Targeted advertising goes real-time: Onsite targeting solutions provider Cognitive Match has teamed up with independent advertising technology company Adnetik to increase the effectiveness of online campaigns.
The partnership builds on Adnetik’s Audience Investment Management (AIM) system for display advertising and enhances its capabilities through combination with Dynamic Creative Targeting™. While AIM helps advertisers to buy targeted display ads on an impression by impression basis, this collaboration places the solution in a real-time environment. It provides a dynamic creative solution that is capable of targeting different elements of creative for each user. The goal is to maximise user engagement and increase the effectiveness of online campaigns. → Read More
RIM may be pinning their hopes on BBX, but that doesn’t mean they’re done churning out classic BlackBerrys. Case in point: the revamped Bold 9790 has been revealed in a new set of photos that doesn’t look like someone took them during an earthquake.
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There’s been some chatter about how Conde Nast’s tablet editions of its popular magazines, which have enjoyed a large increase in subscribers since the release of Apple’s Newsstand feature. It must be a pleasant surprise to the company, which as late as April was easing back on tablet content production after a less-than-stellar debut period. A lot can happen in six months, though: for example, 20 million iPads were sold. That’s a big increase in the demographic. And of course the designated channel for magazine-type content helps as well.
As pleasant as this news is (I’m all in favor of bringing print-quality content to digital devices), I think this portion of the tablet experience is still very much an early-adopter, minority share situation. They’re probably patting each other’s backs at Conde Nast, but the champagne is still in the fridge. → Read More
Another day, another Tokyoflash watch. The Kisai 7 is a clever, fairly cool watch that looks like something Jeff Bridges picked out of his magisterial beard in the last Tron movie. Priced at $99 for the next 30 hours, you, too, can look like a Program just looking to get out of the CPU.
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RelayRides, a car-sharing service that lets you rent (or rent out) cars a few hours at a time, has raised an additional $3 million in funding, adding on to the company’s Series A round that now totals $13M. More important than the money is who took part in the round: it was led by General Motors Ventures, with participation from the company’s existing investors.
The funding is connected to a recent deal that RelayRides forged with GM, which will allow RelayRides users to tap into the OnStar system that has come equipped on all GM cars since 2005 (that’s around 15 million cars). After connecting their OnStar accounts to RelayRides, renters will be able to remotely unlock the cars they’ve signed up for using their mobile phones, without having to deal with swapping physical keys.
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Kobo is about to launch their new Vox ereader/tablet and I think it’s important to remember that the reader race isn’t just down to two contestants: this Canadian company, while comparatively small in the US, is performing quite admirably on the international stage, hitting 2.5 million users in the US and over 5 million total in the world.
The Vox is a fairly nondescript Android tablet running a slightly modified version of Android 2.3. It is compatible with most Android apps and ships with the Kobo app pre-installed. As it stands there’s little to be excited about except the price and the bright, readable screen that is purported to have excellent visibility in direct sunlight. At $199, the Kobo Vox is probably one of the most affordable “big name” Android tablets that may actually gain some traction this holiday.
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What. The. Bleep.
Not to say that Nokia’s new smartphones aren’t interesting, but this crazy flexible smartphone-like device CNET spotted over at Nokia World has to be the coolest thing to grace the showroom floors. Unfortunately, CNET reports that its strictly in the prototype phase, and may never become an actual product that’s for sale. → Read More
It took 8 years for Pastebin.com (which, for the unassociated, is sort of like the Internet’s clipboard. Anyone can paste in a big ol’ wall of text and share it with anyone else, often anonymously) to reach 1 million “active” (read: not spam or expired) pastes. In the year and a half since, it’s spiked all the way up to 10 million.
Interestingly enough, Pastebin’s original owner chose to sell it off just before the massive uptick — bet you can’t guess why! → Read More
Onsite targeting solutions provider Cognitive Match has teamed up with independent advertising technology company Adnetik to increase the effectiveness of online campaigns. The partnership builds on Adnetik’s Audience Investment Management (AIM) system for display advertising and enhances its capabilities through combination with Dynamic Creative Targeting™. While AIM helps advertisers to buy targeted display ads on an impression by impression basis, this collaboration places the solution in a real-time environment. It provides a dynamic creative solution that is capable of targeting different elements of creative for each user. The goal is to maximise user engagement and increase the effectiveness of online campaigns.
