Wednesday, November 28, 2012

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Facebook Gives New Mobile Page Ads More Color And Context To Make Every Pixel Count Top
Facebook New Mobile Page Ads DesignYou scrolled right past the old design for Facebook's "Pages You Might Like" mobile ads. Too much gray, not enough description. But they just got updated to show colorful banners and explain what a business does. Their designer Jeff Kanter thinks you'll stop to give them a look. Maybe even a tap. With style and targeting, Facebook is turning limited mobile ad space into its secret weapon.
 
Conceptual Designs Push Innovation Forward: Check Out This Instagram Of The "Future" Top
4460807545_7dd8b09a8f_zI'm a big fan of conceptual designs. Basically, designers who love to look at things and want to make them prettier, will mock up what they think a product should be. One of the hottest properties in the world is Instagram, and it's a very visually appealing app. One designer decided that he'd like to see it take a giant leap forward, so he put together a concept treatment.
 
Blaast Gives Carriers In Developing Countries A Way To Offer Flexible Data Plans Top
Screen Shot 2012-11-28 at 7.41.41 PMAs affordable Android phones start reaching consumers on developing countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, more will spring for data plans. But the problem is that carriers see very low average revenue per user in these markets, perhaps around $2 to 3 per month per person. Most won't be able to afford standard plans, so how do carriers consumers a flexible range of options? Maybe even a la carte access to specific apps?
 
How WedPics' Eviction From Founder's Home Spurred A Rally In Raleigh Top
raleighWhat seemed like a disaster turned out to be a blessing for 31-year-old entrepreneur Justin Miller, founder of Deja Mi and WedPics. After a feature story by NewsObserver left the company with an eviction notice for running the 13-employee business out of Miller’s home in Raleigh, NC, the community’s support led to a new working space at The Hub and a $250K investment from a local angel investor. We first met Miller at the Raleigh-Durham meetup, where we learned about his second startup WedPics, an Instagram-style private photo-sharing app for weddings. The company’s first startup, another geo-based photo-sharing app called Deja Mi, and WedPics were both run out of Miller’s home, until very recently. The city’s zoning department sent an inspector to give notice of eviction to the 13-employee company after the NewsObserver ran a feature story on Deja Mi, Miller, and the homegrown operation going down in Miller’s basement. The citation stated that if the business wasn’t removed from the house in 30 days, the city would fine Miller $500/day until the matter was resolved. The city claims that a neighbor anonymously complained to the Mayor’s office about foot traffic in the neighborhood, yet this is the first Miller has heard of any complaints in the two years the business has operated out of his house. This reaction surprised the community, coming from a region working to grow the startup scene in Raleigh and Durham. But Miller has told TechCrunch that he received over 100 different offers for a place to work (both permanently or temporarily) from local businesses and people from the area. They ended up at the Hub, which is a brand new co-working space in downtown Raleigh. And perhaps even better than that, Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads.com, caught wind of WedPics and decided to invest $250K in the company toward its second round of investment. They’re looking to raise $1.5 million to go alongside Deja Mi’s original seed round of $750K. WedPics has since moved from a paid model ($99 for the couple’s album) to freemium, instead generating revenue with account upgrades like custom printed invite cards, unlimited hosting, and true hi-res album downloads. The app has seen 5,000 couple sign ups, with an average of more than 300 sign-ups a day in over 40 countries.
 
ABI: Africa's Mobile Market To Pass 80% Subscriber Penetration In Q1 Next Year; 13.9% Of Global Cellular Market By 2017 Top
2735720397_fb123fb116Analyst ABI Research expects mobile phone subscriber penetration levels in Africa to pass 80 percent in the first quarter of next year. In Q3 this year, it said the continent's 54 countries and 1.08 billion people had accumulated 821 million mobile subscribers, up 16.9 percent year-on-year -- to 76.4 percent -- and it expects this to grow to 1.12 billion subscribers by 2017.
 
