Wednesday, June 30, 2010

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To Show Off Chrome Integration, Google Builds A Flash Game On Top Of YouTube Top
As we noted a few days ago , the latest stable builds of Google Chrome now come with native Flash support built-in by default. The hope behind this is to get better performance and better security out of Adobe’s plug-in. To showcase how well it works, Google has created a Flash-based game on top of YouTube, Chrome Fastball. It’s pretty nifty. If you go to this page you YouTube , you’ll find the game. Basically, it’s a combination of a YouTube video and a task-based game that you try to complete as quickly as possible. A video starts playing showing a Rube Goldberg-like contraption. As a ball travels through it, at certain points, challenges pop up that you must complete before the video continues. One challenge is to find the best route in Google Maps, one is to tweet something (from a generic Twitter account tied to the game), one is to look up artists on Last.fm, etc. Says Google: In testing Flash Player integration into Chrome, the Chrome team admittedly spent many, many fun hours with a few of our favorite Flash-based indie games. So as a side project, we teamed up with a few creative folks to build  Chrome FastBall , a Flash-based game built on top of the YouTube platform. Chrome Fastball is actually six YouTube video stitched together with these challenges in the middle, triggered by Flash. It’s not quite as cool looking at the Chrome speed test video , but it’s a nice showcase. And it does seem to perform pretty well — my fans aren’t spinning, yet. Yesterday, YouTube also made the case for continuing to support Flash going forward. While they’re experimenting with HTML5 (with both H.264 and their own new WebM standard), it still can’t do some of the things YouTube needs. CrunchBase Information Google Chrome Adobe Flash YouTube Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Facebook Rolls Out Simplified Application Permissions System Top
Today, Facebook has announced the rollout of a new permissions model for third-party applications, mandating that apps specify exactly what data they wish to access (and giving users the ability to opt out if they wish to). The change has been in the works for a long time: Facebook’s blog post notes that it was first announced back in August 2009 as a result of privacy concerns brought up by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner . The new dialog boxes were shown off at f8 in April. Third-party Facebook applications have always had to ask users for permission to access their private data, but before now the dialogs were unspecific, and sometimes required users to click “Yes” to a series of boxes which could get confusing. Now all data that an application wishes to access will be presented in a single dialog box. As usual, applications will be able to access data that you’ve shared with ‘Everyone’ (which actually encompasses quite a bit of data these days). Beyond that, users will be told in plain English exactly what private data they’re sharing, which can include things like your Email address, photos, and videos. This is definitely a step forward. A month ago, Facebook also made changes to its main privacy control panel that makes it easier to manage your settings (and turn off Facebook Platform entirely). Still, those changes have not gone far enough to silence privacy advocates, especially with regard to Facebook’s controversial Instant Personalization feature. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Chango Closes $1.4 Million Round, Brings Search Targeting To Display Ads Top
Toronto-based advertising startup Chango closed a $1.4 million Series A funding, with new investors Metamorphic Ventures and privately from Geoff Judge , a VC at iNovia Capital and co-founder of 24/7 Real Media. Last November, the company raised the first $750,000 of the Series A from iNovia Capital and Extreme Venture Partners. Chango is an ad platform that targets display ads based on people’s previous search history. It is what is known as a “search retargeter.” Unlike other ad retargeters like Criteo who show ads to people based on the fact that they have visited a particular Website, Chango targets ads based on the searches those people have done in the past. The way it does this is by buying up browser cookie data from data exchanges, toolbar companies, and vertical comparison shopping sites. This data is commercially available for hundreds of millions of people on the Web. When you click through to a site from a search engine, that site captures the referral data, along with the search terms that brought you there. Sites often resell this data along with identifying cookies. When you show up at a site with Chango ads, it matches the cookie on your browser with what it knows about your search history and tries to serve up relevant display ads. In effect, what Chango does is open up display advertising to search marketers. “We've just launched in private beta,” says founder and CEO Chris Sukornyk. “We are still selecting which advertisers we are working with, and will probably launch a self-serve option later this month.” Sukornyk is a serial entrepreneur with a mixed track record. Previously he co-founded the X-Stream Network (a free ISP in Europe sold to LibertySurf for $75 million), Bubbleshare (photo-sharing site sold to Kaboose for a couple million dollars, and then deadpooled ), and FiveLimes (a green shopping site sold to Avid Life Media , which now appears to be defunct). CrunchBase Information Chango Metamorphic Ventures Information provided by CrunchBase
 
