Facebook also offered enhanced privacy settings, allowing users to change who sees content they’ve already posted.

The fun status updates that have been popping up all over Facebook, saying that a user is watching The Big Bang Theory, listening to Kanye West, eating bacon or playing Xbox are now able to be posted from iPhones and iPads.

Additionally, Facebook added a feature currently available on the Android native app — the ability to change privacy on things users have already posted. That means embarrassing photos only meant for college friends (but accidentally posted publicly) can now be changed from mobile.

Readers: What other improvements would you like to see on the iOS app?

Screenshots courtesy of The Next Web.

]]> http://socialshoppingnews.com/2013/06/19/facebooks-latest-ios-update-brings-structured-status-updates-better-privacy-settings/feed/ 0 http://socialshoppingnews.com/2013/06/19/yc-backed-videopixie-launches-to-create-a-marketplace-for-video-editors/ http://socialshoppingnews.com/2013/06/19/yc-backed-videopixie-launches-to-create-a-marketplace-for-video-editors/#comments Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:00:19 +0000 admin http://socialshoppingnews.com/2013/06/19/yc-backed-videopixie-launches-to-create-a-marketplace-for-video-editors/

There are tons of raw video footage out there: Videos taken on vacation or school trips, videos of friends and family, videos taken to show off new restaurants and boutiques. And every day there’s more. But the problem of editing that footage is a problem. For as many of us as there are who like to shoot video, very few of us know how to edit it.

That’s a problem Videopixie is trying to solve, by creating a marketplace devoted entirely to connecting users who have video with those who can edit it. By doing so, it’s providing a way for anyone to have beautiful videos created out of raw footage from professional video editors and animators.

Two years ago, the team behind Videopixie launched Sellstage, which was a platform for marketers to distribute their product videos online. The idea was to store and stream videos that could be easily embedded on product websites online.

It was an okay idea, but what the team found was that many sellers needed help with the actual creation of their videos and not help with their distribution. In particular, there was a bottleneck in the video-editing process. Sellstage’s customers would frequently have video footage that they had shot, but they would have no editing experience.

They could hire an editor, or even a full-service video crew to create videos for them, but that was expensive. What they really needed was an on-demand video editor who would charge a small fee based on the amount of time involved in piecing the video together.

And so, Videopixie was born.

The service works like this: Users log in and upload all their raw video footage, then make it available for editors to have a go at it. They can run a contest, with editors vying for the business by putting together a quick teaser trailer using the footage provided. Or they can submit footage and have editors bid on a project, and choose them based on ratings and price. There are also fixed-price options for smaller projects.

In any case, businesses can use the service to cost-effectively get product videos, customer testimonials, or explainer videos created. And consumers can use it, too, for weddings, vacations, and the like.

Videopixie was founded by Tom Saffell and Thomas Escourrou, who were part of the Y Combinator Summer 2011 class with Sellstage. Funding comes from YC and its Start Fund.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google launched a new scorecard in AdSense today that allows site owners to see how their properties are performing relative to other AdSense publishers. The scorecard is organized into three categories: revenue optimization, site health and Google+ (because everything Google does needs to have a bit of Google+ built-in). For each of these, Google assigns a rating between one and five and suggests improvements for increasing traffic and revenue.

As Google notes, the company won’t take any action and punish a site that has a low score in any of these three areas. “This is an informational tool only to give you greater insights into how your site is performing,” AdSense product manager Nick Radicevic notes in today’s announcement.

Still, AdSense users will likely want to look into Google’s recommendations, given that the company probably has a pretty good idea what kind of changes could help a site improve its traffic and revenue.

AdSense, Google says, will calculate these scores daily, but it may take a few days before the score reflects any changes you make on your site.

At its heart, Google still remains an advertising company, and while tools like this are obviously meant to help site owners make more money through AdSense, they won’t exactly hurt Google’s bottom line, either.

