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| about : newsroom — industry news |
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|  Last July, we reported that the new company by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield had received a name, and was looking to hire. Tonight, Tiny Speck's first project has revealed itself to the world: Glitch.
So what is it? As we suspected, it's an online game in the vein of Game Neverending, the gaming project that eventually became Flickr (weird, I know). It's a Flash-based massively?multiplayer?game, that revolves around solving puzzles. While the game itself will be free, there will be some level of in-game purchases. Or as it's described on the site: | | - Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:10:15 GMT |
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| Another quiet week for deals in the Northwest as we head into the depths of winter. Nevertheless, there were a few notable deals in software, hardware, and energy.
—Kennewick, WA-based Infinia snapped up another $11.5 million in equity financing in a round that could total $75 million over time, as Luke reported. The investors in the [...]
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Editor's note: Is Apple going too far with its restrictions on developers? Alistair Goodman thinks so and explains why in this guest post. He is the CEO of 1020 Placecast, a location-based mobile advertising startup.
Apple's recent behavior bears an increasing resemblance to carriers with respect to the walled garden they are creating around the iPhone. Restricting applications, restricting the use of location on the device, blocking Flash, and now potentially taking advertising in house-these moves are taken from the carrier's playbook with the hope of locking out meaningful competition. Ironically, Apple may very well become the barrier to open innovation in mobile in much the same way as carriers have been before the iPhone came along.
What is clear from the announcement to developers last week about plans to deny some apps that deliver location-based advertising is that Apple intends to control the flow of marketing dollars on the iPhone. Less clear are their plans for sharing the wealth with the ecosystem-but if you look closely at acquisitions like Placebase, key hires and patent filings, what emerges is a potentially more ominous view of a company that can only compete in the direct advertising business head-to-head with Google by seizing control of location-based advertising. | | - Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:12:27 GMT |
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| Less than six months after rolling out the Twitter application TweepML, Seattle entrepreneur and developer Marcelo Calbucci has put the service up for sale on the public auction site Flippa. Calbucci set a "Buy it Now" price of $79,000, which he told us is "somewhat arbitrary" but does value the service at what he called the bargain price of less than $1 per unique visitor per month. | | - Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:57:48 GMT |
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|  Foursquare continues to sign interesting deals with major players in a wide range of fields. Following the service's Bravo deal a couple weeks ago, they've reached a deal with restaurant rating guide Zagat, according to The New York Times. And AdAge has some details about deals with even more partners, including HBO, Warner Brothers, and the History Channel.
The service has been on a roll lately. They're now seeing over a million check-ins a week, with that rate doubling in the last month alone. And these new deals can only help them as they bring the type of mainstream appeal that it took services like Twitter so long to find. | | - Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:23:55 GMT |
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Nowadays, buzz around brands on the news, blogs, tweets and other social media that spreads through product launches, PR campaigns, earnings reports are as valuable as traditional ad campaigns. But buzz and social dialogue on the web is tough to quantify. General Sentiment has released a report that calculates the dollar value of the buzz, content, and conversation taking place online. General Sentiment's technology evaluates the volume of mentions and sentiment value regarding a brand, company or person. The algorithm combines this data with website traffic and online news readership figures to determine the purchase-equivalent dollar value of the brand exposure across more than 30 million sources by gauging sentiment, frequency, and exposure of news mentions and social dialogue.
Google topped the rankings, with value of its "buzz" itemized at $669.6 million. Google's social media reach costs $402 million, with its Twitter reach alone valued at $22.8 million. On the other hand, Apple came in fourth with total buzz reaching $293.2 million; social media buzz valued at $223.7 million; and Twitter reach valued at $5.6 million. | | - Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:00:40 GMT |
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YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year. ?It is not surprising that it commands a smaller share of time spent watching videos than number of streams watched, since?most YouTube videos are so short. ?But what is surprising is how fragmented the Web video landscape remains once you go out past the top 25 sites.
According to comScore's 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25. ?What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other. ?Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams.?So there is hope yet for niche video producers. | | - Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:01:59 GMT |
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With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process.
Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. BlueKiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers. | | - Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:48:18 GMT |
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|  It actually took longer than I would have expected for someone to come up with a good mocking of Google's "Parisian Love" commercial that played during the Super Bowl yesterday. But today brings us just that.
The video comes compliments of the Upright Citizens Brigade Beta Team "The Brig." They've named their video "Parisian Oops" and have given it the tagline, "Romance, Consequences, Awkwardness. Search on." Watch it below. | | - Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:14:05 GMT |
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| | The Mark, a Toronto-based online daily news magazine, announced today that it has closed its first round of funding, led by Innovation Grade Capital. Thunder Road Capital and Venture Communications CEO Arlene Dickinson also participated in the round.
The total sum raised was not disclosed. The [...] | | Rob Lewis - Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:34:38 GMT |
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Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.
Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)
Here's the full ranking: | | - Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:41:08 GMT |
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