As we wrote earlier this year, OneRiot launched a social targeting service for mobile ads, that offers highly targeted ads within mobile apps. Similar to Klout’s social influence score, OneRiot has developed a “social interest score” to define mobile audience segments based on social interest categories.
With the new social targeting service, OneRiot allows advertisers to reach targeted audience
segments on mobile, from busy moms to tech influencers to sports guys to fashionistas. Segmentation and targeting are based on factors such as audience interest profiles, demographics, social influence and realtime conversations. OneRiot’s audience profiles are created by mining and analyzing public big data social streams from services (i.e.Twitter). The company says that this data is derived from users that heavily engage with content on their mobile device that is relevant to their current social activity, including status updates, tweets, photos, advertising and more. → Read More
This is a guest post from Ali Partovi, angel investor, startup advisor and serial entrepreneur. He co-founded iLike, acquired by Myspace in 2009, and LinkExchange, acquired by Microsoft for $265 million in 1998. His portfolio has included successes as far-ranging as Zappos, Facebook, DropBox and OPOWER.
Around Earth Day, we’re reminded about global warming and pollution, as well as the “green” technologies and consumer choices that may save our planet. We don’t hear as much about agriculture, one of the world’s largest polluters, nor do we appreciate the environmental impact of our diet.
According to research by the World Resources Institute, agriculture is mankind’s biggest contributor to climate change, generating at least 26 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide — more than from all electricity and industry or from all the world’s planes, trains and automobiles.
Feeding the growing world population using today’s practices is increasingly unsustainable. Just as we need new technologies in areas like renewable energy, we need more “renewable” approaches to producing the most primal form of energy: food… → Read More
This Q&A with Survivor host Jeff Probst was conducted by guest writer Narendra Rocherolle, CEO of The Start Project. He and his partners hold the curious distinction of selling their company, Webshots, twice. Narendra is an occasional contributor to TechCrunch, you can read a Q&A with Lance Armstrong here. He is @narendra on Twitter.
The CBS show Survivor is completing its 22nd season—a run with a business and social impact that are reserved for extraordinarily few productions in Television history. Survivor launched the Reality TV genre and has managed to continue to do well during a decade where the very foundations of TV have been shifting. The show’s host Jeff Probst has been a mainstay and a driving force behind the show’s continued innovation in storytelling. I recently caught up with him to get some unfiltered thoughts. If you have questions or comments you can direct them to @jeffprobst on Twitter!
Survivor is a deceptively complex media property because you have multiple narratives: the game, behind the scenes details, and deeper looks into the actual participants. Building on these narratives, you are now live tweeting during Survivor shows (both East and West coast feeds). Where did you get the idea?
I am a big Howard Stern fan and one weekend he tweeted while watching a re-run of his movie, Private Parts. That was the inspiration for me to do the same thing with Survivor fans. I wanted to continue the conversation and give them more of what they crave, which is behind-the-scenes information and personal insight. In addition, I learn valuable information about what is and is not working for the show. It’s a very satisfying, albeit time consuming, effort. → Read More
If you’re an early stage venture capitalist or angel investor there is no time like the present to declare a bubble, say valuations are out of control and predict the demise of the tech industry in the very near future. Since they’re in the business of buying low and selling high, any angle that suggests that the buy price should be even lower sounds great to them.
If there’s any evidence of said bubble all the press will eat it up. Mostly because they were out buying Internet stocks in 2000 instead of doing their jobs and reporting on the fairly obvious signals that the Nasdaq was about to implode. They won’t get caught with their pants down and their hand out again. Declare a bubble early and declare it often.
And there is some evidence laying around. Valuations on a few select private tech startups are pretty darn high right now. And valuations on early stage “Series A” startups have surpassed the all important $4 million line and are now averaging in the $6 million – $8 million range.
That’s bad for seed fund economics. Which leads to paragraph 1 above, followed by paragraph 2 in the press. → Read More
At the end of last year, social networking site myYearbook shifted its focus more towards games and introduced a live video chat feature which could have completely backfired. But instead of turning into the next Chatroulette, the site has managed to keep the unwanted live porn vids to a minimum. While Chatroulette still has an estimated nudity rate of 1 in 50 videos, myYTearbook was able to cut its nudity rate down to 1 in a 1,000. In a Q&A with myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook, he explains the strategies he used to get there.