AdSense, it’s worth noting, turned 10 earlier this week and Google says about 2 million publishers currently use the service. Last year, the company says, it paid out over $7 billion to publishers that use AdSense on their sites.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Vdio, the video streaming service which launched into public beta this April as a complement to Rdio’s subscription music service, is today becoming available to all. Earlier, the service was available for preview in the U.S. and U.K., but only to those who were already paying Rdio Premium or Unlimited customers.

Today, however, anyone can sign up for the Vdio TV and movie streaming service (which is still only available in the U.S. and U.K.), even if they don’t use Rdio.

The video streaming service was originally part of Rdio founder’s Janus Friis’s vision, Rdio and Vdio (now outgoing) CEO Drew Larner explained to TechCrunch earlier this year. But it had taken some time for the company to secure the content deals that would allow it to compete in the competitive video streaming market more effectively – an area which is dominated by the likes of Netflix, Hulu, and now Amazon, among others.

Vdio includes content from  Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, MGM, Sony, CBS, ABC, Disney and more, with a focus on offering new releases which users can either rent or purchase, in addition to other classics. After purchasing the content, users can then stream the movie or show on the web or the companion iPad application, which also supports AirPlay for streaming to Apple TV.

In addition, the service integrates with Facebook, allowing users to sign-up with their Facebook credentials, as well as see which of their Facebook and Twitter friends are using the service and what they’re watching. (Netflix has also recently added Facebook integration for a similar purpose).

With today’s public launch, users can rent or purchase videos immediately after sign-up, but the company has said that it plans to offer a subscription model in the future.

Vdio will eventually expand to the two dozen or so markets where Rdio operates, with the next one planned being Canada.

Though the app itself is well-designed and easy enough to use, the question now is how many subscription-based services (assuming Vdio goes that route, as they’ve said) can one tolerate paying for? Already Netflix and Amazon are battling for users by targeting families, while Hulu is striking deals and building up an original content collection of its own. Assuming you wanted to stream content from all three, you would start seeing monthly bills which, when combined, begin nearing the cost of cable TV. Most aren’t ready to cut the cord entirely, which means the market for streaming video today is still a luxury of sorts. That may change in time, but the challenge for startups like Vdio is to survive until that’s the case.

We’ve reached out to the company for an update on the current size of its catalog, and more, and will update with details when they respond. 

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s no room at the digital inn for more mobile messaging apps, but that’s not stopping them crowding in. Hike, an Indian mobile messaging app that’s only been around six months but has amassed more than five million registered users in that time, is doubling down on its home market while expanding its accessibility further afield too.

Version 2.2 of the hike app adds support for four new languages — Spanish, French, Russian, and Portuguese — building out the previously supported two: English and German. The company said it plans to aggressively expand its language support each month as it chases after scale. And, evidently, as it chases competitors such as Japan’s Line which is also expanding into global markets such as Europe and LatAm.

“We’re targeting those languages which we’ve seen the most demand for,” says the company. “With these languages, and English and German already supported, we’ll be supporting approximately more than 85% of the world’s mobile population. In addition to this, we’ll also be adding support for four new languages every month.”

Interestingly, hike does not yet support any Indian languages owing to the linguistic landscape being so diverse, with more than 15 major languages spoken across the region. It does plan to start tackling this though, with Hindu support likely coming next to cover off a significant chunk of the population. It also intends to build native Indian language support and keyboards for all major languages into its app so it doesn’t have to depend on the OS/device (OS fragmentation is another big issue in the region).

“We’ll probably be launching Hindi support next (which’d cover a significant portion of the Indian population), as well as some other top languages. You can expect much deeper local language support in the coming months,” it says.

As well as extending its global reach by bolstering language support, the new version of the hike app adds a feature hike is hoping will give it serious uplift in its home market. Offline messages is an SMS conversation tech the company told TechCrunch about back in May. The feature allows users in India to keep in touch, regardless of whether the person they are sending a message to has 3G data enabled or not because messages are converted to SMS for delivery if there’s no viable data connection.

Other new features in v2.2 of hike’s app include, somewhat inevitably, sticker packs — showing how hike is following in the footsteps of messaging competitors such as Line and Viber by sharpening its entertainment credentials. As Line has, hike has launched its own brand characters in sticker form, along with various other types of sharable imagery such as “expressions, rage faces, and some localised stickers targeted specifically at the Indian market”.

