Atlas view tags can now be used to measure Facebook ads targeted to custom audiences, partner categories and lookalike audiences, the social network informed its largest advertisers this week.

Those targeting types are relatively new to Facebook and weren’t previously supported in the Atlas platform, which advertisers and agencies use to plan, manage, track and optimize their digital marketing. Facebook recently bought Atlas from Microsoft. Now, the tool will enable advertisers to track Facebook’s new ad types the same as any other. This gives advertisers better view-through measurement on their campaigns that take advantage of the social network’s latest capabilities.

Custom audiences allows advertisers to retarget consumers by email addresses, phone numbers or user IDs they already have from previous marketing or sales interactions. “Lookalike audiences” helps advertisers target users similar to those in their custom audience databases, using algorithms to identify audience segments with the same customer profiles. Partner categories are audience segments created by third-party data providers that U.S. advertisers can use for targeting via Power Editor or the API. These categories are informed with transactional data, survey information and other online or offline behaviors. Collectively, these represent tremendous new opportunities for advertisers to target Facebook users by first-party or third-party data.

The social network agreed to acquire Atlas from Microsoft in February. The deal closed at the end of April, and the Atlas team in Seattle is now officially part of Facebook. The company says it bought Atlas to improve measurement capabilities for advertising both on Facebook and across other digital platforms. Atlas says it is working to update its user interface to be more intuitive and effective, as well as create “unique differentiators under Facebook.”

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

A new report commissioned by research giant GfK claims that the growth of the high density cluster of technology companies in East London (dubbed Tech City by the UK government) is being “stunted” by a talent shortage and lack of access to capital. The ‘Tech Futures Report’ – commissioned by publishing company TechCityInsider and sponsored by accountant Grant Thornton, recruitment firm Vitamin T, City University London and Digital Shoreditch is based on 141 interviews of ‘tech’ company senior management. In fact, only less than half of these admitted to developing technology products and platforms. It’s simply the latest in a long line of reports that conflate consultants and digital advertising agencies with technology companies, leading to yet more confusion about the state of the cluster.

When quizzed by TechCrunch, the reports authors admitted that only 41% of those surveyed made apps, while 21% did social networking, 17% retailing/ecommerce, 12% publishing, 12% IT consulting and services, 8% data processing/management and 7% were in gaming – though it’s not clear whether than meant games or gambling. And of those 141, only 77% of respondents were CEO/Founders of the business they represented.

As a result of this over-sight, an important opportunity has been missed to find out more of the needs of real high-growth technology companies in the cluster, rather than normal growth advertising agencies.

But for what it’s worth we present the rest of the reports findings below. Make of them what you will.

Among the reports key findings:

• Nearly a half (44%) find a shortage of skilled workers is the biggest challenge they face
• Over three quarters (77%) say a lack of skilled workers is restricting their growth
• A third (33%) believe a lack of access to capital is hindering their business.
• In terms of the businesses represented, 30% had an annual turnover of <£200k, 34% £200,000-£999,000, 17% £1-£5m, 7% £5-£10m and 12% over £10m. 24% said their main location of business was London, 44% UK, 17% Europe 14% North America and 1% ROW.

The report says the 141 executives surveyed had “mixed feelings” about the the effectiveness of government support, with some liking it, others not. Not eactly ground breaking news then.

Clearly, despite the 'glass half empty' tone, the situtation is in flux. Ryan Garner, Research Director for GfK said: “Our research shows Tech City is at a tipping point, and hopefully this report will help it find its way in spearheading that economic growth.” Indeed, the reports authors could equally have spun the situation as a 'tech hiring boom'.

Unfortunately, the report struggles with some of the common terms of the technology world. The top skills most in demand are said to be “coders and developers” and something called “research and development” leading one to wonder if the reports authors could possibly be more vague. The others skills said to be in short supply (again, not news) are marketing and PR, business development, web design and user experience specialists. Someone is hiring. Hold the front page.

The report claims that staff retention remains a challenge, though is not clear on whether that is because it's a booming startup market generating more spin-out startups, or if people are leaving for big corporate jobs.

As for accessing capital, a third of those surveyed said their businesses are hindered by a lack of capital, whether sourced from investors or banks. Once again, because the report conflates technology businesses that might be fundraising with digital agencies that might just want a bank loan, the picture here is vague. Of course, it's common knowledge that most startups fail to raise external funding anyway.

