DigitalBeat

Tweetmeme launches buttons for re-tweetable advertising

Twitter said it’s planning a large-scale advertising network soon, but U.K.-based Tweetmeme beat them to the punch with a monetization effort of its own today.

The startup, which creates those green ‘Retweet’ buttons you see everywhere (including on this site), is rolling out the same feature for ads. They’re partnering with Federated Media to insert retweet buttons into their advertising two weeks from now, enabling people to share compelling ads with others.

Advertising in social streams has… Continue Reading

LaDiDa brings reverse karaoke to your iPhone

There are tons of karaoke applications for the iPhone, but a startup called Khu.sh is introducing a twist on the concept, “reverse karaoke,” to the App Store.

There have been other reverse karaoke products, most notably Microsoft Songsmith, a Windows application that lets you record your singing, then automatically generates musical accompaniment. Songsmith even prompted a series of YouTube videos highlighting the hilarious badness of many of the resulting songs.

Khu.sh’s iPhone app, LaDiDa, lets you do… Continue Reading

Hot Potato launches event streaming, storytelling in real-time

Expect big things from this location-based service.

Brooklyn-based Hot Potato launched a site and iPhone app today that lets groups of people share and create streams of content around events.

You can create an event like a concert or a football watching session and let other people check in to it. Everyone “checked in” at an event can post their thoughts, photos and videos about what’s going on, creating a stream of activity for others to see.

All… Continue Reading

Google search marketing gets all touchy-feely

Google hasn’t traditionally engaged in large-scale advertising campaigns. Instead, it has relied mainly on word of mouth to become the $180 billion company it is today. However in the last year, the company has rolled out bigger and bigger paid advertising efforts (as many mature brands start to do). That includes the Go Google campaign back in August, promoting Google apps as a reliable alternative to Microsoft Office for businesses.

Yesterday, Google rolled out a series… Continue Reading

Twitter COO Dick Costolo: Revenue is on and advertising is coming soon

Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on-stage at the Real-Time CrunchUp in San Francisco. I’m taking some notes as we go.

The big takeaways are that Twitter is making more than $4 million a year, but won’t specify how much and that’s through the recent data-sharing deals with Microsoft and Google.

Next, Twitter is going to roll out advertising soon. Costolo says, “You’ll see an advertising strategy from us in the near future. It will be fascinating and… Continue Reading

FunMail livens up your iPhone messages

FunMobility, the developer of a bunch of social mobile applications, is releasing a new iPhone app that chief executive Adam Lavine says will finally convince people to use their phones’ multimedia messaging (MMS) capabilities.

It is called FunMail, and it automatically offers up suggestions of images you should send along with your text messages.

Lavine points to a study FunMobility commissioned from Frost & Sullivan showing that only one out of every 70 mobile messages is sent… Continue Reading

Facebook bans offer providers Gambit and Tatto Media due to questionable ads

Facebook has banned offer providers Gambit and Tatto Media from providing offers in games and apps on the social network.

The development is one of the results of the recent scandal around the quality of offers in social games and apps. Some of the offers have been tainted as scams because they don’t tell consumers about hidden obligations or fees. Earlier today, Offerpal said that it was issuing a set of standards for its advertisers to… Continue Reading

Seesmic jumps on Twitter’s new location feature with map previews

Seesmic, the Twitter client that was the first to incorporate lists, has now jumped on the social network’s new location-tagged tweets. You can roll over tweets that have a special marker to show a map of where they are, without ever leaving the client.

Twitter finally rolled out its location application programming interface earlier today. It lets you pair a tweet with data about where you are. It could be extremely valuable for real-time data about… Continue Reading

Offerpal Media sets standards to lock out scam offers

[Updated with interview]

Burned by a scandal in its offer business over inappropriate promos, Offerpal Media is moving to set standards that forbid offers that are misleading, deceptive or otherwise objectionable.

The action is the first move the company has made since it brought in a new chief executive, George Garrick, a couple of weeks ago. The CEO transition happened in the midst of a debate over scam offers that were allegedly duping users into mobile subscription… Continue Reading

Twitter finally enables geotagged tweets with new location API

Twitter finally rolled out its new application programming interface for tagging tweets with your location.

