific photo, or find those you shot at a given event, it can be difficult. A new mobile application called Flayvr, aims to help with this by automatically organizing photos… → Read More
Facebook also announced today that it will be kicking off an advertising campaign to promote its brand, specifically targeting 13 countries including Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Russia, Spain, U.K., and the U.S. The campaign will appear in 12 different languages and will be housed on Facebook itself. → Read More
Local reviews site Yelp — which is up against big competition in Europe in competitor Qype — has launched Yelp Poland, giving it a stronger base in Central Europe.
The U.S.-based publicly listed company already has a Central European presence in Germany (launched in July 2010), Austria (launched in October 2012), and Switzerland (launched in September 2011) — though Qype itself is also… → Read More
Social network Facebook officially hit the 1 billion active monthly user mark, the company announced today. In a post on the official Facebook blog, founder Mark Zuckerberg shared a note celebrating the milestone with a personal thank you to Facebook users. → Read More
Dobango, a startup that allows brands to promote themselves through fan competitions on Pinterest, just announced that it has raised $600,000 in seed funding.
The company is led by Devkumar Gandhi who previously founded mobile advertising startup Nexage. (Dobango’s seed investors include John Ostrem, the original backer of Nexage.) Gandhi served as Nexage’s CEO for more than four years, but… → Read More
In July of last year, Jon Bischke and John McGrath co-founded Entelo to help companies large and small identify and recruit technical talent. Since then, the startup has been in limited beta, providing only brief glimpses into what they were building, but that officially ended this morning. → Read More
Facebook says that today 220 million people are visiting its App Center every month, with 40% likely to return the day after they use it for more. But with thousands of apps available, and visitors looking for guidance on what apps to use, recommendation is a huge part of the equation both for consumers, and for developers hoping their apps are the ones to hit the big time. Today, Facebook took a… → Read More
Facebook is expanding to the US the controversial Promoted Posts feature that lets users pay to get their posts more visibility in the news feed. It will cost $7 per post and Facebook hopes it will be used for garage sales, parties, wedding photos and other important announcements.
Promoted Posts could surface important announcements, but I worry it could allow the rich to dominate the feed. → Read More
Mobile and social game developer Crowdstar is at it again with a new CEO at the helm. The company is promoting from within and giving Jeffrey Tseng, the general manager of products, the top slot.
Peter Relan, who co-founded the company and has served as CEO for the past year and nine months, moves into an executive chairman role. This is a marked change from two years ago when the company… → Read More
These days, it seems like every city and township in North America has its own startup accelerator and is on its way to creating a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. While these apparent symptoms of an “accelerator bubble” are sure to make a few eyes roll, if cities and firms lay the foundations with the right goals in mind, these ecosystems can become important engines of job creation — and… → Read More
Twitter just announced a partnership with Nielsen that should give brands a new way to measure the impact of their advertising campaigns.
Apparently, in the same way that you now see Promoted Tweets in your tweet stream, you might also start seeing surveys from the @TwitterSurveys account, asking you to answer a few questions. It sounds like these surveys will measure things like your awareness… → Read More
Back in June, Brightcove unveiled a new strategy to take its App Cloud development platform open source, and at the same time it introduced a new dual-screen Apple TV feature aimed at growing its business on connected TVs. Today, Brightcove is announcing the very first implementation of that, with Discovery Networks International, which will be using it first in Italy. Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of… → Read More
Promising to help online publishers increase engagement, ensuring that visitors stick around for longer and return more often, Blooie’s chat and analytics platform gets its official push today. In its initial offering, it provides a way for publishers to embed a chat facility onto their site which connects visitors one-to-one based on shared interests, garnered from semantic analysis of the… → Read More
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” — Steve Jobs
A few months ago, former Facebooker Sacha Tueni and Matthias Wagner were working on a Twitter client. Yes, a Twitter client — several years after Tweetdeck launched and Seesmic pivoted toward being a social media reader. While their app… → Read More
Everyday your friends are getting married, breaking up, and getting drunk, but it can be hard to follow along. So today The Taploid launches its web app that runs natural language processing on your Facebook feed to produce a gossip magazine of subtle trends and juicy tales. Taploid can tell you which of your friends are alcoholics, or who someone that just got out of a relationship will date… → Read More
The Internet is a great place for arguments, and a new startup called Deeyoon aims to bring arguments to video. Of course, there are a bunch of other startups working on video chat. However, none of them seems to have become a huge, sustainable hit yet, and Deeyon CEO Joe Kalfa says he’s taking a different approach — not just general, unstructured conversations, but “live, real-time video… → Read More
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