When Google wanted to get into the game of selling social ads across all platforms, it decided to acquire Wildfire, a company that had the market on lockdown. Since the acquisition last July, little has changed as far as what Wildfire offered, how it offered it and there was little to no impact for current customers. Today, the Wildfire team has announced that its first major shift is upon us… → Read More
SocialFlow, the makers of social marketing optimization technology that helps brands determine when to post their messages to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as which messages they should promote, has today closed on $10 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Fairhaven Capital, and included participation from existing investors SoftBank Capital, RRE Ventures, Aol… → Read More
HTC promised it would be spending more on marketing efforts to ditch the “quietly brilliant” tagline and come up with something with more pop, but it couldn’t have gone much worse than the video above. Kudos to signing on Dawson’s Creek and Internet meme star James Van Der Beek, but -1,000 for making such little use of his comedic talents in this dismal Bachelor parody. → Read More
HTC has revealed that it will finally drop the frankly stupid “Quietly Brilliant” tagline it has been using for the past few years, the WSJ reports, with company marketing chief Benjamin Ho saying they “haven’t been loud enough” with marketing to date. The first fruits of that change in strategy are already apparent, with HTC handing out snacks at the Galaxy S4 launch event in NYC, and the use of… → Read More
Facebook is preparing to roll out a new feature on Pages and popular Profiles that will help increase interactions with fans and readers: Replies. Up to now, visitors could comment on a post but others, including the Page owners themselves, would not be able to respond directly to them in cases of multiple people commenting on a post. Facebook has been running tests of the new feature since … → Read More
Mobile app developers using a technology called “cookie tracking” (sometimes called “Safari flip-flop” or “HTML5 first party cookies”) are starting to have their apps rejected by Apple’s App Review team, we’ve heard from a few different industry sources. With this method in place, Safari is opened upon first launch in order to read a cookie that may exist there from a user’s past interactions… → Read More
Y Combinator-backed Vimessa launched in late 2011 with a free video voicemail app for the iPhone that allowed users to send high-def video messages to any cell number or email address. The idea was to make video messaging work on any mobile device or desktop. But, despite the early buzz around the product, rules are rules: 90 percent of startups fail. → Read More
Medikly, a startup that aims to help pharmaceutical companies reach and better understand physicians, announced today that it has raised $1.2 million in series A financing from Easton Capital.
A recent graduate of the Blueprint Health accelerator in New York City, Medikly has developed an enterprise-grade platform that provides Big Pharma with a multi-channel marketing solution, combining… → Read More
When it comes to social media management and marketing suites, most people think Hootsuite and move on, but there are quite a few smaller competitors that vie for a piece of this market, too. Viralheat, for example, just launched its redesigned service with a new analytics dashboard and a redesigned user interface to make managing multiple accounts, accessing analytics and engaging with their… → Read More
Engagio, a social web platform for searching, discovering and following social conversations, has been acquired by marketing company Influitive, hot off the heels of its $7.3 million funding this past December. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the deal was a combination of cash plus stock. As a part of the acquisition, all five employees, including the founder and CEO William Mougayar… → Read More
Whenever a new platform launches these days, brands are instantly checking them out to see how they can “become a part of the conversation.” What that really means is how they can use a site like Twitter, or its new app Vine, to get your eyeballs, interact with you and, of course, sell you more stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s commerce at its purest. The story… → Read More
Visual content marketing service Reachli (formerly Pinerly), has raised a seed round from 500 Startups, PNP Ventures, Zelkova Ventures (Early Klout, Fab investors), Philquo Ventures (Fab investor), GVA ventures, and angel investors including William Lohse (invested in Pinterest’s first round), Howard Love (CEO Lovetoknow.com), Saeed Amidi (Plug and Play founder), plus a few others from the… → Read More
Appboy, the maker of a suite of customer relationship management (CRM) tools for mobile app developers, is now offering a new customer segmentation product that lets developers slice their audience into groups based on who they are and how they behave. After doing so, developers can then use other Appboy tools to target those users in different ways using push notifications, emails, and in-app… → Read More
Interesting news from the NFC front today: despite recent reports that the iPhone 5′s lack of NFC has set the market back by two years in the U.S. and Western Europe, an NFC-based mobile advertising startup known as Tapit has closed on a $2.3 million in Series A funding. Maybe being based in Sydney, Australia helps in this case. → Read More
When people want local information, more often than not, they turn to the nearest mobile device. In fact, Google reportedly announced in October that 50 percent of mobile search queries are for local information. Mobile devices are integral to how interface with the world, especially when it comes to searching for and discovering local businesses and services while on-the-go. While consumers are… → Read More