It won’t appear on Twitter.com, but it will be enabled for location-based services like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Twittelator Pro. Tweetie already switched on some geotagging functionality earlier this year, so you can see nearby tweets.

This is probably the most significant update Twitter has released in the last half-year and it’s hard to say what outside developers will… Continue Reading

Foursquare makes global push: 50 new cities

Popular location-sharing game Foursquare has just gone global with the announcement of 50 new cities worldwide, doubling the service’s previous coverage. The company says it chose the cities based on feedback from users requesting the service.

The new cities take the service across six continents, but it’s not so long since it was a strictly a tech-insider phenomenon in the US. As cofounder Dennis Crowley (pictured below) told me last week “The goal is to build… Continue Reading

New targeting on Pages gives Facebook leg up over Twitter for marketers

Facebook unveiled what could become a pretty powerful marketing tool for large multinationals and brands last night. You can now target specific locations and languages when you send out updates on a Facebook page. A brand like McDonald’s could use the new feature to send out coupons to Japanese followers, for example.

Why is this important? “Drip marketing”, or social media marketing — whatever term you want to use for it — has become increasingly essential… Continue Reading

Google creates automatic captions for YouTube videos

Google announced today that YouTube will be able to automatically include captions in videos. Previously, you had to enter the caption manually while the video was uploading, an option that was usually overlooked. That was also a problem for those impaired or might have language barriers that are looking to consumer video.

Google notes that the number of captioned videos does is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, but with the new automatic caption services, that should… Continue Reading

Twitter retools prompt, asks “What’s happening?”

Twitter unveiled a small marketing tweak today.

The company’s changed its main question from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” It’s more of a cosmetic change to make it clearer to outsiders what Twitter is all about. Status updates have come to encompass a broad range of behavior, not just the much-mocked example of “I’m drinking a latte right now.” People use it share links, videos, images and small, provocative thoughts.

Co-founder Biz Stone writes:

“…a birds-eye… Continue Reading

Yahoo juices up its news search with Twitter

Yahoo is using Twitter to surface timely and relevant news stories, images and videos starting today.

As news organizations pile into the microblogging service and as shared links and retweets become a decent metric of what’s interesting, the web’s biggest search destinations are incorporating Twitter. (Microsoft and Google both signed data-sharing deals with Twitter last month.)

What’s unique about Yahoo’s approach is that they haven’t built a separate real-time search engine outside of their primary search as… Continue Reading

Runa’s new service looks to turn web surfers into sales

Last year, e-commerce retailers spend $21 billion, or 15 percent of their revenues, in online marketing to drive traffic to their websites. The end result — a dismal 2-3 percent conversion rate between visitors and sales.

Mountain View startup Runa, a provider of revenue growth and profit maximization solutions, is looking to help e-commerce retailers to change low conversion rates with the launch of their new conversion marketing solution. The new web application focuses on converting web traffic into sales while… Continue Reading

Olive Media launches new way to serve music to home stereos

High-end audio is moving into the digital age. Olive Media announced today it has created an audiophile’s music storage system that can deliver digital music to home stereos.

The San Francisco-based company is launching the Olive 4HD, a high-definition Hi-Fi Music Server. The system serves as a control center for high-quality audio — with 24-bit sound and 96 kilohertz sample rates. It can store 6,000 CDs on its two terabytes of hard disk space. That’s also… Continue Reading

5 O’clock Roundup: Office web app impressions, AT&T’s legal skirmish with Verizon

Here’s the latest action:

Microsoft releases beta test downloads of Office 2010 — This is basically the first time the public has a chance to play with the much-vaunted web application versions of Office. Due to a bunch of restrictions, I wasn’t able to try the apps out myself, but Harry McCracken at Technologizer took a look and said they were so rough he has to give them “an Incomplete rather than trying to grade them.”

Judge won’t… Continue Reading

Imeem — another music streaming story ends in tears?

If I were Spotify, I’d be paying close attention right now.

Imeem, which was one of the first music startups to work out streaming deals with all four major record labels, is going to MySpace for a bargain basement price of $1 million in cash, according to TechCrunch. (Update: Sources tell us the acquisition valuation is closer to a range of $7 to 9 million. That’s $1 million in cash plus earnouts to retain key employees.)

Neither… Continue Reading