Q: When you decided to add live video chat to your site, what were you thinking? I mean, seriously, what were you thinking?
When we decided to build a Live Video gaming platform, the best example of Live Video at scale was Chatroulette, and it was full of porn. At the time, 1 out of every 10 video streams on Chatroulette was obscene.
Chatroulette was growing in part because it was obscene—it was the accident victim and the public was the rubbernecker. Chatroulette’s traffic peaked in March 2010—the same month that Jon Stewart screamed into the camera “I hate Chatroulette!” to end a segment that would be the service’s high water mark. → Read More
Thanks to the revolutions happening in the Middle East, our leaders have been touting social media as the new force for democracy. President Obama went out of his way to schmooze Facebook employees this week. He told them that when it comes to solving the challenges our country faces and to precipitating changes in the rest of the world, they were “at the cutting edge of what’s happening”.
It’s great that Silicon Valley is getting all this love and affection. But could this attention end up killing the golden goose? Think about it: if you are an evil dictator, looking for an excuse to block Facebook and Twitter, what better propaganda weapon than a picture of President Obama getting chummy with Mark Zuckerberg? Yes, I know that the U.S. government didn’t invent Facebook or even figure out how to use it until recently; and that it doesn’t control Facebook’s policies. But don’t those pictures and video clips tell a different story? → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — endured technical glitches and a dissection of the disruption formerly known as TV before settling into a debate about privacy. I know, sounds like the usual nonsense, but this show was high quality nonsense. I forget who brought up the famous iPhone/Android hidden recording file crisis, but things quickly got out of hand when one of us suggested that was a feature not a problem.
It turns out that not that many people are aware that when we are on the Internet, everything is recorded. For those who seem surprised by this, all those free apps are actually there to harvest our clicks, searches, and other gestures of our intent. As Doc Searls pointed out, how else does Google make money except by random clicks on Adsense adding up to billions. It’s only when we can’t figure out how to delete our wanderings that people get upset. Me — I count on being surreptitiously tracked so I can go back and figure out where I was last week. → Read More
We’re back with another episode of TC Cribs, taking you inside the offices of some of the tech world’s hottest companies. This episode features Meebo, which rose to popularity as a multi-protocol web-based chat client, and has since gotten tons of traction with their Meebo Bar (not to be confused with the numerous drinking holes located in the office, as you’ll see in the episode)).
Tune in to learn about Meebo’s traditions, their giant cookies, their hidden staircase to the happiest place on Earth, and the wooden board they call a ‘rock wall’ that is much, much harder than it looks. Seriously, it’s really hard. You’ll see. And do be sure to watch til the end. → Read More
Microsoft Has Sold 350 Million Copies Of Windows 7 Happy Day Of Special Significance To Many Religions! We Have Brightly Colored iPhone Cables For You! The LIFEBOOK E741/C Is The World’s First Notebook With Built-In Contactless Palm Vein Sensor iGeigie: A Geiger Counter For Your iPhone Beer Gardens NYC App Goes 2.0 For Beer Garden Season → Read More
Unfortunately for PlayStation Network and Qriocity services users, it looks like the widespread network outages will continue.
Since Sony’s PlayStation and music networks went down two days ago, there has been a fair amount of public speculation over the cause of the outage. (Largely due to Sony’s tight-lipped handling of public relations.) Many blamed vengeful gremlins loose in Sony’s server clusters and datacenters, while others immediately pointed the finger at Anonymous, the merry band of hackers that metastasized out of 4chan.
Thankfully, after 24+ hours of communication silence, Sony has updated its blog and ended the speculation. According to the electronics colossus, “an external intrusion” is responsible for the ongoing outages of the PlayStation Network and Qriocity. (It probably sounded like this at Sony headquarters. Or this.) → Read More
Mozilla released its new Firefox 4 exactly a month ago today and within a day had more than twice as many downloads as Internet Explorer 9 after its launch. Some where around midnight tonight the browser build will hit 100 million downloads after one month in existence, according to the Firefox download stats ticker.