"Lawyers Are Expensive. We Can Be Friends." (@Posterous To @TwitPic) Top
As you may have read yesterday, TwitPic and Posterous are currently in a row after the latter introduced a “ Rescue your photos from TwitPic ” tool that provides users with a one-click way to import TwitPic photos over to their Posterous blog. TwitPic isn’t into the idea and reportedly sent the Posterous team a letter last week threatening legal action against the company if they launched it. Posterous co-founder Sachin Agarwal told us TwitPic’s claims are bogus, and that “Posterous is simply acting as an agent to the user who owns the photos”. TwitPic for its part seems most concerned about Posterous' methods for accessing data. But maybe lawyers won’t be necessary, after all. Check out this tweet from Agarwal, sent to TwitPic founder Noah Everett about half an hour ago (via @cdixon ): “Hey @noaheverett: if you’d like to discuss data portability, please email me. sachin@posterous.com. Lawyers are expensive. We can be friends” Wouldn’t it be swell if an actual lawsuit was diverted thanks to that tweet? Are you watching this, @HTC, @Nokia and @ceoSteveJobs (yes, I know it’s a fake)? CrunchBase Information Posterous Twitpic Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Cliqset 2.0 Launches With Deeper Twitter Integration And Content Curation Top
Cliqset, a realtime online social identity platform is launching a new version of its applications: Cliqset 2.0. The goal of the new release is to better organize the social web and make Cliqset the go-to “distributed social ecosystem,” says CEO Darren Bounds. One part of this is a full integration with Twitter, to allow users to message Twitter users who haven’t joined Cliqset yet. Previously the platform only allowed you to interact with Twitter users who were also Cliqset members. Cliqset has also made it easy to search for and follow users not only on Cliqset, but also on Twitter and Google Buzz. So when someone you follow on Twitter Tweets, you’ll see it in your stream on Cliqset. Bounds says that sharing content is a key part of Cliqset’s feature set and because of this, the startup has added a real-time curation feature that allows you to create streams of content centered around a particular topic or interest that other users can subscribe to. The streams are updated in realtime and support realtime protocol PubSubhubbub so you can receive the content inside and outside of Cliqset. As a whole, Cliqset is trying to move away from the comparisons to a FriendFeed clone and towards being a centralized place for your social networking. Bounds says that with the vast amount of online sites where consumers are socializing, there is a need for a decentralized social ecosystem and destination. Currently Cliqset has 55,000 users, which is up from 6,000 in November, says Bounds. But while Cliqset has worthy ambitions, there are a number of other startups who have the same goals. Threadsy, Seesmic, TweetDeck, Brizzly and many others are also playing in this space. CrunchBase Information Cliqset Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Leveraging Social Media for Contest Promotion Top
This guest post is by Eric Schwamberger, President, Zezza Network . Zezza helped the staid old whiskey brand, Canadian Club, create an online game called the Canadian Club Hide A Case contest . It’s an interesting look at how to build engagement without resorting to retweets. When leveraged correctly, social media is an undeniably powerful tool for contest promotion. It's important to strike the right balance between contest promotion and organic conversation. Consumers want to feel they are part of something, not just on a list with numerous other people. Facebook is a great place for brands to help create a real connection with their consumers, and, in turn, create valuable loyalists. Through our experience we've identified a few simple strategies and considerations that nearly all successful contest-focused social media campaigns have in common. Have a plan When you set out to engage your fans through social media, the logical place to start is by thinking through your overall goals. When Zezza Network took on the social media management of Canadian Club's Hide a Case campaign, we evaluated the online footprint of Canadian Club and learned the brand needed a strong dose of social media to get online whisky enthusiasts talking. Equally important, we needed to grow a base of consumers to talk to. We started with three core objectives to provide a sustainable impact on Canadian Club's digital presence: • Expand the overall reach of the brand • Drive user engagement • Create and grow connections with the online whisky community Chances are, if your brand has a presence on Facebook, it will likely have at least a small