Click to view slideshow.

“It’s been around 15 hours since we launched, and we’re seeing the usage of stickers increase every hour. We’ll easily hit more than one million stickers shared on Day 1,” it says. “We expect it to grow significantly, both organically and through some innovative marketing efforts that we’ve lined up to take them mass market in India.”

For now hike’s stickers are free but it intends to launch paid packs to monetise the feature in future — as Line has successfully been doing. “We do expect stickers to become a significant revenue stream going forward,” it says, but adds that its focus is not yet on revenue.

For the moment, hike’s focus is on building out features to help it grow, since occupying such a competitive space as messaging absolutely necessities maintaining momentum — or the risk is to fall by the wayside as rivals streak ahead.

Other new features introduced in v2.2 of hike include a mode called Last Seen, which allows users to share with chosen friends when they were last online. Hike also says it has improved the operation of a Walkie-Talkie feature — which it notes offers an accessible messaging option to Indian users who can’t use an English keyboard — to make that easier to use.

“After this update, we plan to add a couple of really good features geared mostly towards growth and in-app engagement. We’ve observed that personalized content drives conversations, and we’ll leverage that in a very clever way soon to drive conversations on hike. We also plan to ride existing social networks and bring groups of friends on hike,” it adds.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Intercom, a startup promising to help online businesses communicate with their customers in a more personalized way, has raised a $6 million Series A.

I wrote about the company last month when Facebook’s Paul Adams joined it as its new head of product design. At the time, Adams told me that Intercom’s work matches his own belief that businesses’ interactions with customers have to become more personal and relationship-based.

CEO Eoghan McCabe offered a similar vision this week. “Loyalty is magic,” he argued, recalling that the personal service he received at a friend’s chain of coffee shops meant that he’d walk past competing shops and invite friends to this one.

“It became kind of clear to me that on the web, you don’t really have those relationships,” he said, aside from “a few little outliers like Zappos who have invested heavily in great service.”

In order to enable those kinds of relationships, McCabe said Intercom has a couple of key features. For one thing, he said that businesses usually have to “stitch together” products to run an online help desk, email marketing, customer relationship management, and marketing automation. That’s a flawed approach, because they’re all trying to accomplish the same broad goal — “to provide simple, human service.” So Intercom brings all of that functionality together in one place.

Plus, McCabe said that by adding just a few lines of JavaScript to their site, businesses get a natural way to interact with their customers, not just by sending them marketing emails (which often come in at inconvenient times and are ignored), but also at the moment of greatest relevance — “when they’re inside your product.”

That all sounds appealing, but are businesses really going to become more personal and less spammy just because they have better tools?

“The thing is, no business inherently wants to be spammy,” McCabe said. “It’s shit for business. Even assholes know it’s a dumb thing to do.”

The problem, he said, is that there’s “so much friction in the process that you can’t afford to be very targeted and personal.” Eliminate that friction and businesses can do a better job at this stuff. That’s also why McCabe said most of the new funding will go towards improving the product, while also hiring more people to expand Intercom’s own service team.

The Series A comes from The Social+Capital Partnership, the firm founded by former Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya, with participation from Freestyle Capital and David Sacks, founder and CEO of Yammer. Intercom previously raised $1 million from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, 500 Startups, and others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook’s June 20 new product announcement is gathering a lot of curiosity by the technology business world. We are all in anticipation over what Facebook will release and how we think it will affect the lives of Facebook users, which now account for 1 in 7 people across the planet. Early indicators based on code released by Facebook point to some form of an RSS tool.

From a user functionality point of view, a feature with RSS feed could be a new channel to find information, or track trending topics within Facebook. Similar to how Reddit has built a very successful aggregator of information through user submitted and promoted content, Facebook could potentially optimize its News Feed to include trending topics amongst Facebook users. Recent interface changes would also support this theory. For example, Facebook has added nested comments making it easier to for users to have conversations based on comments as is popular in Reddit.

