Research firm eMarketer has put together a few interesting data points that show Google doing better in display ads than you might have realized. That is, by growing this business across properties that it at some point acquired – YouTube, DoubleClick, and mobile (AdMob) – it’s set to pass Facebook’s own display business.
The social network had the highest online ad sales of any company in the US last year, at $1.73 billion. But that was a mere $200 million or so above Google. This year, eMarketer expects a similar story, with Facebook bringing in $2.58 billion versus Google’s $2.54 billion. Things change in 2013 and 2014, further off from what the data can tell us accurately. → Read More
Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.
The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts to personalize your news reading experience the more you use the product. → Read More
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If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were up to during the summer, and beyond. At the time, Hansen and Varon were sophomores at Harvard, but they’ve since taken leave and have moved to San Francisco to focus on Newsle full-time. (Sounds like a familiar story, doesn’t it?) → Read More
140 Proof, a startup that says it delivers targeted ads to more than 50 social apps, is adding a video ad unit to its lineup.
Like the company’s existing 140-character text units, the videos can show up in the social stream of any app running 140 Proof ads. Users should be able to click and watch the video without leaving the page, rate it, and bring up a feed of all the tweets mentioning the advertiser’s hashtag. → Read More
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result.
That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page. → Read More
Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have long counted on the rise in smartphone usage to help fuel their growth: that trend, however, seems to also be taking a toll on mobile carriers — specifically in the form of revenues.
The analyst firm of Ovum, part of the Informa Group, has estimated that operators lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenue in 2011, as a result of their customers using services like Twitter and Facebook to message each other instead of the carriers’ own text messaging services — a big rise on the $8.7 billion Ovum estimates was lost in 2010. A separate report from mobile analytics firm Bytemobile has also charted huge growth in the use of social media on mobile — with operators getting virtually no benefit as a result. → Read More
Storify has become one of the main ways that people can create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. And now you can do that curation from your iPad.
The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially curated timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with its tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets. But with the new Storify iPad app, you can create those stories on a mobile device, too. In fact, co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman argues that this may be the first great app for content creation (rather than consumption) on the iPad. → Read More
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…. Whether or not Facebook’s in-house analytics product, Insights, is working. Due to product changes in recent weeks, the tool has been particularly slow to update with the latest metrics, as the site’s creator, PageLever, has discovered. The startup uses Facebook’s API to provide an advanced custom interface for page owners who are trying to track impressions and a variety of other key numbers. Because of the problem, it has been getting all sorts of questions from clients lately asking a slightly different question: “Why isn’t PageLever working?”
Yes, WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotworking.com doesn’t actually try to answer what its name would seem to indicate. Only Facebook engineers working on the tool know exactly why Insights is not functioning at any given time, after all, and they are probably busy working to fix it instead of dealing with questions. → Read More
There’s a lot of noise in our social media channels. I’m busy clogging up your Twitter feed with my deep thoughts, your friends are sharing their millionth baby picture on Facebook, and Scoble is filming startups in your living room on Google+. There is an unfathomable amount of data being produced every second, as social networks, apps, chat, etc. now facilitate real-time communication and sharing — making email feel like the Pony Express. This makes it nearly impossible for people (and their businesses) to stay on top of — among other things — the real-time communication happening between their customers. → Read More
With stories of Terminator-esque Google glasses making headlines these days, you’d think a basic task like screen sharing would be something that’d be pretty well solved by now. But while there are many different ways to share your desktop (or some portion thereof) with your friends or coworkers, more often than not the process isn’t something you’d call easy.
It’s bad enough that many people (including me) often find themselves steering their peers around computers the old-fashioned way: voice instructions over the phone (“Okay, now look in the Dock, do you see the Settings button? The one with metal gears, right. Click that…”)
ScreenLeap, a new startup out of the latest Y Combinator batch, wants to make this process a lot less painful, so that next time you’re confronted with an issue that could be better dealt with via screen-share, you actually take advantage of it. → Read More
Facebook’s Timeline is a cool idea, but as a representation of my life, it doesn’t have much to say about my experiences before 2004. Now, in its own small way, viral content site BuzzFeed is trying to change that.
Specifically, it’s adding buttons to select posts that take advantage of the Timeline’s ability to backdate content. The first post with this feature asks, “What Was Your First Computer?” For example, you could say that your first computer was an Apple II, and that you got it in 1978, and that would be added to the relevant section of your Timeline. Another post asks, “What Toys Did You Play With As A Kid?”
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There’s a feature war brewing in the synchronous listening space. Turntable.FM-competitor LetsListen today added video chat to its music locker web app so you can listen to a song at the same time as a friend, but also chat with them via text, audio, or video.
