Monday, November 2, 2009

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Break Media Partners With Southern Comfort To Launch Social Sportz Net Top
Break Media, a social video site for guys, is launching a new branded content project, called the "Social Sportz Net,” created in partnership with liquor brand Southern Comfort. The videos will consist of an original series of webisodes designed around the “uniqueness and versatility” of the popular spirit. The "Social Sportz Net" channel will cover information that most fratastic guys want: how to throw a perfect party. For example, a webisode will feature everything guys need to know to host a killer house party, including the right music, required dress, games and entertainment, and drinks ideas. The webisodes showcase two roommates, Ted and Neil, as they go head-to-head to prepare, host, and entertain in a party-hosting showdown. Each installment features a different themed party, covered with sports news-style recaps and analysis that highlights the Southern Comfort brand. Break.com recently launched a campaign to upload more UGC to its video platform. Break Media (which includes several other “entertainment communities for men,”) had 26 million unique visitors worldwide in March according to Comscore. The media network also recently launched a new Twitter-focused show, called Tweet Boxx. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Wildfire Launches A Legitimate, Easy To Use Sweepstakes Platform For Twitter Top
If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a tweet that asked you to retweet something (usually a link to a spammy-looking site) for the chance to enter a contest. Of course, these are typically bogus, leading many people to simply ignore them. And that poses a problem to the companies who really are trying to run sweepstakes on Twitter, who can have a hard time proving their legitimacy. Wildfire , a platform for building viral marketing campaigns, is looking to help: the company has just launched support for sweepstakes on Twitter, allowing brands to now manage campaigns across their websites, Facebook, and Twitter simultaneously. Wildfire hasn’t been around very long, but it’s already accomplished quite a bit: it won last year’s fbFund, and has built up a very impressive roster of clients, including Pepsi, Sony, CNN, Universal, AT&T, VIctoria’s Secret and even Facebook itself, which has used the service for multiple campaigns. But until now, it hasn’t been available for Twitter. From the user perspective, a Wildfire sweepstakes that’s being run on Twitter is very straightforward: clicking a contest link will take you to a basic sweepstakes form, which includes a pre-populated Tweet that will alert your followers that you’ve just signed up for the contest. Tweet that out, and you’re presented with another quick form where you fill out your name and contact information, so you can be reached if you win. The contest format is built to encourage virality — for every one of your followers that signs up for the sweepstakes via the link you tweeted out, you’re given an extra entry in the contest. This gives users with a lot of followers a big incentive to tweet these contests, as they’ll have a good chance to boost their odds of winning. If you’d like to try out the experience for yourself, check out this sample contest . Wildfire also tries to streamline the process for the company running the campaign. The platform uses a wizard to set up the sweepstakes microsite, which companies can then customize with their rules, opt-in newsletters, and the appearance. Companies can also prompt entrants to their sweepstakes to start following their official Twitter accounts, which makes it easy for them to build up a larger audience. On the backend, Wildfire allows clients to control their campaigns across all supported platforms (Facebook, the web, and Twitter), and also offers detailed analytics for each. All in all this is a solid addition to Wildfire’s lineup — don’t be surprised if you start seeing major brands running campaigns on Twitter using the platform in the near future. And there will likely be plenty of smaller customers too, as Wildfire has been used by thousands of small businesses to run over 10,000 total campaigns. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Sorenson's Squeeze 6: A Connected Media Encoding And Distribution Platform Top
A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine came to me with a problem. The British distribution company handling his music video was shockingly backwards in its formatting, and was asking for a Real Media encode of the video. They didn't specify bitrate, resolution, where it would be shown, or anything like that. Quicktime was being a bother, and we needed to use my PC to do a few encodes at this or that specification. We ended up running it through in Vegas, and going to grab a coffee while it churned out the frames. Now, the point is not that you need a PC to encode heinous old formats, but rather that digital distribution is a weird, complex process that could use a bit of simplification. Sorenson's Squeeze 6 appears to go to some lengths to make this happen. It's far from the only encoding platform out there, but I think they're moving the right direction with this version, which not only integrates tightly with your Mac, but also with SMS, Twitter, and other popular services. After all, there's no guarantee that you're going to be working in the same office, or even the same country, as people who need to be informed every step of the way. (link fixed)
 
