Gamification works — at least, that’s what SessionM is trying to show with some new data about its customer results.
The company offers mobile publishers a platform for adding game mechanics to their apps, including a rewards system called mPoints. The goal is to increase user engagement and retention. And apparently, these efforts are actually paying off, with developers seeing a 35 percent… → Read More
Paperless Post, a company that has built a name for itself offering a cloud-based, visually engaging, way of sending people invites by email, is going retro: today the company is officially launching PAPER, a printed stationery business that it will sit alongside its less physical cousin, which now has 1.5 million registered users, and has sent out invites to 30 million more since going live in… → Read More
Referly, a YC-backed company that makes it easy for anyone to earn a bit of money while sharing links to products they adore, just raised $1 million in seed funding.
Investors include New Enterprise Associates, Ignition Partners, 500 Startups, Jeff Lawson (CEO of Twilio), Elliot Loh, Eileen Burbidge, Ullas Naik, Michael Liou, Damien Tanner, Matt Monahan, and Carter Rabasa.
Danielle Morrill… → Read More
GrabCAD, which offers an online community and cloud-based collaboration tools for those involved in designing and building physical products, has raised an $8.15 million series B round led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from new investor David Sacks (co-founder of Yammer and former chief operating officer of PayPal), and existing investors Atlas Venture, NextView Ventures, and … → Read More
In case you thought Skype may be slowing down while settling into being a part of Microsoft and recently celebrating its ninth birthday, here are some numbers that seem to indicate otherwise: Last week, Skype reached a new peak of 45,469,977 concurrent users online, part of a strong run for the peer-to-peer voice/video/chat service this year. Overall it has seen an increase of 70% so far in… → Read More
Editor’s note: Peter Vogel is co-founder and CEO of Plink, an online-to-offline loyalty program that rewards members for dining and shopping at their favorite national restaurants and offline stores.
Startups face an ever-changing series of challenges. Luckily for us, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we face a new problem. There are lots of companies out there that we can… → Read More
Ad tech companies are trying get better at demographic targeting, especially on mobile, but a startup called Sensegon aims to go a step further — targeting ads based on audience members’ personalities.
To illustrate the concept, CEO Omer Efrat talks about going to a car dealership with his co-founder and CTO Tal Yaari. Efrat was more interested in engine power, while Yaari was more… → Read More
Instagram is huge because it’s a network made of people who are passionate about taking pictures of things that they see and then dropping a cool filter on them to enhance their vision. It caught on immediately with everyone from geeks to Starbucks baristas. Since then, many companies have tried to duplicate the magic that Instagram used to sell itself to Facebook, but have failed.
Today, an… → Read More
As The Next Web reported, users are finding that their Facebook status messages aren’t being cross-posted to Twitter even though they’ve set up their accounts to do so. I first noticed this the other night, but thought nothing of it, since I’m not really a fan of cross-posting.
We reached out to both companies and Facebook let us know that this was indeed a bug and that they’re working on it. → Read More
Even though it’s taken for granted that you have to manage your own personal brand on the web, that still isn’t necessarily the case in the slower-moving world of academia.
But it’s starting to happen, with individual brands beginning to eclipse the importance of being published in a well-known (and often exorbitantly expensive) journal.
Academia.edu, a social network for professors and… → Read More
Facebook likes to test things out on the live site, getting feedback in real-time. Sometimes, things make their way to some of your friends, but not to you. Some would call this an “inconsistent experience”, but I actually like how Facebook goes about this. I would personally like to see all of the new stuff that the company tests, from a journalist perspective…but hey, you can’t have… → Read More
One of the often repeated criticisms of social media is that it tends to be glib and shallow. That’s a simplification, but I think it has some truth to it — when I’m on a site like Twitter, I’m usually looking for (and sharing) jokes, tidbits of news, and random observations.
Jonathan Ghller is hoping to go in the opposite direction with a new site called Storylane, which is all about… → Read More
Plenty of startups still believe there’s room in the social recommendations space, and now, another new contender heads into battle. Chicago-based Mouthee is today officially debuting its website and iOS application, which allow users to quickly share reviews of local restaurants and hotels, as well as movies, music and books. → Read More
The global social TV market is already a multi-billion dollar industry, with TV giants betting big money on second screen viewing, but the market is set for double-digit growth in the the next five years, according to a report by market research firm MarketsandMarkets. The research firm expects the market to grow from $151.14 billion this year, to $256.44 billion by 2017. → Read More
ExactTarget, the marketing software giant that went public in March, has picked up a pair of smaller companies to build out its portfolio: marketing automation company Pardot for $95.5 million ($85.5 million in cash and $10.0 million in ExactTarget common stock) and analytics company iGoDigital for $21 million ($14.7 million in cash and $6.3 million in ExactTarget common stock). → Read More
“There’s a major piece missing from the social graph,” Chris McCoy tells me over coffee, “and it’s sports.” Naturally, McCoy is a former baseball player, Quora devotee and a religious consumer of all things sports. But, perhaps surprisingly, he’s not alone in the way he views the current sports landscape.