It’s a more intimate shared experience than just watching avatars dance around, but will video chat convince you to spend all day staring at your music player? → Read More
You may not know this, but Turkey has a fever. And the only prescription is more games. That’s right. Sifting through some of Pando Networks’ recent numbers on international gaming, we found that Turkey owns an increasing share of the global downloads of free-to-play games. Over the last year, the number of gamers in Turkey downloading free games climbed to over 5 million, a 534 percent increase since 2010 — and more than 14 percent of the country’s total population. → Read More
OMGPOP, the social game-maker formerly known as iminlikewithyou, says it has another mobile hit — its app Draw Something has been downloaded more than 1 million times in 10 days.
Draw Something is based on OMGPOP’s online game Draw My Thing. Described by CEO Dan Porter as a turn-based version of Pictionary, players are assigned things to draw, which can be simple (like a smile) or complicated (like a zombie), then their friends are supposed to guess what it is.
Players have already created more than 20 million drawings, Porter says. The game’s average load is now 50 drawings per second, and where the company took nine days to reach its first 10 million drawings, it’s now seeing 10 million new drawings every 24 hours. → Read More
I’ve been using Facebook since its early years. So today it has the most complete and accurate set of connections to people I’ve known throughout my life. Exactly because of its success in assembling this group, I’ve avoided turning on its five month-old Subscribe feature — until now.
For the many others of you who both want attention but don’t want to spam your friends about your work, here’s my reasoning for taking my Facebook profile public. → Read More
Just spotted in Orkut, Google’s also-ran social networking site: a new Google+ badge, one of the first integrations between the two services. Orkut members who also have a Google+ account are now being rewarded in the form of a badge reading “Google+ user,” which they can choose to make visible on their Orkut profile. No, it’s not a big deal in terms of the feature itself (oooh, a badge), but it’s an indication of Orkut’s current status in Google’s eyes. Orkut and Google+ are different products, and both sites will continue to exist, the company tells us today by way of explanation.
“Orkut has a large user base, especially in Brazil and India, and we will continue to invest in the product,” notes a Google spokesperson. Wait really? How on earth does that fit in with your current social strategy? Sorry, Google, continuing Orkut support just doesn’t make any sense. → Read More
Forkly, the food rating app from Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May, just launched a major update dubbed “Forkly 2.0.” Along with a user interface overhaul which features a faster feed, bigger photos and an upgraded user profile design, the app update also includes improved menus and a “Discover” function to offer better, personalized recommendations. Hey, your Forkly “taste graph” just got useful!
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Loyalize, a social TV audience platform, has been been acquired by Function(X) for $5M in cash and stock. The company intends to integrate Loyalize into Viggle, a television loyalty product designed for iOS devices.
Loyalize was founded by serial-entrepreneur Shahar Smirin whose current flagship project is GetTaxi, which former TechCrunch Editor Sarah Lacy called ‘Way Beyond Uber‘.
Smirin, along with his GetTaxi co-founder, Roi More, are also the founding duo of Vigoda.ru, a major daily deal site in Russia and the Ukraine with expected revenues for 2012 in the range of $200-250M.
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I must admit I was skeptical when Housebites first launched last year. It seemed a quaint little business attacking a hugely established market but in a way which looked, as least from the outside, to be unscalable. The premise of Housebites is this: the average person likes the convenience of take-out food (in the UK it’s called takeaway) but the food itself is usually unhealthy and processed. So why not capture all those wanna-be chefs, connect them with customers via location and, voila, you capture a potentially big business? It seemed all very well, but I figured they’d find a handful of chefs, but vetting them would be too slow. After all, Airbnb had scaled because anyone could register their apartment and start trading. How do you do that with your kitchen when you might actually poison someone?
I’m happy to say I was wrong – Housebites is now growing at a fair clip, now with 10,000 registered users. As CEO and founder Simon Prockter told me in the interview below, Housebites has tapped into a very disruptive model which could well change the whole restaurant industry. But more of that in a moment.
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Bartle Bogle Hegarty today became the latest company to make the leap into social gaming, and it is on the lookout to give seed funding to social gaming developers who want to make the jump with them.
The ad agency’s Asian division, BBH Asia Pacific, has opened a new venture, Chuck Studios, which will be run in partnership with one of its longtime clients, the confectionery giant Perfetti Van Melle — makers of Chupa Chups lollipops. Together, the two will invest in social games promoting the brand, in exchange for a share of whatever revenue is made from the content.
The first product of the venture, Chupa Chucker, made in partnership with studio Atommica, goes live today on Facebook. Future games will also run on iOS, Android, and HTML5, BBH tells us. “The only requirement is that the numbers have to check out.” → Read More
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