→ Read More
Thanks to services like iCloud and Google+, snapshots flow like water between mobile devices and the web these days. But many of those photos never make the jump from pixels to paper. And, as it turns out, people still love to stick photos and cards to their family refrigerator.
That’s where Sincerely comes in. The company builds products that revolve around easily creating and sending physical, real-world postcards at a low cost. And today it’s announcing that it’s raised a $3 million Series A funding round led by Spark Capital, with Spark’s Bijan Sabet joining the board. Other participants in the round include a strong roster of investors: First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, SV Angel, Chamath Palihapitiya, Drew Houston, Paul Buchheit, Adam Smith, Ariel Poler, Shan Sinha, and Paul Freedman.
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Zingaya, a Russian VOIP startup HQ-in London has raised $1.15 million in a Series A funding. Investors include Esther Dyson and Russian private investors. . I one “Untitled Venture Capital Company”. I kid not. Zingaya, founded in 2009 by the three young Russian geeks who previously developed flap hone, a web-based VOIP app, is effectively a click-to-call service aimed at support calls for e-commerce sites. They are by no means the only player in this market but are getting traction with customer at a reasonable click with over 100 paying customers including the largest Russian payment system – Qiwi, and major Russian airline S7 Airlines.
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The ticketing industry’s arguably most disruptive start-up Eventbrite has today opened the doors of its London office. This is the first international expansion of the U.S. based business and they’re only just getting started.
The event platform has passed one milestone after another in the past two years as ticket gross sales jumped up to $400 million in December 2010 from $100 million in January 2009. Up to this expansion Eventbrite was used in 147 countries and has issued nearly 40 million tickets since it was founded in 2006. A recent Series E round of funding worth $50 million will be used to aim for bigger events, invest in mobile products and build more analytics and social media tools. → Read More
Red Gate this morning announced that it has acquired Cerebrata, an India-based maker of tools that helps developers build applications that run on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. In fact, Cerebrate is not only a Microsoft partner but also one of their BizSpark startups.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we’re told Cerebrata will continue to operate its own website and services, and its development team will be kept in place for the ‘foreseeable future’. → Read More
If you are of the opinion that two screens are better than one, I come bearing good news. LG’s new DoublePlay smartphone has today been made available at T-Mobile. → Read More
The popular social gaming network for Android, PapayaMobile, is announcing today that it’s now expanding its gaming platform to iOS. The company is making its social development toolkits available to iOS developers as a beta release, allowing them to connect users on both platforms (iOS and Android) for in-game features including challenges, game invites, leaderboards and more. → Read More
In June Justin.tv launched one of its first verticals, TwitchTV, a live-streamed video game portal and community for gamers. The platform has since taken off in terms of usage, and today, TwitchTV is expanding to the iPhone.
For background, TwitchTV features competitions of a variety of games and platforms with top gamers, tournaments and commentary. The platform aims to be a one-stop-shop for live video for ‘eSports,’ which Justin.tv says is synonymous with competitive video gaming. TwitchTV features live video game battles and commentary from titles like Halo:Reach, Starcraft II, World Of Warcraft, Call Of Duty: Black Ops and others.
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Sports+ (formerly Hitpost) has launched a new iPad app for sports fans that features socially-powered feeds for every league, team and player you care to follow. These feeds include latest news, crowd-generated stories, and polls.
Hitpost’s apps allow you to follow your teams, players and leagues to get a comprehensive view into photos, Tweets, user-uploaded reports and news coming out of an organization. Currently Sports+ has 250,000 mobile users on its iPhone and Android apps. → Read More
Foodies rejoice! ZipList, makers of online and mobile shopping lists and a recipe search service, is out now with a completely revamped iPhone application. The updated app syncs with ZipList.com and its 40 parter sites, including MarthaStewart.com, Women’s Day, $5 Dinners and more, to keep your mobile shopping list up-to-date with your latest recipe finds from across the Web.
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Online store and backup service provider Backblaze this morning released version 2.0 of its flagship product, bumping up the allowed file size for storage and backups up to ‘unlimited’ and bringing other enhancements to the table.
The company has actually always provided unlimited storage – and “unthrottled bandwidth” – for five bucks a month, but now vows to make its unlimited offering even more unlimited. → Read More
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