After Its 9-Figure Acquisition, Recruitment Software Giant Bullhorn Buys MaxHire And Sendouts For More Cloud Services Top
bullhorn logoIn June, recruitment software company Bullhorn got bought by Vista Equity Partners in a deal we heard was in the lower-nine figures. Today, Bullhorn is announcing two acquisitions of its own: it's picking up Vancouver-based MaxHire Solutions and St. Louis-based Sendouts. The deals beef up Bullhorn's cloud-based portfolio, with both companies specialists in recruitment software-as-a-service. Financial terms of the two deals were not disclosed.
 
Inside The M@dison, Downtown Detroit's Tech Startup Hub [TCTV] Top
Screen shot 2012-11-28 at 10.06.03 AMDowntown Detroit has sadly not been known in recent years for having a bustling business vibe, but the people at the M@dison Building are working overtime to turn that around. Housed in a nearly 100 year old building that used to house Detroit's first major movie theater, the M@dison is a 5-story, 50,000 square foot space dedicated to all things that go along with technology and digital startups: Entrepreneurs, developers, business people, and investors are all in the mix.
 
Ginger.io Raises $6.5M To Use Your Smartphone To Track Your Health, Round Led By Khosla Top
5-MeBehavioral health analytics startup Ginger.io just announced that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from seed investors True Ventures and Romulus Capital. In the funding press release, Vinod Khosla says the company is "at the forefront of data-driven technology and healthcare." CEO Amnol Madan also noted that Khosla actually wrote a guest post for TechCrunch where he identified Health 2.0, driven by data and sensors, as one of unhyped areas in web and mobile technology that has big potential.
 
Confirmed: Google Acquires Incentive Targeting To Power Super Targeted, Personalized Coupon Programs Top
Incentive Targeting - HomeGoogle has just acquired coupon targeting company Incentive Targeting. The acquisition was confirmed in a tweet from Mike Dudas, who is on the team building Google's mobile commerce business. Google confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch.
 
Rocket Lawyer: We Will Defend Ourselves Against LegalZoom's 'False Accusations' Top
rocktAs we heard last week, online legal services company LegalZoom slapped rival Rocket Lawyer with a lawsuit over false and misleading advertising, trademark infringement and unfair competition. Now Rocket Lawyer is fighting back, saying that LegalZoom is attempting to derail a competitor using frivolous legal tactics.
 
Amazon Web Services Announces Redshift, New Data Warehouse Service Top
photo (2)Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Redshift, a new petabyte-scale data warehouse service intended to disrupt the old-guard data warehouse providers. Senior Vice President for AWS Andy Jassy made the announcement on stage at AWS re:Invent, the cloud group's first annual conference here in Las Vegas.
 
Another Social Media Inbox? Source Metrics Says This One's All About 'Actionable Mentions' And Breaking Down Data Silos Top
source metrics social media inboxStartup Source Metrics is announcing a new feature to its social marketing tools today, which it's calling the Social Media Inbox. The idea of a new social network listening tool may not set anyone's heart aflutter, but CEO Scott Lake said the real selling point is the fact that the inbox is integrated with Source Metrics' other services. Many companies use a product like Radian6 to monitor social media, HootSuite to publish content, and Bitly to track different campaigns, creating "three data silos," Lake said. Source Metrics offers all of those capabilities in one suite of product.
 
With Amazon, It's Records All The Way Down — Which Is Brilliant Top
2075543502_ac292a2772So let me get this straight: this year's "Cyber Monday" (the worst fake holiday name in the history of fake holidays — and names) was a new record day for Amazon when it came to Kindle sales. So was "Black Friday" (at least this one sounds like a plague). Overall, the holidays brought "more than double" the numbers of last year's record sales. Great! So what were last year's record sales? Well, they were "4X Over Last Year".
 
Amazon Web Services Drops S3 Storage Service Pricing About 25% Top
jassyAmazon Web Services (AWS) announced on stage at AWS re:Invent that it has dropped pricing about 25 percent across the board for its S3 storage service. Senior Vice President of Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy said the price drop will go into effect December 1. AWS has dropped prices 23 times since 2006. Jassy attributed the price drops to what he sees as a virtual circle that has emerged as AWS has expanded. More customers leads to more AWS usage, which fuels the need for more infrastructure. As more is added, AWS gets economies of scale in lower infrastructure costs and, as a result, can lower prices. Jassy said the differences between AWS and its competitors come down to margins. The large, enterprise giants such as Oracle, IBM and HP work on high margins. That has been the way they have historically made their revenues. But now the world is different. The new reality is scale and super-thin profit margins. The big technology giants of the past are making up for this lack of capability to scale with “private cloud” solutions that are nothing more than an effort to “cloudwash,” a term that refers to the habit of these big tech providers to put the cloud name on its legacy hardware. AWS still faces steep competition from the likes of Google, which earlier this week lowered its cloud storage costs by 25 percent.
 
