The latest from TechCrunch
- The Pitfall Of Twitter's 'Promoted Trends' #RoyalWedding
- Nancy Conrad On Education Innovation: Turning Geeks Into Rock Stars Is A Game Changer
- Onavo Is A Money-Saving, Must-Have App For EVERY iPhone Data User
- eBay's PayPal Buys Mobile Payments Startup Fig Card
| The Pitfall Of Twitter's 'Promoted Trends' #RoyalWedding | Top |
| Twitter recently upped its rates on Twitter Promoted Trends from $60K-$70K to between $100K-$120K which means the demand for the unique form of advertising is certainly there. But what are brands getting in return? As we’ve seen before with Skittles, Charlie Sheen , and even the #Dickbar, attempting to float a brand message over user generated Twitter content isn’t always a success. Case in point … For the past few days the chatter around the #RoyalWedding has been plentiful, but not necessarily all positive. Diet shake Slim Fast bought the #RoyalWedding Promoted Trends slot yesterday, and at some point had its brand message (and its inexplicable link to its Facebook page) associated with sundry undesirable content. While granted it is sort of funny, the relevancy of tweets like “#RoyalWedding of the ass is my c*ck” to Slim Fast’s admittedly inane message should be a serious issue for a company trying to monetize UGC. Companies who spend money on advertising tend to avoid the above sorts of associations, with good reason. What makes this specific instance of ad relevancy failure worse is that the #RoyalWedding hashtag is currently being highlighted on Twitter’s revamped homepage along with #STS134 and #NFLDraft — As things that presumably add value to new Twitter users. Right now all three are riddled with hashtag spam. Twitter, which just hit 200 million users , is currently averaging about 500K new accounts a day. While this growth isn’t too shabby, it’s hard to picture the middle aged, middle American curious about Twitter landing on the above results and wanting to stick around for very long. #RoyalWedding side note: Twitter did not have a whole server dedicated to Will & Kate today. That was a joke. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Nancy Conrad On Education Innovation: Turning Geeks Into Rock Stars Is A Game Changer | Top |
| Last week President Obama spoke at Facebook , emphasizing during the townhall that the US needs to be bullish on Science and Math education if we are to pull out of the recession, “We want to start making Science cool. I want people to feel about the next big energy breakthrough and the next big Internet breakthrough the same way they felt about the moonwalk," he said. Taking off on that idea, Nancy Conrad, the wife of late astronaut Peter Conrad , has founded the Conrad Foundation in the memory of her husband. Peter was expelled from one school in the 11th grade because he had dyslexia and then went on to graduate from Princeton and walk on the moon because he was taken under the wing of another educator who saw promise in the young man. Nancy Conrad wants to give other kids with a penchant for entrepreneurship their “moon shots,” or the opportunity to get funding and actualize their ideas; Because of this the Conrad Foundation puts on the Spirit of Innovation Awards and Innovation Summit annually, attempting to foster a love of innovation in kids between the ages of 13 and 18. To attend the Innovation Summit , high schoolers across the country are invited to enter the three year old competition, which ends up flying in 27 finalists to NASA Ames to pitch their startups to judges in one of three categories: Aerospace Exploration, Clean Energy and Cyber Security. The winning team in each category receives a 5K grant to fund their project. While building the “innovative workforce of the 21st century” is an ambitious goal, after attending the extremely professional finalist presentations today it’s obvious that spotlighting kids who have a passion for innovation and technology is a fundamental step in turning our education system around. “There’s so many problems, we’re not running out of problems,” Conrad said emphasizing that you need to get kids excited about Science, Math and Technology in order build a viable workforce. “When you’ve got juiced kids who really want to do something, they don’t know there’s a box. And then all they do is think outside the box. This is where geeks turn into rockstars, and that’s the game changer. That’s where you can change the culture of students.” Hmm … So maybe Intel was right ? | |
| Onavo Is A Money-Saving, Must-Have App For EVERY iPhone Data User | Top |
| There’s really no better way to describe Onavo other than a must-have app for any and every iPhone user on a data plan. I’ll go a step further: I think it’s the very first app one should install. Why? Because Onavo shrinks your data usage (and thus, your bills). All you need to do is install the free app and you’re done. The app will then run in the background and do its thing and all you have to do is continue consuming data as you do today … surfing the web, emailing, tweeting, using maps, etc. The techies among you are asking yourself whether there’s any slow-down in data speed. I’ve been using the app for a few weeks and I have perceived no noticeable slow-down. What happens behind the scenes is that compression technology resides on Onavo’s cloud servers. Once the data is routed through them, the compression takes place before the data reaches the device (or the carrier). Onavo is targeting travelers who have a very obvious pain-point of being forced to purchase ridiculously expensive data plans when on business or personal trips. Mind you, saving 5MB-15MB in data usage can equal direct savings that can go as high as $50 and up. However, with all-you-can-eat data plans a thing of the past, I contend that Onavo provides significant value for domestic data usage as well. I, for example, keep it running all the time. I’m currently away on business in San Francisco (I’m based out of Israel) and in the past two days alone I’ve saved 11.32MB, and I still have four nights to go. Most of my savings were with Maps on iPhone, where Onavo saved me 75%, or 8.87MB of 11.80MB. Onavo also saved me 64% surfing the Web, and 12% on email. To the best of my assessment, this is an upside-only app. And being free, there’s really nothing that should hold you back from downloading it. CrunchBase Information Onavo Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| eBay's PayPal Buys Mobile Payments Startup Fig Card | Top |
| In its second acquisition in two weeks, eBay’s PayPal unit has bought mobile payments startup FigCard. Terms of the acquisition, which was announced on the PayPal blog, were not disclosed. Boston-based Fig Card allows merchants to accept mobile payments in stores by using a simple USB device that plugs into the cash register or point-of-sale terminal. All the consumer needs is the Fig app on his or her smart phone. The connection with PayPal is that when consumers setup their payment information, they could add PayPal as a payments option. You can see the video below for a demo of Fig Card’s technology This is also as much of a talent acquisition as it is a technology buy. The founders, Max Metral and Hasty Granbery (who will both join the PayPal Mobile team) are both seasoned technology execs. Prior to founding Fig, Metral was co-founder and CTO of Firefly, which was sold to Microsoft. He also went on to architect sign-on system Microsoft Passport. Metral and Granbery met at PeoplePC, which was sold to Earthlink. And so and so forth. Clearly mobile and online to offline is a big part of eBay’s strategy both for its marketplace and PayPal business. The company just bought location and advertising company Where, which will be housed within PayPal. In fact, PayPal will be integrated into Where's mobile app as a payments mechanism for its local deals. It should be interesting to see how (and if) PayPal integrates Fig Card into its products. We know that the payments service is looking to connect with local merchants and bringing them a PayPal-focused point of sale system could help them compete with emerging technologies like NFC, Square and others. CrunchBase Information eBay Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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