Other changes within the Facebook interface seem to point in the direction that Facebook is working on a much larger goal. It would appear that Facebook has their sights set on becoming a player in the search marketing business. It started with the introduction of the Open Graph, as Facebook opened their walled garden to include objects that exist outside of the Facebook network. Then they rolled out Graph Search, which makes it much easier to search socially for things like “songs my friends like” or “restaurants my friends like.” We’ve also recently seen the addition of interactive hashtags, making it possible to search for trends and other popular topics.

From a business standpoint, it begs the question: Who should be worried about these changes? Google and Twitter have the most to lose should Facebook successfully enter the search game. In the short term, Twitter has the most at risk. Hashtags in Facebook are a clone of Twitter’s most popular feature and Facebook already has the larger network of users. If Facebook users quickly adopt hashtags, it could have an immediate impact on those Twitter users who use the service primarily to track trends.

In the long term, Google will need to keep an eye on Facebook as advertisers look for digital advertising options. Today, Google still dominates the direct response market, especially in key categories like retail and travel based on implied behavior from keyword intentions. For example, someone who uses the “Samsung Galaxy” is most likely looking to either buy the latest Samsung Galaxy phone or they are looking to research the product. Facebook’s Open Graph Search has the potential to be more accurate than keyword intention. Instead of searching just for a keyword, consumers can tap their social network for purchasing advice via searches like “what smartphones do my friends use” or “where is the best site to buy a smart phone?” Google+ already shows that Google is playing the defensive as they try to build up a social network to supplement keyword data with social demographics.

At the end of the day, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all run on the same advertising business model. The company that will succeed will be the one who can deliver the best relevance between consumer and advertiser. If Facebook can put together a search engine that enables a more natural way to find information via searchable web behavior based on Open Graph data, it will attract the big advertising budgets that currently flow primarily to Google. 

Joe McCormack has more than a decade of digital marketing experience and currently serves as the CEO of Adotomi, a Facebook PMD. Joe sits on the board of directors at multiple technology companies and is a long-time expert on the advertising technology industry. Adotomi is a Social Advertising Technology company which works with some of the biggest brands, developers and agencies in the world including SodaStream, OMD, Konami, Playtika, and Wix.

Main image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

If you thought the “ambient location” craze has passed, prepare to be surprised. A company called SocialRadar is announcing today that it has raised $12.75 million in Series A funding from NEA, Grotech Ventures, and others including Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, Dave Morin and Kevin Colleran for a mobile, location-based people discovery app arriving first on the iPhone.

What’s notable about the app, besides the fact that it’s arriving at a time when many have written off “people finders” as passé, is that the company’s founder and CEO is Michael Chasen, the former co-founder and CEO of Blackboard, who stepped down from his position at the company in late 2012, following its $1.64 billion exit to Providence Equity Partners in mid-2011.

Blackboard may not be the most beloved learning-management system, but it did establish itself as a leader in the space, which new edtech startups today hope to disrupt. And now, Chasen believes he can push SocialRadar to the top of the “people discovery” heap as well.

“One of the interesting things about Blackboard is that even though we were an enterprise software company, we really considered ourselves to be closer to the consumer,” Chasen explains. “I spent all my time on college campuses dealing with students and faculty to help put courses online.” While there, he noticed several interesting trends. Though only 56 percent of U.S. users have online profiles, on college campuses, it’s almost 95 percent. Smartphone penetration is around 60 percent in the U.S., but on college campuses, it’s over 90 percent, he says.

Not only are the students more likely to carry these devices, they also use them in different ways. “They’re openly using their smartphones as location beacons and sharing their location with other people, as well as sharing their social information,” he says.

But Chasen thought it was strange that although this is now the default behavior (at least within a particular demographic), there isn’t a simple way to just walk into a room, launch an app and find out who’s there and how you’re connected to them.

Of course, that’s not entirely true.

A number of startups including Highlight, Banjo, Sonar, and more have attacked the location-based, people discovery space with gusto over the past couple of years, with the movement really coming to a head at the annual SXSW event in Austin in 2012. Since then, however, many of the apps have struggled to find mainstream adoption. Some, like Glancee and Glassmap have sold. Others, like Kismet, have moved into new product categories. Intro pivoted.