following. Growing this audience will be a critical factor in the success of your campaign. When the Hide A Case campaign launched in late April, we had grown the group to about 16,000 loyal fans. To keep growth steady throughout the course of the campaign, we offered an incentive – giveaways are a great way to create buzz and grow connections. We launched the friend-get-friend Facebook application to encourage users to invite their friends to the fan page. For each five friends a user converts through the app, they get a free Canadian Club t-shirt. To date we've gathered nearly 30,000 fans and are growing at a rate of about 4,000/week – not bad for a brand that had fewer than 9,000 a few months ago. This fan base has given the page well over a million impressions since the campaign launched – a metric that literally increases exponentially with fan growth. Know your audience and find your brand's voice: Each brand needs to find its own social media "voice." To learn the voice of your brand, you must listen to your audience. To get the audience talking, you need a call to action in the form of a question. We knew a simple post to Canadian Club's Facebook page about the campaign wouldn't engage the audience. Instead of posting self-serving campaign plugs, we asked the fans to share details about their journey, which, in turn, created engagement and excitement. We also talked to the fans about a variety of topics, not just the Hide A Case campaign. It's important to maintain the organic conversation to keep the dialogue authentic. Keep your audience interested and engaged Regular involvement with your audience and creating opportunities for them to engage increases their investment in the campaign. This increases the likelihood that they will talk about it, which is the ultimate goal. The Hide A Case campaign included a set of "weekly missions" (puzzles, brain teasers, etc.) that contestants need to complete to move to the next round. We took advantage of this structure by tapping into the conversational nature of Facebook and asked the fans questions about their experiences with the "missions" along the way. We found many of the participants started sharing their experiences organically on the brand's Facebook page. Also, allowing users to register for the contest via Facebook made it easier to participate and a smaller "ask" for most people, thus increasing the likelihood of participation. A low barrier to entry is also an important consideration. For example, for the Red Stag by Jim Beam's "Call of the Wild Sweepstakes," in partnership with Kid Rock, users were able to register via multiple platforms, including a mobile website, SMS, Facebook and the contest website. Mobile registration isn't a perfect fit for every contest, but it's a great way to turn on-premise promotion into online connections. Another example that illustrates engagement well is Jim Beam's "The Remake" video contest. The contest was the first user-generated video contest for a bourbon brand and was promoted heavily on Facebook. As with any campaign relying on user-generated content, it is critical to make it easy for those that participate to share their experiences with their network. We gave participants the tools to promote their own videos and earn votes. By allowing participants to take the odds of winning into their own hands, we unleashed an army of brand evangelists and received hundreds of submissions. Build buzz and keep the conversation going: Encouraging ongoing participation by leveraging influencers is central to keeping the conversation going. In addition to asking your fans questions on a regular basis to keep them talking, contests and giveaways are another way to add additional excitement – and ultimately buzz. But if the budget doesn't permit hosting giveaways, leveraging important online influencers is an important way to get your message out through additional conversations. Knowing your ambassadors/influencers and communicating with them in an authentic voice will ensure that they are able to effectively spread your campaign's message and help to bring your campaign to the next level. Influencers can play such an important role in the success of your campaign. When identifying influencers, it's important to not only consider the friends/followers/visitors they have, but also the value of their audience and that audience's connections and relevance. We've found research tools such as Flowtown , TweetReach , Sysomos Heartbeat and Klout very helpful indentifying the right matrix of influencers. In summary, by adhering to the recommendations above and focusing on engagement over visits and conversations over impressions, you empower the online community to take the promotion of your contest into their own hands. A good rule to remember: your brand's Facebook page should be about facilitating genuine conversation among fans, not about spamming marketing messages. Shifting digital metrics from old school page views to connections is at the core of Zezza's social media strategy, promoting contests and across the board. If no one is talking about your contest, then no one cares. If they don't care, your brand is destined to be viewed less favorably than a Fail Whale.