TechStars Boston 2011 grad Promoboxx, a startup offering a brand-to-retailer marketing platform, has raised an additional investment of $1.375 million to close its Series Seed round of financing. The company’s investors include Launch Capital, Boston Seed, SK Ventures, Common Angels, Stage 1 Ventures, and over 30 angels. In December of last year, Promoboxx raised $565,000 from SK Ventures… → Read More
Talk to an engineer, and the world is full of big data promise. But those who work at the front end the tech industry — business development, sales and marketing people, for example — have largely been cut out of that conversation. That appears slowly to be changing, with the rise of startups that are dedicated to figuring out how to harness big data in a way that is digestible to those who… → Read More
If you don’t live in New York City, you may not have heard of LocalVox. But the startup, which aims to simplify local marketing for small businesses and publishers, is beginning to take off. Headquartered in the Big Apple, the startup initially focused its efforts in its own backyard, but thanks to the $7.5 million series A it closed two weeks ago, it is now setting its sights on a more national… → Read More
ExactTarget, the marketing software giant that went public in March, has picked up a pair of smaller companies to build out its portfolio: marketing automation company Pardot for $95.5 million ($85.5 million in cash and $10.0 million in ExactTarget common stock) and analytics company iGoDigital for $21 million ($14.7 million in cash and $6.3 million in ExactTarget common stock). → Read More
Neemware is a newly launched marketing platform for mobile developers which allows the integration of messaging, feedback forms, questions, alerts, promotions, and more, into mobile applications. You can think of it as something like an Urban Airship for marketing. The platform, now available as a beta SDK, gives app developers a more personal connection to their apps’ users, but it also lets them… → Read More
One counterpoint to all of Google’s spring cleaning: it’s also moving ahead with launching new features. Tag Manager, out today, is aimed at help websites speed up their load times and make modifying them a little more efficient to boot, with the introduction of all-in-one coding that links up with analytics and other advertising and marketing services.
The challenge that Google is trying to… → Read More
Marketers are increasingly personalizing their products and services to meet their customers’ changing needs. But customization used in conjunction with powerful persuasion techniques is arming marketers with new weaponry to boost customer engagement and drive profits. → Read More
Smore, a startup which lets anyone quickly build attractive, single-page websites which it calls flyers, is rolling out a new version of its service today to specifically targets mobile app developers. Called simply “app flyers,” these mini, customized websites can be built in seconds by pulling in data from the App Store itself, then allowing users to tweak the design using a handful of built-in… → Read More
Social media dashboard maker MarketMeSuite, which targets SMBs with tools that help them better manage their Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn postings in order to target leads, has raised $1.1 million in new funding today, in a round led by Boston-area VC Jeff McCormick of Saturn Venture Partners. The company also recently uprooted from its home base of Norwich, U.K. to set up shop in… → Read More
It’s no secret that the mobile app landscape has become extremely competitive. Over the last few years, this has led to an incredible amount of innovation and progress, but the cost of visibility — of acquiring new users — is also on the rise. In fact, Fiksu found that the cost of acquiring users hit a record high in December. While December is a critical month for app discovery, it remained to… → Read More
ThriveHive, a new marketing platform for small businesses, is today announcing it has closed $1.5 million in seed funding in a round which included MIT Professor Ed Roberts, Mitch Roberts and Jean Hammond, as well as seed stage venture capital group Founder Collective, The Birchaven Group, and IBCC, among others. The company, founded by two former small business owners who know the pains of SMB… → Read More
We’re so over PowerPoint presentations, right? Well, that’s the common refrain, at least. And we haven’t even been super-enthused about the new-fangled PowerPoint alternatives in a while – not since companies like Prezi, Animoto, and (VMWare-acquired) SlideRocket were making the rounds in the startup scene, that is. Even SlideShare, the service that made presentations social, launched a web… → Read More
Founded in 2010, New York City-based startup Jirafe set out with a simple mission: Help eCommerce store managers turn their digital storefronts into viable, thriving businesses. To do so, in the long term, Jirafe hopes to be able to someday automate the many boring administrative and analytical tasks that are part of daily grind of running (and monetizing) an eCommerce operation — so that… → Read More
Since announcing its private beta in March, 12society has been in stealth mode, quietly building a star studded roster of co-founders and curators, one that now includes LA Clipper and Rookie Of The Year Blake Griffin, actor/comedian Nick Cannon, Tim Lincecum, former New York Giant Michael Strahan, Minnesota Timberwolves All Star Kevin Love, and rapper/actor superstar Nas.
Today, the startup… → Read More
Mobile app downloads continued to decline in April and the cost to acquire loyal users picked up, reports mobile marketing firm Fiksu in its latest report out today. This downward trend was expected, as no major events sparked app discovery during the month, explains Fiksu CEO Micah Adler. However, mobile app marketers were particularly aggressive in the social networking and games categories… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco
San Francisco, CA