Chasen insists that SocialRadar is different from that lot, though.

“I get that those applications use both location and sharing of information,” he says. One of his favorites in the group is Highlight, which he explains runs in the background and, when you’re near someone it thinks you’re interested in, it will give you an alert. “It is certainly a great app for meeting new people nearby that the Highlight algorithm thinks that you should meet, but it doesn’t give you the power to take out your phone when you walk into a room and see who’s around you,” says Chasen.

Meanwhile, an app like Sonar – which does in fact tell you which of your friends are near you (and how close by) — Chasen describes as just a “straight list of people,” accompanied by others who are friends of friends.

SocialRadar will instead focus on not just who’s nearby, but how you know them. For example, it would show you people who you work with, people you went to college with, and so on, not just names.

But the other big differentiator between SocialRadar and the other apps, which often mine publicly available check-in data to find those nearby connections or have disregarded real privacy concerns, is that SocialRadar is meant to offer users more control. Users can choose to share their location with all others, with friends only, or stay anonymous.

Users can also control how the app is run, choosing whether or not it’s background-enabled. That’s something that addresses one of the major pain points for end users of other location-based people finders like Highlight, which was said to have negative impacts on battery drain.

And SocialRadar will allow for custom alerts, letting you tell it when to bother you with notifications and which people or groups you’re interested in tracking. (E.g. when my best friend is nearby, when a fellow frat brother is in town, when my co-workers are at this event, etc.)

These differences, Chasen claims, will allow SocialRadar to succeed where others have stagnated. “There were hundreds of social networks before Facebook came out,” he says. “A lot of these other apps in the space I consider to be version one, toe-in-the-water. I wouldn’t even necessarily even put them in the same circle of competitors.”

Them’s fighting words.

SocialRadar, now a 10-person team based in Washington, D.C., is announcing its funding today, but the company was only formally founded eight weeks ago. However, the technology has been in development for much longer, Chasen says.

Still, it’s very early days. “We got office space seven or eight weeks ago, and I was literally building chairs in my office three weeks ago,” he says with a laugh. (Side note: at Blackboard, Chasen says they had so many people, he had a division of the company that built office furniture. How things have changed for him now.)

The iPhone version of SocialRadar will arrive in beta in a couple of weeks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Long-time Android fans (fandroids?) will probably be familiar with Dolphin, the third-party browser that first made a name for itself during the ways when the stock Android browser left much to be desired. It’s been making some considerable strides over the past year whether you noticed or not, and today the team at MoboTap have pushed out yet another substantial update into the Google Play store.

The new build plays home to a handful of significant UI tweaks — users now have one swipe access to gesture and voice commands, and can drill down their search results to focus solely on results from sites like Amazon, eBay, and YouTube. The biggest addition to the mix though? A HTML5 web app repository that gets featured prominently when you first fire up the browser. It may not seem like a huge leap for the company considering just how strongly it’s tried to play up its speedy HTML5 rendering over the past year, but Mobotap hopes that providing quick access to rich web apps will change how people interact with their phone’s browser.

“We want Dolphin to be people’s second homescreen,” MoboTap corporate strategy head Edith Yeung told me. “You don’t actually need to run all these native apps, you just run things in the browser.”

MoboTap says they’ve got “over 200” web apps indexed in their storefront, all of which can be added to the browser’s speed dial screen and slotted into different folders for quick access. Once you’ve got the speed dial loaded up with links it bears a passing resemblance to your typical Android homescreen, but their vision of a rich smartphone experience being contained within a browser hasn’t been achieved just yet. Yeung concedes that it’s very much a work in progress though, and that the company is working to make this particular sea change as smooth as possible — they’ve made their share of drastic changes in the past, much to the chagrin of unsuspecting users.

