This is awesome. At 9:30 AM ET, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted what’s bound to be a historical status update to his Facebook Timeline. The post simply reads: “Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. — with Chris Cox and 4 others.” You can read the whole story right here from the engineer who rigged up the auto-post: “How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button”

Since the CEO was busy actually ringing the bell from Hacker Square at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Facebook figured it would post for him. The post went live just as Zuckerberg rang the NASDAQ Opening Bell. In the future, don’t be surprised when more physical objects get hooked into Facebook.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, Facebook app discovery too heavily favors the loudest apps with the most users, so Facebook today announces it will soon launch the App Center, a single, personalized hub for discovering the highest quality Facebook-integrated games and utilities from across the web and mobile. And for the first time, Facebook is beta testing the option for developers to sell pre-paid web and HTML5 apps. You’ll be able to access App Center via the web or mobile, and you can send apps you discover on a the web to your littler devices.

App Center could be a huge boon to app growth on Facebook, especially for those that are beloved but not inherently viral.   With any luck, App Center will usher in an age where your news feed is filled with apps you actually want use, not just the spammiest ones or those with the biggest marketing budgets.

Unlike the unpersonalized app directory Facebook shut down a year ago, App Center won’t list every available app, just the ones with the highest customer ratings, engagement, session length, and voluntary sharing. App Center dynamically shows you different apps depending on your habits. If you play games, that’s what you’ll see. If you think those are a waste of time and only use utility apps like BranchOut or Open Graph apps like Foodspotting, those will be what appear.

Here’s a few more details on the App Center:

• Facebook is finalizing the App Center’s design. However, it looks like the homepage will show apps recommended based on those you already uses; apps frequently used by friends; lists of top, trending, and highest grossing apps, big “app of the week” style features, and the ability to browse by app category.
• Unlike the Apple App Store and other marketplaces, Facebook’s App Center won’t have objective rankings. Instead, each user will see a different set of apps, so it won’t have the same “king-maker” potential. This should lead developers to focus on general quality rather than install count or other specific metrics.
• The signals the cause certain apps to appear more or less frequently in App Center to any particular user include a customer ratings, session length, return visits, frequency of user shares from the app, similarity to apps you already use, usage by friends, and spam reports as well as overall user counts.
• App Center listings will replace the auto-generate App Pages that litter Facebook now. Developers will need to submit assets to populate their listing, which is what users will land on when they find an app through search or the App Center. Apps that following the listing guidelines and that are submitted before May 18th will receive priority for appearance when the App Center eventually launches.

• Developers will gain a new category of Insights metrics measuring the quality of their apps. They can monitor these to see how changes they make impact the enjoyment and engagement of their users.

• Facebook is not trying to compete with iOS and Android, but rather helps Facebook-connected apps on those platforms grow. Native mobile app listings in App Center will lead to the Apple App Store and Google Play marketplaces.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There are a number of different schools of thought about how useful Foursquare-like check-ins really are. Forecast, especially, is taking a very different approach from most of Foursquare’s competitors by emphasizing where you are going to be later in the day over just checking in at a location when you arrive. Now, with the latest version of its iPhone app (an update for the Android app is coming soon), the company is taking this concept a bit further. Instead of just telling people where you will be, the app will also automatically check you in when you arrive at a location (assuming you opt in for this service) and let your friends know that you have arrived.

So instead of having to remember to check in when you arrive somewhere – which is also the most awkward time to fiddle around with your phone – Forecast will now do this for you. You can use the app as a stand-alone product or connect it to Facebook and Foursquare to reach a wider group of your friends.

As the app already knows where you are going, Forecast can take a more conservative approach to checking where you are as you go through your day. Instead of constantly checking where you are and trying to check you in to places as you walk around, the app just checks your location periodically and once it notices that you have arrived at your forecasted location, it will just check you in. Given how unreliable location services can be in dense urban environments, this approach also helps to ensure that you are indeed checking in to the right place.

Currently, about 76% of Forecast check in when they use the app. With the auto check-in feature, the company expects that number to get close to 100%.

This, as the company’s CEO and co-founder Rene Pinnell told me earlier this week, the app’s concept of “future tense check-ins” opens up a range of possibilities for the company in the long run. Once you have checked in somewhere, after all, chances are that you won’t change your plans anymore. When you tell the app where you will be in the future, though, those plans are still malleable and the right offer from the right advertiser, for example, still has the potential to make you go somewhere else instead.