What’s more impressive is that the browser has now taken over 7.94% of the worldwide browser market according to StatCounter, with Internet Explorer 8.0 at 29.99%, Firefox 3.6 at 24.43% and Chrome 10 at 15.35%. → Read More
Enterprise chat platform HipChat has entered the 101 Battle of the Billboards, putting up the above memetastic masterpiece on the 101 North after the Whipple exit this past Friday. For the uninitiated, the “Y U NO USE HIPCHAT” billboard is a take off of the startup friendly Y U NO guy meme, which has already spawned at least one parody Twitter account run by YCombinator hopefuls. → Read More
We couldn’t wait any longer to announce another batch of special guests for this year’s Disrupt in NYC. We had around 80 speakers last year and we have even more this year.
We are pleased to announce that Tim Armstrong, Dennis Crowley, and Chris Dixon will all be with us on stage at Disrupt NYC. They will join the guests we announced yesterday—Charlie Rose, Ron Conway, Roelof Botha, and Arianna Huffington. As you can see, we are not messing around. We said Disrupt would be big this year and we meant it.
Tickets are still on sale and you can find the best deals here. As we said before, make sure you purchase them as soon as you can since prices will go up as we get closer to the event. We are giving away 1 free ticket each week, and our giveaway for this week started this morning at 10am PST. We will be picking the winner tomorrow, so if you want to enter make sure you do so soon! → Read More
Congratulations to Microsoft, who somehow in the face of teasing from very important bloggers like us, has managed to sell quite a few copies of Windows 7 since that OS’s release 18 months ago. And by quite a few, I mean 350 million. That’s a lot. → Read More
Despite enormous sales of the iPad and iPad 2, it seems like the digital publishing world isn’t quite ready to support the digital magazine editions coveted by media giants like Conde Nast. This is the company, if you’ll remember, that was busting to get iPad editions ready before the iPad had even been announced.
It seems, though, that these well-laid plans, or at least extravagantly-laid, aren’t quite paying out just yet, according to a report at Ad Age. → Read More
As if my ego needed another boost.
Last month at SXSW, I had the opportunity to interview Senator Al Franken, who was speaking at the conference to discuss the importance of Net Neutrality. The interview went well (I doubt you can tell he was my first Senator), and as I walked out of the room Senator Franken slapped me on the back and said I had a bright future ahead of me.
Instead of responding with one of my famed witticisms I mumbled something about keeping my fingers crossed and went on my way, only to begin cursing myself a few moments later. One of the most level-headed members of the United States Senate had just complimented me — and I had failed to ask for it in writing. Bright future, indeed. → Read More
Shigeru Miyamoto, who has apparently eluded his handlers, is dropping information left and right about Nintendo’s new console and other enticing issues. After pretty much confirming “Café” yesterday and talking about Super Mario 3DS, he has now mentioned that the lack of big games from Nintendo lately is due to their focus on finalizing the 3DS and developing the new console.
Oh, and he wants to remake A Link To The Past. What you say → Read More
I’ve been puzzling over Twitter’s recent tactical moves around their API, Ubermedia and Tweetdeck, for a few months now, and it just doesn’t add up. In fact I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in a direction where they end up missing out on their biggest potential win.
If Twitter continues to go down the media company path, without incorporating their API into the plan, that could not only force a large part of their ecosystem to go elsewhere, but it could deprive them of a much larger potential infrastructure revenue opportunity, and could even end up costing them the company.
After all, Silicon Valley is littered with the burned out wreckage of once-great media companies that failed create and keep third-party app ecosystems: AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo – to name a few. It’s very hard to maintain leadership as an online media company without an ecosystem of outside apps increasing reach, innovation, and stickiness.
In light of this, I’ve been exploring an alternate path for Twitter that leverages their API in a much bigger way, and this path appears to be a better strategy. According to my own experimental revenue projections for Twitter, this alternative path is not only a good tactical move, but it’s a good business move because it increases Twitter’s reach, number of active users, and revenues massively. → Read More
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