So what’s next in MoboTap’s push to proliferate HTML5? So far we’ve seen a handful of gutsy companies make a case for the web as a platform — Google is still doggedly pushing the concept with ChromeOS and some frankly impressive hardware, while Mozilla’s Firefox OS is being loaded onto entry-level smartphones in anticipation of an impending launch this summer. That sort of hardware-inclusive approach is one hasn’t been on the table thanks to MoboTap’s size, but as far as they’re concerned branching into hardware is problematic unless you’re tremendously well-connected.

“We have a very good relationship with the people at Firefox, but we have a very different theory,” Yeung added. “Firefox likes to have complete control, which is great, but from our experience working with the OEM, it’ll be different for any OEM to commit to any significant volume of phones.” Instead, the company has been spending its time and resources trying to ink potentially fruitful pre-install deals with carriers (and especially big players in southeast Asia) — MoboTap linked up with KDDI to pre-load the browser on a slew of Japanese Android phones, and it quietly locked up a similar deal with China Telecom back in January. So far, the strategy seems to be working — MoboTap confirmed that Dolphin has already been installed on over 80 million devices across the globe, though the company wouldn’t break down how many downloads came from users who found the app on their own and installs stemming from pre-install partnerships.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Cannes Lions mega advertising event is in full swing today in the south of France and while Twitter is marking its official presence there with a big sign at the entrance to the main venue (pictured here), and a big data keynote (led by Twitter’s new chief media scientist Deb Roy) to go along with it, it’s also continuing to ink deals. The latest is with Viacom, which joins ESPN, Fox and Discovery among the broadcasters who will link up ads on Twitter’s platform to ads they’re running alongside their programs.

The idea behind Twitter’s ad targeting platform Amplify, first launched in May, is to create ever more, and smarter, links between the two screens to better capture the ever-fickle consumer. Video will be a key feature of Amplify, and is another reminder of why other social media platforms like Facebook are also making video moves (with its hot photo property Instagram expected to add video services very soon).

Twitter’s first Viacom deal is picking an easy target: the two will create social video campaigns that will run on Twitter during the popular MTV Video Music Awards on August 25. Last year’s Video Music Awards, Twitter says, was the most popular news event on its platform last year, with 52 million votes cast via Tweets for the “Most Sharable Video” and the show itself generating 14.7 million Tweets. The biggest peak of the night went to the moment cheesy manufactured pop band One Direction won Best Pop Video with 98,307 Tweets per minute, Viacom notes. That says quite a lot about how Twitter pitches itself as mainstream, and also about how it gets used.

The aim will be, in future, for at least some of those tweets — if not all — to get linked up in two ways. One will be in terms of analytics to help give advertisers and TV companies an idea of what their viewers are interested in. The other will be to figure out when and where they are most likely to see an ad, based on their interactions on Twitter.

“Our technology has automated ad detection. We know where and when each national commercial airs,” Roy noted today during his Cannes Lions presentation. “It’s no accident that Twitter [has] emerged as the prime platform for social soundtrack. It’s live [and] goes hand in hand with TV,” he added later.

Roy, an associate professor at MIT’s Media Lab, came to Twitter via the company’s acquisition of BlueFin Labs, where he was the co-founder, and he made liberal use of his big data chops, with visuals of what he called the “social soundtrack” for different locations that visualized the “noise” coming from them across different times of day.

This is more to try to indicate that this works than to give any huge insight. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for example, the highlighted sections indicate times when people are tweeting less. Those coincide with calls to prayer, he noted:

Going down the line, future Viacom campaigns will also involve social video — likely appearing the form of Twitter cards — which will take place around events on VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon, COMEDY CENTRAL, TV Land and Spike and more.

“The VMAs virtually pioneered the social TV moment, triggering a demand among marketers to tap into the fan conversations and trending topics that Viacom networks create every day,” Jeff Lucas, Head of Sales, Music and Entertainment, Viacom Media Networks, said in a statement. “Through this partnership, we’re allowing marketers to insert their brands seamlessly into the torrent of fan activity and engagement around our networks on Twitter.”

“As events happen in life, we continue to see Twitter as the place people share those moments, especially when those events happen on TV,” Adam Bain, President of Global Revenue at Twitter, added also in the news release.

Image: Twitter

Article courtesy of TechCrunch