If there is a gem of new information here it's in the finding – which has been largely anecdotal till now – that there is a growing gap for businesses requiring investment of £500,000 to £2 million. The “Series A gap”.

However, the report mistakenly thinks that all startups which can't raise a Series A in London will skip of to bag “the Silicon Valley dollar” when doing so is far from a simple move or likely.

TechCrunch is hereby placing a ban on all reports about London's Tech City from now on unless they actually talk to 100% tech companies with an actual product or platform. Not guys coming up with a new hip flash site for Coca Cola or selling tech support to banks.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Telefonica is today announcing a deal with Samsung that will see it make an even bigger move into the area of carrier billing. Samsung will integrate the carrier’s billing backend directly into its own mobile services, meaning that the Telefonica customers (it has 316 million worldwide) who use the Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps portals on Samsung smartphones will be able to buy apps, music, videos, books, games and more and charge them directly to their phone bills.

The agreement, which will use Telefonica’s BlueVia payment APIs, is a significant one for Telefonica. So far it has inked deals with app portal operators, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and RIM, and with billing providers like Bango; this effectively closes the loop for it by securing a deal with the world’s largest handset maker, although a recent deal to help the carrier finance the procurement and distribution of BlackBerry devices could point to Telefonica gearing up for a similar deal with that handset maker, too.

In addition to Bango, Telefonica also works with BOKU, where it led a $35 million investment last year. It’s not clear how this deal with Samsung will play out between these two rival billing providers. In the past Telefonica has been vague on the subject, saying that it will work one or the other depending on the situation.

Telefonica has been especially bullish on trying to come up with a way to get a piece of the action on apps and other content that is getting purchased on smartphones and tablets. Apple’s early move into the area with its very popular App Store (just this week marking its 50-billionth download) set a precedent for all but cutting carriers out of the picture, with Apple handling the payment on its own platform and then dividing up resulting revenues with the app publishers.

Mobile advertising alongside often-free apps is one other area where carriers and others have tried to play, although these revenues are still small in relation to those collected from downloads and in-app purchases.

But the promise of carrier billing, as we have noted before, is that it not only offers carriers a look in to the growing pot of money being made from smartphone content, but it also provides a route for publishers to better target consumers in parts of the world where smartphone usage is growing rapidly, but payment card penetration is not so much.

The carrier framework can be used not only for consumers who take monthly plans, but also for prepaid accounts, with each purchase deducted from there, as already happens with phone minutes, data bytes and SMS messages. This is an area where Spain’s Telefonica, which has more users in emerging markets in Latin America than it does in any single market in Europe, can hope to gain a foothold with its carrier billing offering, even if it has (so far) missed the boat in more developed markets.

Nevertheless, this deal will be implemented in phases, starting first with a rollout with Telefonica’s subsidiary in Germany “in the coming months.”

“We strongly believe that carrier billing has the potential to drive the monetisation of digital content,” Wayne Thorsen, vice president of Global Partnerships at Telefónica Digital, said in a statement. “Partnerships like this allow us to harness the power of the billing relationships we have with our customers to make it easier for them to consume content on their tablets and mobile devices.”

For Samsung, meanwhile, it gives the company the ability to promote its own content portals as easy to use — one way of driving more users there instead of to Google’s services. As Samsung tries to further differentiate itself from the other OEMs using Android, and Google itself, little things like this could help it along the way.

“Samsung is committed to ensuring that our customers have choice and convenience when purchasing content on our devices,” Lee Epting, VP of Media Solutions Centre Europe for Samsung Electronics Europe, said in a statement. “Our partnership with Telefónica Digital allows us to deliver yet another easy and convenient purchasing experience to our Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps customers.”

Telefonica and Samsung are not strangers to each other in the area of new services; they have co-invested in the latest round for semantic, real-time search startup Expect Labs.

Photo: Flickr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.

Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)

Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.

Teachers will now be able to search for and recommend learning content by category, grade level, and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators, for example. What’s more, every piece of content served within its curated portal is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate.

Google has already begun to recruit content partners, with NASA and PBS among those that have already signed on to make their content available to users when the store goes live this fall. Yerga said that the team plans to begin accepting content submissions from developers at some point this summer.