YouTube Expands Automatic Captioning To 6 European Languages, Now Supporting 10 Languages Total Top
youtube logoYouTube announced today that it's expanding the number of languages that will automatically be captioned in videos uploaded to its library, with support for six European languages. The new languages supported include German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Dutch, so that deaf, hard-of-hearing, and viewers who speak other languages will be able to follow along to those videos.
 
Flurry: China On Track To Top U.S. iOS And Android Install Base By Q1 2013 Top
flurry_logoMobile analytics and ad company Flurry today released a new report examining the global growth of the smartphone ecosystem, including which countries have the largest install base, which are growing the quickest, and how app usage itself is becoming more international. One of the most significant findings from the report is growth of the Chinese smartphone market, which is poised to top the U.S.'s install base early next year.
 
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason: "The Plane Crash Is Much More Interesting Than The Safe Landing" Top
Groupon-Logo1During Business Insider’s Ignition conference, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason commented yesterday’s stories about his role at the company. AllThingsD reported that the board was discussing whether the company needed a new CEO. Mason replied by stating that “it would be weird if the Board wasn’t discussing whether I’m the right guy for the job.” Groupon has gained traction in an entirely new space and a lot of questions remain. “There is so much exciting stuff happening at the company”, Mason said. He emphasized the big opportunities in front of the company. “We will look back at those stories and will be proud that we got over them,” he continued. According to Mason, with 40 million active customers, Groupon is trying to do what Amazon has done for products, but with local businesses. On the other hand, goods deals are a way to take what the company has learned from local deals and apply it to goods. This year, Groupon’s stock has been drastically down. It was trading at over $24 and is now trading at exactly $4.00 a share. Mason said that Groupon is optimizing the stock for three or four years. Most of the interview was about how the press reports on Groupon’s activities. He said that many articles “countered each other” and don’t depict the reality. International growth and goods deals have surprised the company. Finally, Mason reiterated that he is the right guy for the job. “If I thought I wasn’t the guy, I would be the first person to stand up,” he said. “I think we have the strategy, I think we have the team and the board sees that,” he continued.
 
Amazon's S3 Now Stores Over 1.3 Trillion Objects, 3.7 Million Elastic Map Reduce Clusters Launched Since May 2010 Top
re-invent-amazonAt Amazon's first re: Invent developer conference in Las Vegas today, the company's vice president for Amazon Web Services Andy Jassy announced that its S3 storage service now stores a total of 1.3 trillion objects and handles over 830,000 requests per second. Jassy also announced that the company's users spun up 3.7 million Elastic Map Reduce clusters since the service launched in May 2010.
 
Simple Fleshes Out Its Online Banking Service With Mobile Check Depositing Top
simple-checkFrom the outset, online banking startup Simple has been focused on supplanting the brick-and-mortar banks in its users' lives, but they haven't always been equipped to handle every little transaction that comes up. Case in point -- what happens when someone cuts you a check (after all, the holidays are right around the corner)? Well, that's no longer the case. According to a post on the official Simple blog, users are now able to deposit money from those pesky pieces of paper just by taking a photo with the company's iOS app.
 
CloudFlare Now Uses Authy's Two-Factor Authentication To Keep Its Users Safe Top
authyCloudFlare, the popular website security and CDN service, suffered an embarrassing security breach earlier this year when the company's CEO's Gmail account was hijacked, giving the hacktivist group UGNazi access to a customer's account and the service. Even though CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince used Gmail's two-factor authentication, the hackers used some smart social engineering to work around this. After this incident, CloudFlare promised to soon offer two-factor authentication for its own login system as well and today, the company is launching this new system.
 

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