While ESPN, BleacherReport, Twitter and countless others are busy digitizing the… → Read More
Just three weeks after Facebook formally launched Custom Audience ads that can target people by lists of email addresses or phone numbers, TechCrunch has attained the first reports on their performance and they’re promising. Not as amazing as Facebook Exchange retargeted ads, but they boost clicks and conversions, reduce costs, and deliver ROI according to Facebook and three adtech startups. → Read More
Early last year, fabled satirical news source, The Onion, launched a sports TV show called “Onion SportsDome” that aimed to parody SportsCenter, ESPN’s long-running daily news show about all-things sports. Unfortunately, the show was short-lived, but now The Onion is turning its satirical gaze to TED and its TEDTalks, with a new show called “Onion Talks.” And it’s gonna blow your mind. → Read More
Facebook is down for many users in Europe, according to several TC tipsters and widespread reports on Twitter. Twitter user @AnonymousOwn3r is claiming responsibility, as he had done in the past for a major GoDaddy outage as well. Later, GoDaddy claimed that a technical problem on its own end was responsible, however, and the true cause of this current European outage is still unknown. → Read More
Coderwall, a Y Combinator-backed startup that allows developers to build profiles around their skills and achievements, is ready for companies to start recruiting on the site — specifically by customizing their Coderwall profiles.
Founder Matt Deiters tells me (via email) that there are already 6,000 companies with a presence on Coderwall, but for now, those take the form of unofficial teams… → Read More
Heyzap has added a cool new feature to its social platform for mobile games — the ability to actually start playing games with other users.
The app already allowed users to check-in to games that they were playing (either manually in the Heyzapp app, or automatically through its many SDK integrations), to earn badges, and to find other players and games. However, in order to actually start… → Read More
Facebook has assembled one of the tech world’s best and brightest team of engineers, and today we get a little glimpse at one process it uses to find and nurture that talent: trials by fire. It turns out that an intern by the name of Peter Cottle was responsible for Facebook’s first product that let people buy mobile ad space, via a mobile device.
The story, as told in a blog post that he’s… → Read More
PunchTab, a social loyalty and rewards platform now backed by $5.25 million in venture funding, is expanding its platform to mobile. Until now, the company had focused on allowing businesses and agencies to run campaigns across the social web – something that made it stand out from similar platforms, which often only target Facebook and Twitter. PunchTab, meanwhile, supports Google+, Pinterest… → Read More
Tumblr is a company that has built a platform that seemingly morphs every single time I visit it. One of the most popular features of the service is its ability to share photos, and then of course watch them spread throughout the network quickly.
Today, Tumblr announced a new standalone photo-sharing app called “Photoset”, which allows you to group some pictures together, share them on a web… → Read More
After Rovio last week put out a teaser for its very first book app, with an announcement full of addled-looking pigs, today it’s unveiled the actual product: it’s an app for a cookbook about eggs — which happened to be the subject of Rovio’s first printed book effort, too. Bad Piggies Best Egg Recipes is being put out first as an iPad app, the company announced today at the Frankfurt Book Fair. → Read More
Surfing the Internet can feel like you’re running in circles, constantly checking your favorite sites for updates. The RockMelt team believes that content should be delivered, not hunted, so its new browser app for iPad is built around a stream instead of a blank window.
Check out my video demo and interview with co-founder Eric Vishria, where we discuss the next generation of user interface. → Read More
I don’t always play social games, but when I do, I like them to help me pay for my education. If “The Most Interesting Man In The World” were to endorse Grantoo, this might be his conclusion. Grantoo is a social gaming platform that allows college students to compete against each other to win tuition grants and donate to charity in brand-sponsored gaming tournaments. → Read More
Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh.
When the company first talked about the Open Graph at the last f8 developer conference in San Francisco last year, there was the promise of a whole slew of apps that would have many types of actions feeding into the ticker and news feed. The company demo-ed social cooking apps and running apps (like what you see to the right).
But after more than a year… → Read More
Facebook Gifts could make a lot of money on mobile by getting you to buy presents for friends, but birthdays were buried in Events and celebrations weren’t shown on mobile. So today Facebook for iOS and Android began displaying birthdays and celebrations atop the mobile news feed for users in the Gifts Beta, Facebook has confirmed.
You’ll be able to click through these alerts to buy Gifts. → Read More
LocalResponse just announced a new way for its customers to target their ads.
Previously, the startup’s advertisers could reach audiences based on social network activity — for example, after someone checked in to a specific store, they could be targeted with ads that were relevant while in the store. Now those advertisers can also look at historical data, including posts from Twitter… → Read More
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