Pinnell also told me that quite a few Forecast users look at the app as a calendaring service. This is another avenue for future development that the company wants to explore soon.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Exclusive: GoldSpot Media has just unveiled its new “bandwidth-based ads”, a licensable technology that lets advertisers deliver a single mobile ad unit that appears as a simple rotating banner to viewers on 3G or mobile data, but as an auto-playing partial screen overlay video to viewers on wi-fi. Debuted on a new Zyrtec pharmaceutical campaign, you can compare the formats for yourself by turning wi-fi on or off.

GoldSpot’s tech could drastically increase the number of video impression an advertiser gets per dollar. This translates into improved campaign effectiveness and ROI, while preventing a viewer’s limited mobile data plan from being devoured by ads. Bandwidth-based ads will accelerate the metamorphosis of commercials into content by allowing interactive rich-media or even games to be served as mobile ads.

Here’s how mobile video ads often work today.

Regardless of their bandwidth, viewers see a banner that they have to tap before they see the promo video. Few people tap, and the video is rarely seen. GoldSpot’s CEO Srini Dharmaji tells me that if the ad had a $5 CPM, and a budget of $100,000, an advertiser would get 20 million impressions. If the ad had a high click through rate of 0.1%, just 20,000 people would see the video at a cost of $5 per view to the advertisers. Basically advertisers are throwing their money away. Alternatively, advertisers serve an auto-play video to everyone, and those on slow connections get their data plan drained and usually navigate away before the video even finishes loading

Let’s run those numbers again with GoldSpot’s bandwidth video ad tech. Dharmaji says 60-65% of users consume content on wi-fi, and about 30-35% do so on 3G or mobile data. If the combined cost of GoldSpot’s platform and the ad inventory have a $20 CPM, on a $100,000 budget the advertiser would get 5 million impressions from wi-fi users alone.

Even if only 50% of viewers are detected to be on wi-fi and see the auto-play video in a partial screen overlay, the advertiser gets 2.5 million video impressions. That’s 4 cents per view instead of $5. Now do you see why this is a big deal?

Even if all those impressions aren’t full-length, full-screen views, the 2.5 million GoldSpot-powered ad views are going to have a much bigger impact than 20,000 dedicated views. Yes, some viewers could be annoyed by seeing more auto-play video ads, but at least they won’t have to pay for them. GoldSpot is now licensing the bandwidth-based technology to advertisers, agencies, and publishers. It works across ad networks, and provides consolidated performance reporting. It charges a CPM, and clients can use its drag-and-drop creation platform to format their ads.

Started in 2007, the Sunnyvale, CA GoldSpot Media has raised roughly $17 million between its seed, A, and B rounds, and now has more than 75 employees. It has over 50 individual and agency clients including the New York Times, Bloomberg, Chevy, and General Mills. It also provides opt-in device and geo-location ad optimization where viewers can select to provide data to see more relevant ads. Dharmaji calls GoldSpot a “hardcore technology company” with over 20 patents, but says those are for self-defense.

GoldSpot’s technology is a triple-win since in addition to making it money and getting advertisers a better ROI, it doesn’t suck up a user’s limited mobile data plan downloading videos if they’re not on wi-fi and don’t want to see them. Plus, since users on wi-fi are more likely to be relaxed rather than on the move, there’s a better chance that impressions lead to purchases or viewers internalizing an ad’s message.

As we shift to the post-PC era, delivering rich-media ads to tablets where they look great will become even more important. Dharmaji concludes “We give advertisers the power to build much more engaging ads. They have to think about how to increase ROI without pissing off the mobile consumer.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Many of you may remember that I was straight-up infatuated with Samsung’s MV800 point-and-shoot. And why wouldn’t I be? It’s absolutely the best point-and-shoot if your favorite subject to shoot happens to be yourself. While Samsung’s latest camera isn’t quite as narcissistic, the new DV300F announced today still has a pretty awesome trick up its sleeve.

This is one of Samsung’s Dual-View offerings, meaning it sports a 1.5-inch screen up front to accompany the usual 3-inch LCD display (which doubles as a viewfinder.) What sets the DV300F apart, however, is its WiFi capabilities. You’ll be able to share pics and clips directly to Facebook, Picasa, YouTube, etc.

If you’re not in the mood to go public right away, you’ll also be able to upload the entirety of your SD card to your PC with the Auto PC Backup tool. The 16-megapixel camera is capable of 5x optical zoom and comes equipped with a 25mm wide-angle lens. You’ll also find the expected microSD slot present.

Color flavors include black, silver, navy and red and each can be had for $199. Shipping is expected to begin in March.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For people who want to syndicate published work to Facebook, the company has for years offered a Notes application that included a feature to automatically import RSS feeds from other sites. But now the company is telling users that it is removing the auto-posting feature on November 22nd, and directing them to instead to “post links on your Wall.”

