Spot Runner launches web-based TV ad exchange — finally
TV ad company Spot Runner has launched Project Malibu, their much anticipated web-based platform for buying and selling television advertising. The move comes after nearly two years of development, massive layoffs, a heated lawsuit from investor WPP and a whopping $120 million raised from more than a dozen investors.
Spot Runner originally focused on serving local advertisers, letting them use a web-based service to serve ads on TV. But Project Malibu spotlights a shift in technology to a web-based advertising exchange… Continue Reading
Google gobbles display ad startup Teracent
Google is growing its display advertising business today with the acquisition of Teracent, a startup that provides companies with tools for customizing display ads like web banners and interactive modules. Still making most of its revenue from text ads listed next to search results, the tech giant sees display as the next biggest area of opportunity.
Right now, Google is actually coming in second to Yahoo in display advertising — having only launched its strategy in… Continue Reading
Feedtrace shows who, what is popular on Twitter (+invites)
With all the information available today, wading through everything to find out what you really need to know is hard. But there are also a few options for weeding out the noise in your information stream. Feedtrace is a new one, and one with some promise.
When you visit the Feedtrace site and sign up, you sign in with your Twitter username – Feedtrace doesn’t store your password, or really anything about you. Then, once it… Continue Reading
Zynga crosses 100 million users and expands beyond Facebook games
Zynga said today it has crossed more than 100 million unique monthly users for its social games on Facebook.
Thanks to the popularity of its casual Facebook games such as FarmVille, which has more than 65 million players, the San Francisco company has become the biggest developer on Facebook and the leading company in the emerging social games market.
That’s a pretty good achievement for a startup founded in 2007 and one that is surrounded by multi-billion-dollar… Continue Reading
LinkedIn expands platform in attempt to one-up Facebook Connect
LinkedIn aims to be an even more central part of your professional identity, by expanding its platform today with the site developer.linkedin.com.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based professional networking site already offers a platform for third-party developers, allowing them to build widgets and apps that run in LinkedIn itself. What it’s announcing today is another piece of that platform, one that’s arguably more exciting — the site is allowing developers to access your LinkedIn data from their… Continue Reading
Android gobbles up 20 percent share of U.S. smartphone market, says AdMob
AdMob, the mobile ad network that Google plans to acquire for $750 million, today released their October 2009 Metrics Report examining market share for top devices and the operating systems that run on them.
One stat in particular caught our eye. In the US, Android had 20 percent share of smartphone traffic, up from only seven percent six months before. Now that there’s proof that these phones are selling, Android may solidify its spot as a… Continue Reading
Intel and Sprout launch a consumer-powered Facebook promotion
Facebook reaches so many people now that big brands are trying to figure out how to reach its audience. Intel is using social media firm Sprout to launch a new kind of marketing campaign today that promises to drop Intel laptop prices if consumers sign up to be fans of Intel’s latest page on Facebook. The more fans sign up, the lower the price of the laptops will be when they go on sale on… Continue Reading
16-yr old launches Vye music-sharing site. Another Napster?
With the help of close friends and family, 16-year-old Charles Allatt, has launched Vye Music, an online meta search app for music files around the Net.
The site pulls search results from other music sites — including Skreemr, MP3Codes, and 4Shared Music, sites which in turn index hundreds of thousands of sites, blogs and artist pages.
Vye collates all of this content for the user and applies a simple, AJAX-based interface to let you build playlists, stream… Continue Reading
Now anyone can try Brizzly’s app for Facebook and Twitter
Brizzly, an application for managing messages in Twitter and Facebook, expanded its beta test today — now you don’t need an invite code, so anyone can use it.
The application was created by San Francisco-based Thing Labs, and includes features like expanding links and photos, the ability to “mute” people who you want to stop seeing updates from temporarily, and recently-added support for Twitter Lists.
In addition to opening the beta, Brizzly also added a new feature… Continue Reading
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
Infoaxe — a real-time search engine that doesn’t rely on Twitter
Infoaxe, which records your web history and make it searchable, just launched a public facing real-time search engine tapping the behavior of its more than 2 million users.
Infoaxe is a fairly unique entrant into the real-time search space. It doesn’t rely on Twitter’s data stream the way that competitors TweetMeme, OneRiot and Scoopler do. Instead, its results are based off the data it has collected through a browser toolbar it launched last year that has about… 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