Today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space, but with its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging that dominance. To that point, the real key to Google’s new product is the fact that it enables administrators to distribute applications to their entire team. If a teacher wants to shoot content to a couple hundred Android devices, they simply have to type in their group’s name and voila, Google will push that sucker out to everyone on the list.

Another important perk for cash-strapped teachers is that the marketplace doesn’t require them to use credit cards to purchase content. Instead, educators have the option to buy apps and content in bulk and charge those purchases to their account. These are important features for educational users, removing a great deal of the friction around acquiring learning content.

Not only that, but, while schools and educators are eager to bring apps and other digital learning tools into their classrooms, it’s critical for them to be able to manage and to bring some oversight to the content distribution process. Plus, the Android Marketplace, er, Google Play, has had a long-standing malware problem, so that extra layer of teacher control can help get schools over the hump.

While the penetration of Apple’s mobile devices into education is significant, when it comes to other hardware, IT departments don’t want to deal with the hassle of networking iDevices. Plus, Apple products are expensive — and especially for bulk orders, schools will want to turn elsewhere.

Where Google can have a real advantage over Apple is in its ability to combine Google Play for Education with Google Appls for Ed. Small businesses have been adopting Google’s productivity software in droves, and the interest has started to grow among school boards who want to introduce tablets into their classrooms and use Google Apps as the standard.

Together these two products can work hand in hand in the classroom, with each becoming more powerful as a result. In turn this could help create the incentive or leverage that it needs to begin attracting new users.

The biggest takeaway: If it weren’t already abundantly clear, Google is no longer just a search company. The company has been exerting tremendous effort to achieve a unification among its products, not only in terms of design, but in the way its products interact with each other. That is best demonstrated by the fact that Google products now touch just about everyone. In a sense, Google is becoming a utility provider — for both consumers and developers — and, in turn, a data company.

While Apple has long been focused most of its attention on design over the years, Google’s focus on utility has allowed it to build a massive infrastructure, collecting data from across a broad range of software products at a nearly unprecedented scale. For me, there’s no better testament to the utility and wide application of Google’s infrastructure than Education.

Naturally, in juxtaposition with sexy new smartphones and mobile technology, streaming music services and re-imagined social networks, Google’s work in Education tends to end up in the backseat. But, for this reason, Google has quietly (and quickly) gained noticeable traction in Education, thanks to the adaptation of its utilities and gadgets, like Google Apps and Chromebooks, to the learning market.

For example, in February, Google announced in February that Chromebooks are now in over 2,000 schools across the U.S. For awhile now, Apple has grabbed most of the attention in the education space thanks to the rapid adoption of iPads among schools and teachers. Furthermore, when we talk about Google having positioned itself as a provider of essential utilities, there’s probably no better than the company’s recent announcement that the entire country of Malaysia — that’s 10 million students, teachers and parents — will use Google Apps for Education as part of the country’s effort to improve its education system.

Through its Google Apps products, Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs. For that reason, the company can make its educational products accessible to cash-strapped IT departments, for example.

With infrastructure that allows it to run its software at scale from the cloud, Google’s products become more flexible. That foundation behind it, with Google Apps having found penetration among small businesses, it adapted the suite to address similar productivity and collaboration inefficiencies in education.

Apply that to Google Play and pair it with Google Apps, and you can start to see why EdTech entrepreneurs and investors, when asked what the biggest trends are in education (that no one’s talking about yet), more than a few have said “start paying attention to Google.”

And with the impending arrival of Google Play for Education, if Google can start to get Android tablets into the hands of kids, it looks like they might just be onto something…

Google Developer page here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today at I/O, Google rebranded “Hangouts” as a new unified, cross-platform messaging system. It lets people text, photo, and group video message across Hangouts’ Android and iOS apps, plus its Gmail and Google+ site integrations. Hangouts rolls out today, replacing Google Talk [GChat] and G+ Messenger. While it doesn’t support SMS yet, it could challenge Facebook Messaging and Apple’s iMessage.

For over a year, whispers from GigaOm, Droid Life  and others signaled Google would undertake a big unification of its fragmented messaging offering. Today Google will offer new free iOS and Android Hangout apps, the Google+ integration, and you can upgrade from Google Talk to Hangouts by clicking on your photo in the Gmail chat list. There are currently no plans for other platforms like Windows Phone or Blackberry.