Third-party syndication app providers, like NetworkedBlogs, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck remain as options for syndicating content automatically to Facebook. However, the evidence suggests that auto-posting results in significantly lower engagement. This change is likely an effort by Facebook to get users and Page owners customizing the text and images around links to best fit the Facebook audience.

Previously, Facebook had offered a simple way to sync blogs through the Notes settings. Users clicked the “Applications” menu, chose “Notes,” and under “Notes Settings,” clicked on “Import a blog,” and typed in the URL. Then feeds of blog posts or Tweets or other information contained in the RSS feed was automatically republished to Facebook.

There aren’t any other known changes to the Notes app, and users can still write individual notes.

[Thanks to Eti Suruzon for the tip.]

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Back in late 2009, then-free music identifying service Shazam made a rather drastic change to their business model: they went freemium. Everybody got 5 free song identifications per month… but after that, they’d have to cough up for premium app, “Shazam Encore”.

That worked well enough for a while — then the competition rolled in, and gave away what Shazam was trying to charge for. Shazam responded with an experiment: they’d remove the tagging limits in their app, with a single “sponsor” covering their costs in exchange for ad placement — but only for Android, and only until the end of the year. Seems that worked well enough, as Shazam has just removed the tagging limits in their iOS and Android apps indefinitely.

Shazam’s launch partner in all of this is Capital One, so don’t be surprised if a B-list celebrity pops up to ask “What’s in your wallet?” every time you stumble out of the bar bathroom and try to ID the tail-end of that song that has been stuck in your head for four days. (Oddly, eBay was supposed to be sponsoring the Android side of things until 2012. What happened there?)

Both the iOS and Android apps should have their monthly limitations removed as of this morning.

As for the folks who already purchased the premium app: you’ll continue to get unlimited tagging, won’t be subjected to ads, have access to some fancy features like the auto-synced LyricPlay feature, and you get the warm, fuzzy (but nowadays rare) feeling that comes from actually, you know, paying for something.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Launching in beta today in California is the YC-funded Leaky. Like a Hipmunk for car insurance, Leaky’s premise is simple enough; visit the site and you’ll be prompted to fill out an online questionnaire covering all sorts of vehicle-related questions like make, model and mileage of your car as well as demographic information like education level and employer. When you complete the quiz, Leaky immediately serves up a selection of car insurance quotes from five of the top insurance carriers as well as others, including Geico, Esurance and Allstate.

While individual car insurance providers already have the “fill out questionnaire” -> “get quote” functionality on their individual sites, no one in the US is aggregating realtime quotes from multiple providers like Leaky is. And unlike UK counterparts Moneysupermarket.com and Confused.com, where regulations are relatively uniform, Leaky has the added challenge of insurance restrictions being different for each individual insurance companies across all 50 states.

“Insurance companies each have a different perspective how much money you’re going to cost the company,” co-founder Darren Nix tells me “Depending on a customer’s claims history different companies have different philosophies on how to underwrite risk for different customers and each database has different pricing models.”

Basically this means that Leaky has to crawl the APIs for five or more insurance carriers, for the fields corresponding to the answers to 40 questions, across 50 states. “When we first started writing code in January we thought it would take a couple of months, then we realized it was a beast,” co-founder Jason Traff says.

Indeed, many in the insurance sector purport themselves to do exactly what Leaky actually does (which is hard) but instead incorporate some cop-out lead gen or spammy element. Traff explains that Progressive just estimates what your car insurance quote would be based on publicly available data. And services like Netquote.com, Carinsurance.com and Insurance.com have you fill out a questionnaire but do not result in online quotes, rather in a series of sales phone calls over the next couple of days. Sounds horrific.

Free for users, Leaky plans on monetizing by charging affiliate fees for every customer it brings to insurance companies. Nix and Traff tell me that they estimate they’ve saved the 700 people who’ve signed up an average of $313 a year. They estimate the size of the auto-insurance premium market to be $200 billion annually, $20 billion of which results from carrier switching.

So if it’s actually saving people money and has the potential for profit, why the name Leaky? Nix says, “Well most people find insurance really boring and we wanted a domain name to make people think ‘What the hell? how’s that related to insurance?’ And as it turns out, it’s working because we are having outstanding recall of our domain name!” The founders expect to have expand to all insurance companies across all states in the next 60 days.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook today released the results of a study it conducted on what types of posts by the Facebook Pages of journalists performed the best. Among the highlights: Incorporating personal analysis in posts increased referral clicks by 20%, and including a thumbnail image when posting a link boosted Likes by 65% and comments by 50%.

