DigitalBeat

iTunes music: Higher prices result in slower sales growth

On this morning’s earnings call for Warner Music, CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr said that the company’s $1.29 tracks — a 30 percent price boost over Apple’s standard 99 cents — have been a “net positive” for the company. Yet as media pundit Peter Kafka observed, the entire music industry’s iTunes sales growth is slower than a year ago, when consumer confidence and willingness to spend were much lower:

Industrywide, year-over-year “digital track equivalent album unit... Continue Reading

How Sergey Brin uses Google Buzz as a business product

Google Buzz, the social sharing tool that Google just announced at a press event in Mountain View, Calif., isn’t just for fun. The company said it’s going to be launching an enterprise version of Buzz as part of its Google Apps bundle of business applications.

During the presentation, Google was pretty vague about Buzz in a business context, both in terms of how it might be used and when it will launch (“soon” is all... Continue Reading

Google socializes Gmail with Google Buzz

Google announced a new product today called Google Buzz, bringing credence to previous rumors that social networking features would be added to Gmail. Buzz is a service for sharing and talking about content. In the same way that the company calls Gmail “a Google approach to email,” it’s calling Buzz “a Google approach to sharing.”

Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, demonstrated the product on-stage at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View,... Continue Reading

Yes, there’s a Google Street View Snowmobile now

Iterating off the Street View car and the Street View “tricycle”, Google has built another contraption to record the physical world for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

They’ll be driving a Street View Snowmobile around the Games for maps. Dan Ratner, the mechanical engineer behind the “trike”, also built this one.

It’s been able to capture everything from snow runs on the Whistler Blackcomb Mountains, the... Continue Reading

A giant table of Super Bowl ads ranked by online results

Gomez is a division of Compuware that does website performance measurement for businesses. Like me, they constantly hammer the point that a slow site loses a lot of business. In fact, 78 percent of consumers surveyed told Gomez they have switched to a competitor’s site because the site they wanted was too slow.

With that in mind, this past Sunday Gomez studied the websites of every company with a Super Bowl ad as their commercials... Continue Reading

Yodle launches Organic to optimize web traffic and leads for small businesses

Shortly after announcing a $10 million fourth round of financing and alluding to a new product launch, Yodle, a company that helps businesses advertise online, today launched Yodle Organic, a new product to help local businesses increase web traffic and search engine optimization (SEO).

Yodle specializes in helping local  businesses in several major cities, including Boston, New York and San Francisco to display local advertising on search pages. The company’s new product, Yodle Organic, looks to not... Continue Reading

Speedbit building new service to identify viral videos sooner, personalize web video streams

SpeedBit, the folks behind Video Accelerator and Download Accelerator, is developing another service centered around web video. The new offering will potentially help web users find the best web video content suited to their interests and will also identify viral videos before they become huge hits. By identifying viral videos early, Speedbit hopes to promote them to users who may potentially miss out when a video becomes popular very quickly and is soon forgotten.

According... Continue Reading

Foursquare patches its content gap with Zagat, HBO partnerships

As competitors with rich content offerings like Yelp close in on its core market, Foursquare is rallying to fight back with a series of big media partnerships.

The New York Times reported today that the company will unveil a partnership with Zagat tomorrow where users can earn a ‘Foodie’ badge if they check into the right restaurants. It comes on top of a deal the location-based social networking game signed... Continue Reading

Shared content on Facebook surges fivefold from seven months ago

Facebook users are sharing five billion pieces of content a week, or five times as much as they were in July, according to new statistics the company released this month.

The big burst in sharing comes as Facebook has promoted share buttons and Connect, its effort to push a layer of social functionality across the web with partners like Digg and Hulu. As we’ve said before, Facebook is becoming more of a content portal in... Continue Reading

BlueKiwi lets companies build a community for free

BlueKiwi, a French startup that helps companies manage customer conversations, says it’s starting a big push into the US market. As part of that effort, it’s announcing new pricing that could be hard to resist — companies can build a BlueKiwi-powered community for free.

The company’s tools center around managing customer forums, and finding ideas within them. That sounds like something a lot of other companies including are doing, but Vice President of Marketing Erica... Continue Reading

Pursway grabs $6m to help find companies social influencers

Social networking is filled with people who like to talk. While a majority of the online chatter is simply noise, some individuals, for reasons that vary, have networks of friends, family and colleagues that listen, trust and act on their recommendations. These individuals are known as social influencers. Helping to locate and utilize these social influencers for marketing campaigns, Pursway(formerly Datanetis) announced today that it has secured $6 million in a first round of funding to expand its services... Continue Reading

An SD memory card adapter for your iPhone

I don’t normally blog about gadget hardware, but zoomMediaPlus‘ new zoomIt SD card adapter for iPhone and iPod Touch fills a gaping hole of utility. Not only does it let Apple handset owners look at photos, play music, and read documents off an SD card, it has smart software that optimizes the experience.

When you first connect the adapter, it prompts you onscreen to download a free iPhone app that controls the media on your... Continue Reading

Tumblr takes on Daily Booth with photo replies

Ooh, one youthful blogging network takes on another!

Tumblr, the uber-simplified blogging platform that has more than 3 million accounts, kicked off a 48-hour experiment today. It’s letting people reply to others with photos, instead of regular comments or re-blogs.

The blog owner has to turn on the feature by checking “Let people photo reply” every time they publish a post. If a post is photo-enabled, a camera... Continue Reading

Flixster continues rapid growth with new $12.5M

A little over a month after it gobbled up primary competitor Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster, a social-networking site for movie enthusiasts, has landed $12.5 million in a new round of equity and common stock, according to a filing with the SEC. The San Francisco company has already been growing fast, but the new money could kick it up another notch.

The January Rotten Tomatoes acquisition came at an opportune time. Flixster was looking to expand its... Continue Reading

Report: Gmail to add social networking features as soon as this week

Google is trying to push more media sharing and status update features into Gmail as soon as this week, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users would be able to see a stream of status updates from friends as well as photos and videos shared through Picasa and YouTube.

Although Facebook has come to dominate the social networking space with 400 million users, Gmail contacts represent a formidable latent social network with hundreds or... Continue Reading

Disney and Google to buy into China’s largest bus media firm, Bus Online

In what will surely be a common trend over the next few years to take advantage of China’s growing population of media consumers, Reuters is reporting that a Disney-led consortium is in talks to buy a portion of China’s largest in-bus media firm, Bus Online. Google is a part of the consortium — even as they are currently seeking out the NSA’s help to deal with their recent security breach in China.

According to anonymous... Continue Reading

Ad expert: Google’s Super Bowl spot was a live traffic test

Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants you to believe that Google’s 52-second “Parisian Love” ad that ran in the third quarter of yesterday’s Super Bowl was a spontaneous decision to take a popular YouTube video and “share it with a wider audience.”

Aw, a present. You shouldn’t have!

They didn’t. We got an email this morning from Martin McNulty, director of online ad agency Forward3D. Maybe because he’s a Brit, McNulty can see past Super Bowl... Continue Reading

Loopt turns to Mobile Spinach to power local coupons

Loopt, an early leader in location-based services, will start offering users targeted local coupons and discounts.

The Mountain View-based startup has teamed up with another San Francisco Bay Area company, Mobile Spinach, to power the offers. Through the partnership, Loopt will send users offers in their neighborhood with directions, which they can then redeem by showing their phone while at the restaurant.

Mobile Spinach, a company with a free database of local offers, will start powering... Continue Reading