Google’s Vic Gundotra said at I/O today in San Francisco that “Technology should get out of the way so you can live, learn, and love.”  Operating systems and devices shouldn’t matter. You just want to talk with those you care about. That’s the point of the revamped Hangouts. It brings humans and conversations to the forefront.

Hangouts Is The Messaging Kitchen Sink

Presence, Circles, And Delivery

Let’s take a closer look at the features Hangouts offer. Presence, or knowing when friends are available to chat, is a big focus. You can see when friends are on Hangouts, if they’re currently typing, and if they’ve seen your messages [also known as read receipts]. Using Google+ Circles, you can select specific friends or a whole group to start a chat with.

Hangouts takes care to deliver your messages to whichever web interface or mobile app your friends are using. If you’re offline, Hangouts will store your messages until you return. Unlike Google Talk, it won’t send you an email every time you get a message while offline. It only pings you by email if someone starts a conversation with you while you’re away. Hangouts won’t send you duplicate notifications on different platforms, and you can snooze notifications all together if you need some quiet time.

The idea is that you can start, stop, and restart a conversation as you move between platforms, and you can chat with friends across the desktop, Android, and iOS devices.

Text, Emoji, Photos, And Video

Of course you can send simple text messages, but where Hangouts shines is in vivid multi-media communication. To spice up your words, you can add any of 850 hand-drawn emoji. You can send photos in Hangouts, which are saved to a saved to a Google+ album that you and you conversation partners can view, edit, and share later. In fact, you can go back and view your photo and messaging history at any time, or you can turn history off so your dispatches aren’t saved.

The crown jewel of Hangouts is its namesake’s video chat. You can talk face to face with up to 10 friends at once. When you’re in a video chat, you’ll see who is talking in a big window while the rest of your chat partners are shown in tiles below. Friends’ Hangouts will ring when you call them, and they’ll get notified if they miss the digital meetup.

But Hangouts video isn’t just a group FaceTime. Google added a bunch of bells and whistles. You can add visual and sound effects or make use of special Hangouts apps. So if you want to wear a virtual pirate hat or set off some fireworks, you can. You can watch YouTube videos simultaneously with friends while laughing together, and take screenshots to capture moments for later.

No SMS, Yet

The biggest feature missing from Hangouts is the ability to send and receive SMS messages to and from friends who don’t have a Hangouts app installed. This means Hangouts isn’t truly universal. Several of its competitors allow it, including Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s Messenger For Android (but not for iOS).

So if you want to pull mom into a Hangout, you might have to send her a standard SMS from your phone and tell her to install the Hangouts app. That could be significant stumbling block. However, Google tells us SMS support is one of the most requested features from Hangouts testers, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes in a future update.

Oddly, Google tells us that in some countries, feature phone users, but not smartphone users, can participate in Hangouts via SMS. This should help it reach more people in the developing world, a core area for growth of messaging apps.

Other missing features include voice messages or VoIP, but you could just use a video call without looking at the screen to approximate voice calling. There’s also no Hangouts On Air broadcasting to YouTube yet.

Why Google Needs Unified Messaging

The messaging space has become a battleground recently with independent messaging apps like WhatsApp and Line competing with Apple, Facebook, and Google to rule private communication. Everyone wants to become the high-tech successor to SMS.

For Google, messaging could create a wealth of engagement and monetization options. Of course Google could monetize Hangouts directly by cramming ads in it somewhere, or selling special effects for video chat and stickers for text.

A stronger, cross-platform chat experience in Gmail could boost time spent there, where Google already shows ads. It could also finally give people a real reason to use Google+.

Most importantly, though, Hangouts could humanize Google. Still viewed as a search and ads company, people don’t think about it first when they want to socialize. Hangouts leverages all of Google’s powerful technology to bring people closer together.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Singapore’s largest telecoms provider, SingTel, plans to set aside $1.6 billion (S$2 billion) over the next three years for startup acquisitions, according to ZDNet. Like those it has made in recent years, these are expected to be in the digital media space.

All of these can be tracked back to the major restructuring of SingTel’s business arms last year, where it divided itself into three pillars called Consumer, ICT and Digital Life.

The first two focus on consumer and enterprise segments, respectively, but the Digital Life arm is most representative of the change. The division was set up as a reaction to over-the-top competition from third party content providers, and SingTel said Digital Life was going to compete head on, providing smart TV, digital magazines and local content.