 
Appsfire Introduces Live Rankings For iPhone Apps, Scores More Cash Top
Mobile applications discovery and sharing service provider Appsfire has just launched a new product called AppTrends , which essentially delivers near real-time rankings of iPhone apps based on the chatter on Twitter . Rankings – currently limited to the top 20 apps on the website – are based on what Appsfire determines are noteworthy items in the App Store virtually in real-time. Appsfire crawls Twitter for links to iPhone apps, regardless of whether the iTunes URLs are shortened or not, and determines which apps are hot and which are not based on their popularity on the micro-sharing service. To do so, Appsfire looks at the number of mentions of applications, all while filtering out bots, repeat tweets from the same users, updates from seemingly fake accounts and activity tweets such as leaderboard or points sharing. In addition, the startup looks at the influence of users talking about certain iPhone apps (based on Klout ) to keep its rankings as relevant, clean and trustworthy as possible. The company tells us it’s capable of also determining sentiment through automated analysis, but intentionally does not use that data for the rankings because it claims the large majority of tweets about apps are positive of tone, according to one month’s worth of research. AppTrends gets updated on an hourly basis, and you can view evolution for the apps in the top list for the past hour, 12 hours or full day. All in all, for power users this could be very useful, given how the rankings coming from Apple are relatively similar from day to day – with AppTrends users can spot up and coming apps more rapidly and this stay ahead of the curve when it comes to downloading and testing new apps. For non-power users, the added value is less clear. If you’re an app developer or publisher, you can also use the service to track what’s being said on Twitter about your app – provided you made the top 20 list – in real-time via a sidebar. Appsfire intends to go from a top 20 to a top 100 list in the near future, and also offer localized rankings per country/store. Also in the works: lists per vertical, access to rankings from the past and notification services for developers. Coinciding with the launch of the new service, Appsfire has announced that a new investor joined the group of angels backing the company and brought an extension to its seed funding round. The new investor’s name is Lerer Ventures , the New York-based investment firm that has backed startups like (Twitter shareholder) Betaworks, GDGT and just recently, Seeing Interactive . The icing on the cake: Appsfire has persuaded Jyri Engeström (formerly at Google after selling his startup Jaiku to the Internet giant) to join its board of advisors. CrunchBase Information AppsFire Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Bling Nation Adds A Paypal Option To Cell Phone Payments Top
Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we’ve learned. Bling Nation’s payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account. Here’s how Bling Nation works. The startup partners with banks, who then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment. Bling Nation also partners with all of the local merchants in given town, to give them special “Bling Nation” credit card machines that will scan the chips. The payment device will calculate the number of times a payee has made a transaction and as an added bonus, will automatically award the user with coupons, points or discounts, which the merchant determines. The device will read the chip and deduct the money for a purchase out of the payee’s bank account. Bling Nation even allows merchants to implement a security feature, in which upon purchase, the customer will have to enter a PIN code for larger transactions. With the deal with PayPal, anyone will be use Bling Nation to link a PayPal account and receive tags that they can then stick to their cell phones. You may also be able to enroll during the checkout process as well. And Bling Nation in turn will equip merchants in given areas with payment devices that work with the chip. This is a big win for Bling Nation’s system, which originally had ambitions of solely focusing on hyperlocal banks in small communities. The PayPal integration is currently being tested in Palo Alto and is steadily being rolled out nationally. Most of the work involves distributing the payments devices to local merchants. Enrollment is limited for now, says co-founder Meyer Malka. Consumers can sign up for the service at participating merchants and eventually through the web. The deal also represents a way for consumers to start paying for physical goods, not just online purchases, with their PayPal accounts. Bling Nation recently raised a whopping $20 million in funding to scale its system. Armed with a deal with PayPal, the startup is well on its way to making it into stores nationwide. And PayPal is one step closer to fulfilling its futuristic vision for the payments platform, as shown in this video. CrunchBase Information Bling Nation Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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