Google's Chrome Browser Is Now 30 Million Users Strong Top
There is a perception that Google’s Chrome is a rounding error when it comes to browsers. And maybe it still is, but Google is now fighting that perception in a very public way. Today, it announced that the Chrome Team won a Founder’s Award for their achievements so far, and for the first time revealed how many people are using the Chrome browser: 30 million active users. Update : I guess I jumped the gun here. Google has been using that 30 million active user number since July . Now, 30 million is certainly a big number, but it is still a tiny fraction of Internet Explorer or Firefox (which has 330 million users ). NetApplications shows Chrome with only a 3.58 percent market share at the end of October, compared to 24 percent for Firefox and 65 percent for IE. But remember, Chrome only launched a year ago , so that is a fast ramp by any standard. Nevertheless, Google is signaling with this award (which was previously won by the teams which created Gmail, Google Maps, and AdSense) and this figure that it is dead serious about Chrome. A few weeks ago, at a press conference I attended, CEO Eric Schmidt was asked about how Chrome was doing. Here’s an excerpt from that part of the Q&A : Q: You keep adding to Chrome and nobody seems to be paying attention. If that is one of the places where the battle is fought you seem pretty far behind. Sergey: Perhaps that is true in media . . . Schmidt: let me, some of your assumptions about Chrome adoption are wrong. The adoption rate of Chrome is [very strong]. We are going to do a better job of getting that message out. Schonfeld: Steve Ballmer calls it a rounding error, is it? Schmidt: I don't respond to Steve Ballmer questions. Next question? The messaging has begun. Google generally doesn’t reveal user numbers for anything, so this is significant. And now it sets a precedent for Google to update the number in the future. Will it grow, and how fast? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
MFG.com Takes Off The Cuffs With Manufacturing Marketplace Redesign Top
Site redesigns always take longer than expected. But in the case of manufacturing marketplace MFG.com , a major overhaul of its site ended up taking three years. “The whole team has felt as though we were hand-cuffed for the past three years and couldn’t execute on all the great ideas,” MFG.com founder and CEO Mitch Free tells me. But now those cuffs are off. Last night, MFG.com opened up its brand new site, redesigned from the ground up. MFG.com is a surprisingly successful B2B marketplace for sourcing manufactured parts, with more than $600 million in outstanding requests for quotes on the site (which is up from $50 million less than two years ago). Jeff Bezos and the German Samwer brothers are investors, as is Fidelity Ventures. When Free launched the site way back in 2000, he built it on an older version of ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap. It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology, given its growth. Only now does it finally have a modern architecture, built on Java and designed to scale. The new architecture will now also be able to support third-party developers via APIs, which companies can also use to integarte MFG.com into their existing business and ERP systems. Most of the changes to the site are on the backend. MFG.com finally integrates its 2006 acquisition of Sourcingparts.com, which will allow Free to to pursue a Salesforce.com-like strategy in the supplier relationship marketing (SRM) industry, and tie that to his marketplace. Instead of selling SRM software to manufacturers for $100,000 a pop, he is offering the same software over the Web on a much cheaper subscription basis. The new site also now supports multiple languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese) and 50 different currencies. The big growth market for MFG.com over the past few years has been China, connecting global product companies with Chinese manufacturers. Now with local languages and currencies, Free wants to go after the internal Chinese-to-Chinese market as well. “Previously,” says Free, “the MFG.com platform was only in English and we were only attractive to Chinese companies who were fluent in English and export oriented. We anticipate a significant amount of China to China business to begin happening on the platform that is virtually non-existent today.” Watch out, Alibaba. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
CrunchBoard Jobs: Digg, AOL, TheStreet.com and More! Top
If you're on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard . We've added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks, including two jobs here at TechCrunch. Here's a quick sample: Sr. Front End Developer / JavaScript Guru Digg – San Francisco, CA Health News Editor AOL – New York, NY Director, Audience Development TheStreet.com – New York, NY Senior Creative Developer (Flash) Modea – Blacksburg, VA Development Manager, Front End WhitePages – Seattle, WA Also, don’t forget that we’re looking for an Account Executive and CrunchBase interns here at TechCrunch! For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard. Click here to see all the jobs on CrunchBoard. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Seesmic Desktop Adds Twitter Lists, Hits 3 Million Downloads Top
Now that Twitter has officially unveiled its Lists feature to all users, the frenzy has started. But while Lists are available via Twitter’s site, the feature has been slower to come to Twitter clients. Today, Seesmic is announcing the availability of Lists on its desktop client, Seesmic Desktop. The new, downloadable version of Seesmic Desktop will display your Twitter lists in the left sidebar from any Twitter account you have (Seesmic lets you use one client for multiple accounts). The new feature also lets you add any Twitter user to any user list from any of your account. Right now, list functionality is limited. You cannot see lists that list you, only lists that you follow. And you cannot create lists from the client; this must be done within Twitter’s site. But, Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur told me that both the ability to create lists and see lists that follow you will soon come to Seesmic Desktop in the next few weeks. The list feature will also come to Seesmic Web shortly, says Le Meur. He also said that lists took so long to incorporate into the clients because the updated, comprehensive API wasn’t available until a few days ago. Le Meur and his team have scrambled to launch a new version of the desktop client over the weekend and will unveil it to Seesmic members today, and to the general public within the next few days. Other third party sites have also tapped into the Lists API, Listorious , a Lists directory . List descriptions, which will be coming in the next week or so according to Twitter’s Vitor Lourenco confirms , would also be a valuable addition to clients like Seesmic. TweetDeck, one of Seesmic’s main competitors, is also adding list functionality very soon, according to TweetDeck’s founder and CEO Iain Dodsworth. While the nature of TweetDeck’s lists feature is still a secret, he told me that “integration will be extensive and offer complete flexibility to TD users with particular emphasis on curation, consumption and portability of lists and existing TD groups.” Seesmic Desktop, which integrated with both Facebook and Twitter, has also hit 3 million downloads, with the last 500,000 downloads taking place within the past month and a half. The client was recently upgraded to add Facebook fan pages, yFrog integration, a "reply to all" button for messages and a favorites timeline. Earlier this summer, Seesmic recently launched its browser-based Twitter client at TechCrunch's Real-Time Stream CrunchUp. Seesmic Web will also be integrated with Facebook within the next month as developers are currently tweaking the application's functionality on different browsers. Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic. I am not. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

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