Some of acquisitions so far include restaurant review sites, Hungrygowhere and Eatability, and photo app Pixable.

SingTel has also been bullish as a VC. In 2010, it set up a separate venture arm called Innov8 to specifically look at acquisitions that would boost its current play in the telecoms arena. Innov8 was set up with an initial fund size of $160 million (S$200 million), and has since acquired firms like mobile ad company Amobee.

Innov8 has also raised rounds in startups like mobile ad exchange Nexage and Chinese game publisher Yodo.

SingTel runs telecoms operations in other countries in the region, like Optus in Australia. It has significant stakes in other carriers like Globe in The Philippines (44 percent), Bharti in India (32 percent) and Telkomsel in Indonesia (35 percent). Altogether, its operations in the region cover about 400 million mobile subscribers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It seems like everyone is talking about Bitcoin these days. Driven by increased press coverage and a major jump in the value of the digital currency, more and more people are beginning to take it seriously and think about what kinds of businesses can be built around it. With that in mind, New York City-based Liberty City Ventures is announcing its Digital Currency Fund, a $15 million commitment to Bitcoin and other digital currency startups.

When it comes to venture investing, Liberty City Ventures is a relative newcomer in the market. It was founded about nine months ago as the early-stage venture arm of investment management firm Cedar Hill Capital Partners. The fund’s founders include Cedar Hill founding partners Emil Woods and Charles Cascarilla, along with former ConditionOne and Kantar Video exec Andrew Chang, and former Brew PR VP Dorothy Jean.

Early investments by Liberty City Ventures include TripleLift, ElectNext, and Pickie. But the firm sees a big future in Bitcoin, and it plans to invest accordingly.

To its credit, the folks at Liberty City didn’t just become interested in Bitcoin: Founding partner Cascarilla says that he and his fellow Cedar Hill partners began taking notice of the digital currency back in 2010. But it wasn’t until Bitcoin survived the boom and bust of its first bubble about 18 months ago that they knew it was here to stay.

That crash, which saw the price of Bitcoins fall from $30 to about $2 in late 2011, wiped out a lot of early interest in the digital currency. But as we all know, it didn’t take long for the value of Bitcoin to rebound, and after topping $250 earlier this year, the price has stabilized around $120.

Now, the first real infrastructure is starting to emerge around Bitcoin transactions and exchanges. and investors are starting to take seriously startups that are making a push behind the new digital currency. Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures, for instance, lent some legitimacy to the market with their investment in Bitcoin exchange Coinbase. Lightspeed Ventures’ Jeremy Liew has made a few investments in the space and is looking for more. And SecondMarket founder and CEO Barry Silbert launched his own Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. So it’s not really a bad time to get into Bitcoin investment.

More than just believing it’s the right time to invest in digital currency, the folks at Liberty City believe they can add some value through their own financial market expertise. Cascarilla and Woods have spent the last several years investing in financial services and payment systems companies, so they know a thing or two about their needs. They believe that knowledge will help suss out companies that are built to transform Bitcoin from a form of hacker money to one that is traded and regulated just like any other fiat currency.

As Bitcoin becomes regulated — which Cascarilla believes would be a good thing — the firm sees plenty of opportunity for companies to emerge around transmitting and facilitating payment by digital currency, in addition to the exchanges and digital wallets that already exist. On that front, though, Cascarilla sees real improvement needed as well. Despite investment in exchanges like Coinbase, he says, none of the current options would live up to the type of scrutiny that most real-world banking institutions face.

In addition to the money that it’s put aside to invest in Bitcoin startups, the folks at Liberty City are finding other ways to bolster the ecosystem. Chang has been organizing monthly Bitcoin meetups in New York City, for instance, the first of which attracted more than 100 people to RSVP. (The second meetup will be held in about two weeks.) Members of the firm will be attending the big Bitcoin 2013 conference this weekend in San Jose, Calif. And it’s putting together an incubator for startups in the digital currency space as well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you want a digital detox, you’re going to have to pull the trigger yourself. Social Roulette is an app that would delete one in six users’ Facebook account data, but its founder confirms it’s been blocked by Facebook so it no longer functions. While there’s no specific policy prohibiting apps from deleting your data, Social Roulette is clearly counter to Facebook’s mission and business model.

Social Roulette launched on Saturday as an online version of Russian Roulette, the lethal real-life game where a player places one bullet in a six-chamber revolver pistol, spins the cylinder, and fires the gun at their head. You die, you lose. But on Social Roulette, it’s implied that having your Facebook account deleted means you won. If you’re hit that one in six chance, the site explains “we can completely remove all your posts, friends, apps, likes, photos, and games before completely deactivating it.” Otherwise, it just posts to Facebook saying you survived the game, and encouraging your friends to risk their digital lives.

Social Roulette describes itself, saying “Everyone thinks about deleting their account at some point, it’s a completely normal reaction to the overwhelming nature of digital culture. Is it time to consider a new development in your life? Are you looking for the opportunity to start fresh? Or are you just seeking cheap thrills at the expense of your social network? Maybe it’s time for you to play Social Roulette.” Co-founder Kyle McDonald tells me he came up with the idea a few weeks ago, but hacked it together in just four hours with Jonas Lund and Jonas Jongeja after Lund had an idea for how it could actually work.

The app capitalizes on exhaustion with social networks. The dizzying stream of information, constant success theater, and perceived “responsibility” to be contactable can grow tiresome after a while. When I asked co-founder McDonald about the philosophy behind Social Roulette, he told me”Everyone talks about deleting their Facebook account, but we rarely take action. Sometimes we need a simple game to help take the responsibility off our shoulders, and provide a moment for reflection. Social Roulette is more of a provocation rather than a tool.”

Social Roulette seemed to be looking for a fight, considering it’s selling t-shirts of its logo, which rips off Facebook’s and sticks it inside a chamber of a six-shooter pistol. Facebook has aggressively pursued others who’ve tried to coin off of its trademarks. Facebook has also recently shut off API access to apps it perceives as competitors like Vine, as well as ones like Voxer that don’t share much back to it.  Facebook has also blocked apps without specifying a reason but that have been accused of spamming like Path.

Now McDonald tells me, “It took us 4 hours to create the project, and it took another 4 hours after the launch for Facebook to respond by blocking the API key and restricting our ability to create Facebook applications. The app was flagged by an automated system for ‘creating a negative user experience.’ After review, they decided they don’t like our logo either. We tried to follow the branding guidelines but we must have misunderstood them.” You could say the shut down was a bit murky as there’s not a specific platform policy that the app’s data deletion function violates, but Facebook typically enforces the spirit, not the letter, of the law. It might end up adding a specific provision banning apps that focus on deleting your data.

Facebook tells me in an official statement, “We take action against apps that violate our platform policies as laid out here: https://developers.facebook.com/policy/, in order to maintain a trustworthy experience for users.” It didn’t specify which policy, though. However, the app did allow users to circumvent Facebook’s account deactivation feature, which is designed to let people turn off their account but turn it back on later without losing their content and connections. This could be considered a violation of Facebook Platform Policy I.3 that state “You must not circumvent (or claim to circumvent) our intended limitations on core Facebook features and functionality.”

Without API access, Social Roulette can’t let people login with their Facebook account, or delete content from their profile. Surprisingly, McDonald is optimistic that Social Roulette will win Facebook’s approval and live on to kill another account. “We’re currently working to address this and other issues and expect a return to normal service some time this week.”

I wouldn’t hold my breath, though. Facebook’s goal to connect the world and earn money through advertising based on their personal data is directly threatened by Social Roulette. Facebook purposefully makes deleting your account tough so you don’t do it in a momentary fit of anger. Even if it receives jeers for shutting down apps at will, it’s not going to put that gun in any third-party developer’s hands.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a guest post from Jed Singer, director of client engagement at Stuzo, a creative technology company and Preferred Marketing Developer with Pages and Apps badges.

The Facebook News Feed is becoming evermore critical to engagement on Facebook. When you design branded social solutions, they need to serve as conduits for storytelling. 100x more people are likely to see the stories that your social product or campaign pushes out than will ever actually experience the product or campaign.

This amplification through the Timeline and News Feed is inherently key to awareness and viral distribution of the brand’s message, but it’s even more important because those stories in the Timeline and News Feed are more accessible by mobile users (63 percent of Facebook users) than the solution, itself, today. This focus on the “story” can mean success or failure of the program as it relates to actual business outcomes — the metrics that matter.

There are also other ways to have consumers effectively story-tell through a branded social experience: Rich Media News Feed Experiences. This is an HTML5 experience on mobile and a Flash media unit that is the experience within a promoted page post, or pushed out of a custom experience on Facebook (by either a user or a page). Both can be activated and engaged with directly within the News Feed.

Even into Q2 of 2013, these are rare for brands, but they are extremely effective at engaging users. Some, like Dunkin Donuts, Rovio, and Lexus have leveraged such units in their social repertoire. At Stuzo, we make sure that clients are intimately aware of the possibilities; one of our most successful Rich News Feed Experiences was for People’s Choice Awards this past season, which enabled fans to explore all of the award categories and vote for their favorite nominee. This gives users the full voting functionality in-stream and exposes them to the main business metric for the People’s Choice Awards — votes — without having to leave their News Feed browsing experience.

Another example is AutoTrader’s social inventory search feature, Decide My Ride, which enables users to share out three cars that they’re interested in and have their friends then vote on which they believe the user should purchase. This voting is all done in in-stream in the News Feed, and below, we can see examples on both the desktop and via mobile. This is rich branded interaction and storytelling that is cross-device and directly in-stream.

When do you, as a brand, want to consider these Rich News Feed Experiences on Facebook? Here’s a simple list of questions to ask yourself. Do you have:

• A CRM conversion point, like an email sign-up?
• An engagement conversion, like a social vote or poll answer?
• An awareness conversion, like a social good campaign?
• An off-site traffic conversion with teaser content?
• A lightweight social game that users could preview in-stream?
• A product that could be interacted with via News Feed?
• An inventory that users could explore in-stream?
• A service that customers could reserve in the feed?

The list goes on, and the above should serve as thought-starters. There is an array of potential use cases for Rich News Feed Experiences on Facebook, and to maximize engagement and conversion of your audience, these mobile-accessible, mobile-optimized products are an extremely powerful solutions for your digital and social marketing toolbox.

Jed Singer has been studying, advising, and executing in social since 2006, and has worked with brands across verticals including the National Football League, National Basketball Association, Toys “R” Us, Coach, Procter & Gamble, Anheuser-Busch InBev, MasterCard, CBS, ESPN, and HBO. As director of client engagement at Stuzo, one of the original five Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers, Jed specializes in social strategy, management, and application development.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

I’ve heard some suggestions that our extreme fascination with Google Glass is more a symptom of desperation for some kind of genuine gadget innovation than anything to do with the product’s merits, and a new gadget from Sony (via The Verge) has me wondering whether or not other companies are flailing about for something novel. Sony introduced a new 13.3-inch e-ink prototype reader device today, which seems new but also remarkably old and washed up all at once.

The device is called Digital Paper, and is a flexible 13.3-inch display that uses the battery sipping e-ink tech we’re used to in dedicated e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. The large display is more like the one you’d find on a MacBook Air than the one on a typical e-reader, however, which is one of its most unusual qualities. Big-screened e-readers don’t exactly have a super-successful track record, you might recall, as the Kindle DX was seen by most as an overly expensive, overly large iteration on the core Kindle concept, and two offerings in the category that were even larger from Skiff and Plastic Logic hit the deadpool prior to even launching at all.

Sony wants to change things up a bit with a capacitive touch panel and stylus to give users plenty of input options for a change. That’s bound to come in handy for taking notes in class, as this is aimed at the education market and will be entering trials at three Japanese higher ed institutions over the course of the next year. But even with a pen strapped to it, it’s still a big, dedicated e-reader, and it’s hard to see that offering much value for users in a world full of much more feature-rich, multipurpose devices like smartphones and tablets.

When the e-reader first debuted as a product category, it made sense, in that it was a bridge device for users who had grown up with paper books and were looking for a format that closely mirrored that experience. But now, for students especially, devices and digital media are a long-accepted fact. Digital natives don’t need devices that harken back to older tech, even if they do offer longer battery life and a format that may or may not be easier on the eyes, depending on which study you trust.

Education has shown a keen interest in devices like the iPad and Kindle Fire, and Sony is barking up the wrong tree with an e-reader device as an attempt to appeal to that market. Still, if nothing else it should be interesting, which seems to be the main thing driving consumer device innovation these days.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch