Thursday, May 31, 2012

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SEO Was Yesterday. 500 Startups' PostRocket Fires Up $610K For Facebook News Feed Optimization Top
PostRocket LogoBusinesses struggle to come up with what to post to their Facebook Page each day, and making those posts actually get seen is a difficult as the dark arts. That's why PostRocket has raised $610,000 to help businesses blow up on Facebook thanks to news feed optimization. PostRocket analyzes your Facebook Page, and provides recommendations for when and what to post. The 500 Startups Fall 2011/Winter 2012 company pulled in the syndicate seed round from Polaris Ventures, 500 Startups, and several angels. PostRocket's CEO Tim Chae is actually the youngest founder ever funded by Dave McClure's accelerator. The money will build out the team, content recommendation tech, and marketing, and hopefully get it out of private beta. The investment seems like a smart little bet considering the bloated acquisition prices Facebook marketing companies have been commanding lately.
 
OnSwipe Heads To The iPhone, Launches Layout Personalization With OnSwipe Draft Top
onswipe_phone_swipeOnSwipe's been around for a little over a year, and since raised $1 million in funding and launched content recommendations within its HTML5 tablet publishing network. But just as tablets are entering into mainstream territory, people are now entirely comfortable consuming long-form content on their even-smaller iPhone. That said, publishers who don't want to build out an app will now have a new tool to display iPhone-optimized content to folks on-the-go.
 
"In the Studio," PublikDemand's Courtney Powell is Building a Better Business Bureau for the Social Age Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 2.07.27 AM"In the Studio" begins the summer by welcoming an entrepreneur from Austin who worked in various roles at different startups before she tried to return a cable box to TimeWarner, an experience which motivated her to assemble a new squad, form a new company, and move west to Silicon Valley where she now leads a small team based out of 500 Startups that may be sitting on the next big idea. Courtney Powell is the CEO and co-founder of PublikDemand, a social crowd-based platform where individuals can initiate and/or join campaigns (or "demands") against Fortune 1000 companies. (Currently, they support demands against nine larger companies and plan to expand as demands increase.) Their platform is different from other "social good" or corporate social responsibility programs -- on PublikDemand, customers of companies can use the power of the crowd to lodge complaints against those large entities and pressure them into changing policy. Within the last six months, PublikDemand has served as the catalyst for a California man who became so fed up with his service from AT&T that he initiated his campaign against the company on the site itself, has created targeted leads for AT&T competitors, and has even caught the eye of Netflix's Reed Hastings in his fight to preserve Net Neutrality.
 
FTC Chairman Leibowitz: More Privacy Could Actually Bring Bigger Revenues For Web Giants Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-31 at 9.38.32 AMPrivacy guidelines such as the "Do Not Track" option proposed by the Federal Trade Commission does not necessarily mean the end of the kind of targeted online ads that have brought such riches to web companies over the past decade. In fact, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz says, more privacy on the Internet could actually bring the industry much more money that it attracts now.
 
TC/Gadgets Webcast: WWDC Expectations, E3 Excitement, And The Death Of The Spec Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 2.52.27 PMQuite a bit hangs on the horizon in the world of gadgets. E3 is right around the corner, as is WWDC (Apple's Developer conference), and while hardware gets cooler and cooler, the spec does not. John, Matt and I discuss this and more in this week's TC/Gadgets webcast.
 
Google Applies for .Google, .Docs, .YouTube and .LOL Top-Level Domains Top
dot-google-logoToday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications. ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these are, as expected, .google and .youtube. According to Google's chief Internet evangelist and "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, however, the company also applied for domains it thinks " have interesting and creative potential," including .lol.
 
Flikdate Announces The World's First Mobile Live Video Dating Service Top
youve_been-flikedUntil now, online and mobile video dating has mostly been about looking at video clips. Flikdate for iOS, however, is all about live video calls, making it feels more like a mix of Chatroulette and Match.com than the current crop of video dating services. The Flikdate team gave me a demo of the service earlier this week and it turns out the app is about as easy to use as it gets. You simply sign up with your Facebook login (no worries, the app doesn't post to your wall or access any of your data), tell the service if you want to chat with men or women, and after that, it just takes one click to get started. The service works over 3G and WiFi (though the video quality tends to be more consistent over WiFi).
 
Banjo For iOS Becomes More Photo-Friendly Thanks To Update Top
banjoBanjo, the slightly creepy social discovery app that shows you who's doing what nearby, has been updated today with a handful of new tweaks for its iOS version. Sorry Android folks -- you'll have to sit this one out for the time being. Here's a quick recap if you've never messed with Banjo before. Banjo pulls in geo-tagged pictures and updates from all of the major social platforms (think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and the like), and splays them all onto a map (or into a list) so users can see what's going on around them.
 
A Great Firewall? Google Now Warns Chinese Users When Search Terms Could Cause "Connection Issues" Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 10.05.39 AMThose who don't live or haven't recently traveled to China may not have experienced this first hand, but Google Search has been known to be "inconsistent and unreliable" in mainland China -- to use Google's words. Error messages like "This webpage is not available" or "The connection was reset" are common and those errant queries then prevent users from searching again for a period of time. In a blog post today, Google's search team said that, after "taking a hard look" at its own systems, the problem isn't emanating from Google's end, and is instead "closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries." As a result, Google search will now be notifying Chinese users when their search terms are likely to cause these interruptions.
 
Facebook Chips Away At Marketing Providers By Adding Native Page Admin Roles and Scheduled Posts Top
Facebook Page ManagementWhat once you had to use or pay for outside software to do, Facebook now offers for free. Facebook today rolled out Page administrator permissions and post scheduling. The two critical marketing features were previously only available in third-party Page management products like Buddy Media and Vitrue, which are fetching big acquisition prices in part because of these service. Roles let a Page owner assign publishing, advertising, or analytics privileges to team members and service providers without giving them total control. Scheduled posts lets marketers push out a steady stream of messages to the news feed, day and night.
 
Kleiner Perkins Adds Megan Quinn, Former Products Director At Square, As Newest Investment Partner Top
new-avatarMegan Quinn, the web exec who most recently served as the Director of Products at credit card processing tech firm Square, has joined Sand Hill Road venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an investment partner. The hire was announced by KPCB in a press release today.
 
Business-Focused Ad Startup Bizo Launches Self-Serve Retargeting Top
bizo logoStartup Bizo tries to help advertisers reach a business audience using methods like retargeting. Now it's making those retargeting capabilities available in a self-serve product. For anyone who needs a refresher on the nomenclature, if you visit a website but failed to sign up or buy anything, then see ads for that company following you around the Web — well, you can thank retargeting. (As someone who has to visit startup websites as part of his job, this has become a constant annoyance.) However, Bizo says it uses retargeting in virtually all of its display advertising campaigns, because it works — it's going after people who have already expressed interest in a product or service, and it helps businesses stay at the top-of-mind for those consumers.
 
No More Mobile Overage Charges: Netflix iOS App Now Lets You Limit Streaming To WiFi Only Top
NetflixBuilding4Mobile video is taking off, especially due to high-quality video streams available over increasingly fast LTE mobile networks. The only problem is that most users have wireless plans that include a limited amount of data usage -- usually just 2GB or 5GB per month. Since movies can quickly run up data usage, mobile viewers are in a bit of a catch-22: They can now watch mobile video at almost the same speed and quality on wireless networks as is available over WiFi, but doing so could potentially mean lots of icky overage charges, generally at the rate of about $10 per extra GB used. Netflix is one of those services which is forced to navigate that mobile video paradox. Up until recently, its iPad app would stream video to users regardless of their connection, which could drive up data costs for consumers if they weren't watching their data usage closely. With that in mind, the latest update to the Netflix iOS app now lets 4G and LTE iPad owners limit streaming so that they can only access the service when connected to a WiFi network.
 
Hipstamatic Branches Out With A New iPad Magazine, Snap, And #MakeBeautiful Social Campaign Top
Screen shot 2012-05-31 at 16.23.02Hipstamatic has made a successful business out of its popular (and paid) iPhone camera appand the many features it has incorporated to enhance that photo experience: four million active monthly users and 50 million photos snapped through it each month. Now the company behind it, Synthetic, is looking to build on that foundation and create more engagement among the existing Hipstamatic community, and perhaps find new users in the process. Today, it becomes an iPad magazine publisher, with a monthly culture and lifestyle title for the iPad called Snap, consisting of original content and images created by Hipstamatic users. Unlike Synthetic's paid Hipstamatic app, Snap will be free. Alongside that, the company is ramping up its social media profile, with the launch of #makebeautiful. This project will encourage Hipstamatic users to mark pictures using the hashtag to put them into a special stream on Twitter and Instagram and on its own site -- the first time they're aggregating their users' photos in this way.
 
Need To Pump Up Your iPhone Voice Recordings? The Pint-Sized iRig MIC Cast Is Now Shipping Top
imageThe microphone in the iPhone 4S is pretty good -- I have found it to capture excellent quality on all my consumer-ish recordings and videos. Of course, that is not to say it could not be improved. When the iRig MIC Cast was announced at CES this year, I was pretty excited. I have gotten a lot of use out of the original iRig MIC and this miniaturized version seemed poised to make my travel recordings an even more portable affair.
 
Tumblr's New Lookup Page Lets You Find Friends Via Facebook And Twitter Top
tumblr-lookupPopular blogging platform Tumblr has quietly introduced a minor, but notable new feature: a better way to find contacts through your other social networking services or Gmail. On the page available at Tumblr.com/lookup you can now connect your Gmail, Twitter and/or Facebook accounts to find all your friends' Tumblr blogs. Handy. Well, handy if you're the one doing the looking, I suppose. As Buzzfeed's community moderator Ryan Broderick hilariously tweeted, "Great, thanks to the new http://www.tumblr.com/lookup/ page all my friends will find my One Direction fanblog I moderate!"
 
(RED): Starbucks To Donate $1 For Every Check-in In Foursquare's Largest Non-Profit Campaign Yet Top
redrush_to_zero_foursquare_badgeIt's nice to check-in to battle to be the mayor of your favorite burger joint, or to get 30 percent off a purchase, but it's much more satisfying to check-in and feel as if you've actually done some good in the world. That's because the AIDS battling organization (RED) has announced today that it will be partnering with Foursquare to leverage check-ins and social media awareness in the largest check-in campaign to date. The initiative is being held to raise both awareness and funding in support of RED's RUSH TO ZERO, a campaign that seeks to help deliver an AIDS-free generation by 2015 by way of a series of in-person and digital events and experiences that involve social media, brands, celebrities, gamers, and more. In this case, from June 1st to June 10th, the campaign is partnering with Starbucks, which will be donating one dollar to The Global Fund for every Foursquare check-in in their stores throughout the U.S. and Canada.
 
It's A Post-PC World: Amazon Adds Laptops, Netbooks To Trade-In Program Top
Amazon-logoWe're living in a post-PC era, which means you likely have a few laptops/netbooks you're looking to toss out in exchange for a shiny new mobile device. That said, Amazon's trade-in program has recently included laptops, notebooks, and netbooks to its eligibility list. The process is pretty simple.
 
Exec, The Mobile App For Errands, Adds Messaging (Oh, And Sam Altman Led Their Round) Top
exec_messaging_screenshotExec, which is kind of like Uber-meets-Taskrabbit, is overhauling its product today. It's adding iMessages-like functionality to the app that makes it easier for customers to sync up with the people running their errands. The app, which comes from a veteran team of Y Combinator alums including Justin.tv co-founder Justin Kan, can call up people (called "Execs") to run basic errands instantaneously. There's no bidding process and it costs $25 an hour for everything from delivering flowers to housecleaning and other odd jobs. The app has looked pretty basic for awhile in the "Get Shit Done" spirit of the company. But the team found it needed more. "Basically, one thing we realized after doing a couple thousand jobs is that people want more communication with their execs," Kan said. "People want to know what's going on when the jobs are happening. The basic idea is to have execs send updates on their jobs very quickly." As for the service itself, Kan says there are about 100 "Execs" running errands in San Francisco. He's focused on improving specific use cases like cleaning.
 
Samsung's S Voice Agrees With Siri, Declares A Windows Phone As The Best Smartphone Top
image247It was written off as a glitch in the Matrix and quickly fixed when Apple's Siri proclaimed that the Lumia 900 Windows Phone was the best smartphone available. Now, just a few weeks later, Samsung's S Voice digital assistant points to HTC's Trophy Windows Phone as the top smartphone. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it's also possible that the computers are trying to tell us something...
 

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