While these findings are for Pages of journalists, the best practices they illuminate can be useful for the admins of any type of Page.

There is potential for bias in these findings results as Facebook did not describe the study’s methodology.

Turn Off Your Auto-Publisher

The most important finding is that posts saw 20% more referral clicks when personal analysis was added to a post’s description, opposed to just publishing a headline, blurb, and thumbnail.

The ability to include a longe description of what’s behind a link is one of the fundamental differences between Facebook and Twitter. While journalists and other content publishers may not prefer spending the extra time crafting Facebook posts, the benefits in traffic driven that this study shows should convince them the effort is worth it.

Pages that automatically cross-post Twitter updates or that auto-post when an article is published to their website should consider switching to manual publishing. Having a human writing copy specifically to accompany a Facebook post makes the news feed story seem more organic and personal, and therefore more compelling and clickable.

Photos Draw Feedback

When a link is pasted into Facebook’s publisher, it’s formatted into a rich feed story that includes a thumbnail image when possible. Facebook’s study shows that posts that display a thumbnail image receive 65% more Likes and 50% more.

It’s believed that by getting more feedback on its posts, Pages improve their EdgeRank — the algorithm that determines how prominent a post is in a user’s news feed. By courting feedback, Pages can increase the number of users that see their posts past the somewhat disheartening average of 7.49 news feed post impressions per day per 100 fans.

Therefore, Page admins shouldn’t manually strip out the thumbnail unless absolutely necessary. If the publisher can’t find an image behind the link to thumbnail, admins should consider adding an image to the web page, or marking up their site with Facebook’s Open Graph tags such that a site logo is pulled in as the thumbnail.

Post Length and Timing

For post by journalists, Facebook found that 4-line posts received 30% more feedback than average and 5-line posts received 60% more. This means that Pages looking to court feedback should generally publish long posts, though these may have lower click through rates because some users will skim past a dense block of text.

Engagement with one-line posts, on the other hand, fluctuated greatly but displayed the highest maximum feedback of any length, with some receiving 15 times the average. Therefore, when appropriate for the content, one-line posts can be the most engaging, likely because they take so little work on the reader’s part to consume.

In terms of timing, Facebook’s study showed that posts on Thursday through Sunday had higher engagement rates. Posts on Saturday received 85% more clicks than average, and those published on Wednesday had 37% more.

However, these figures may be less generalizable because of the cultural norm of reading news on weekends. Buddy Media’s report on engagement by day showed significant fluctuation by industry, so Pages outside of journalism will need to track their analytics to determine the best days to post. Facebook’s reports of engagement spikes at 7am and 5pm match Buddy Media’s data.

Every Page’s audience is different, so the best way for any Page to determine how to post more effectively is to follow their Page Insights. Pages can thereby modify their strategy based on trends in performance for different content, tone, length, and timing. Still, the findings of Facebook’s study should help point admins in the right direction.

For more strategies on how to get the most clicks, Likes, and comments out of your Page’s posts, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising on Facebook.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

It seems like just yesterday that I was writing about Chrome 11′s awesome new ability to let you speak to the browser by way of HTML5. In fact, it was just yesterday. But that hasn’t stopped a team from coming up with a Chrome extension to get it to work in search boxes across the web.

Speechify is an extension that Dugley Labs churned out in record speed yesterday. With it, many of the search boxes you visit on the web gain the little microphone icon that when clicked, allows you to speak your search. It works on Google, Bing, YouTube, Hulu — a ton of sites. And it works well.

Saying “TechCrunch” on Google returns results for TechCrunch. Saying “MG Siegler” on Bing returns results for me. Saying “Friday video” on YouTube returns that damn song.

It’s great — but also a little buggy. For example, the microphone shows up on Quora, but it doesn’t actually work (I think their auto drop-down may be to blame). And the microphone sometimes appears in odd places, like the title box in WordPress — but it still works!

The best implementation has to be Google with Instant turned on, because it allows you to search without hitting the keyboard at all.

Of course, this type of technology is old hat in the mobile space — meaning it’s a couple years old. But it’s still nifty to see on the web without any plug-in needed. I suspect we’ll see a lot more web apps and extensions that take advantage of this. In fact, AreYouWatchingThis has already implemented it on their site, icantfindthegame.com.

Currently, the plugin requires Chrome 11 beta (or dev), but the feature should be moving to the stable builds soon as well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch