Facebook and marketing agency Definition 6 have released Timeline Movie Maker, an app that compiles users’ photos, videos and other Facebook activity to create a short personal video.

The app is another example of the unique tactics the social network is using to promote its redesigned profile and part of a new trend of collaboration. The company is showing maturity as it prepares to file for an initial public offering that could raise at least $5 billion for the company.

Timeline will be mandatory for all users within weeks, but users have been able to opt in since December. (Developers gained access in September.) During this period, Facebook has taken steps to lead users to discover the new profile through their friends rather than giving the impression the social network is forcing another unwanted change on them. The company has done significant outreach to get celebrities and other influencers using Timeline. It also partnered with Moo.com to let users create Timeline-inspired business cards. These efforts would have been uncharacteristic for the social network a year or two ago, but Facebook has shown a new willingness to work with other businesses and public figures. These diverse partnerships could help the company’s valuation when it files for an IPO. Recent reports suggest Facebook could seek to raise $5 billion, lower than the previously rumored $10 billion. By setting a low float, the company could debut above its initial price as Groupon did in November. Zynga, on the other hand, reached for a larger amount in December and only crossed its initial price on Monday.

Of course, the social network has to satisfy users in addition to investors. Apps like Timeline Movie Maker help users see how personal Facebook is to them. When users visit TimelineMovieMaker.com, they can connect the app with their Facebook account. If users do not have Timeline enabled, they will be prompted to do so. After a few minutes of processing, the app produces a video including photos, videos, check-ins and status updates in the same format as the promotional video Facebook used to debut Timeline at f8. Users can change the music or swap photos if they want, then share the video with friends. Unfortunately the video takes a long time to render and cannot be played in-line from News Feed. Making it easier for users to view their friends’ videos would have made a more compelling case for Timeline.

Facebook is expected to formally file for public offering on Wednesday.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

This is a guest post by Ryan Spoon (@ryanspoon), a principal at Polaris Ventures. Read more about Ryan on his blog at ryanspoon.com.

Last week I began an effort to answer the questions I get asked most frequently by entrepreneurs, starting with how to create an early-stage pitch deck. Today, I address a topic as relevant for early stage startups (vying for consumer attention) as it is for more mature companies (focused on customer relationships):

How to grow your brand on Twitter?

Twitter is the ultimate marketing platform. But the scale of Twitter activity is so extraordinary (250 million tweets per day) that it is quite easy to get lost in the noise… particularly if you are an early-stage startup and/or an emerging brand.

Separating yourself from the masses really begins with the recognition that Twitter is first and foremost a platform for conversation. If you believe that, you avoid the mistake most brands make: treating Twitter as a mechanism to push content rather than create engagement.

And once your goal is to foster conversation and engagement, you can follow these five guidelines:

1. Listen.

2. Be authentic.

3. Be compelling.

4. Find the influencers.

5. Extend off Twitter and onto your site.

In the below presentation, I break down these core themes and provides examples of people and companies successfully using Twitter to drive engagement and grow their brands.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Anoma.ly, a startup that is working on optimizing the personalization of realtime information streams, is announcing its first funding round today with 500K in seed money from rockstar investors like Yelp’s Russel Simmons, PayPal’s Max Levchin, YouTube’s Steve Chen, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Klout’s Thomas McInerney, James Hong, ex-Googler Harry Cheung and Microsoft Kinnect creative director Steph Tryphonas.

i/o Ventures partner Jim Young called it “The most stacked angel round he’s seen.”

The startup will be using the funding to launch a major update to its Cadmus firehose product, rebranding it as Dapt. In the same vien as My6Sense and Storify, Dapt will be focused on aggregating conversations on Twitter and from other places around the web.

Says founder Jay Velayudhan, “It’s hard to highlight the top conversations especially globally. What we’re trying to do is monitor who is it that you like to talk to. Who are the influencers in the field? We want to make Twitter less of a popularity contest and more about what you find interesting.”

Velayudhan also tells me that they will be using the funding for new hires and recently added another engineer to the team, former TellMe engineer and University of Waterloo classmate Tim Kuo. The company is currently in stealth as it’s focused on building its product, but plans to be opening up publicly in the coming months, “We really want to nail that model of back and forth conversations which is kind of broken right now.”

Anoma.ly went through the i/o Ventures accelerator program, which is still accepting applications for its Spring cohort until February 21st. you can apply here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in June we previewed a new product by social media search engine Kosmix called TweetBeat. Essentially, it’s a way to follow news being discussed on Twitter in realtime. Today during our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Kosmix is officially releasing the product.

Kosmix calls TweetBeat “the end of hashtags”. Because they scan all tweets being sent out for all kinds of semantic data, you no longer have to explicitly tag things with hashtag, is their stance. For example, over the past few days there have been almost 64,000 tweets about Disrupt from over 11,000 people — but only a small percentage have used the “#tcdisrupt” tag. TweetBeat found the tweets anyway.

TweetBeat scans over 90 million tweets a day to find the most interesting topics, but only shows you the best tweets about those topics. They do this by identifying the influencers for any given topic. And again, they scan the tweets themselves for semantic data. They also look at signals such as how often a tweet was retweeted or replied to.

With TweetBeat you can ”follow live in real time the most interesting things are saying about any realtime event,” the company says. But you can also pause things and replay tweets from a specific moment in time. There’s a nice slider tool to track when a topic was heating up. And if you connect your Twitter account (which you don’t have to), you can easily retweet or reply to anything you see on the service.

Here’s the TweetBeat page for TechCrunch Disrupt. And check out the leaderboard.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s been two months to the day since Rdio launched in the States – check out Erick’s review if you’re interested in learning more about the (awesome) social music service.

But until today, you needed to be invited by another user to gain access to the service.

Not that it was all that difficult – users were able to invite dozens at a time and we gave away thousands of invite codes for TechCrunch readers – but still, the doors are now open.

That is, if you live in the United States or Canada or at least know how to pretend you are.

Users in those countries can henceforth sign up for Rdio and give it a whirl free of charge and ad-less for a period of 3 days, although users get the option to extend the free trial with another 10 days after, according to the startup, which was founded and financially backed by Skype, Kazaa and Joost founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis.

Rdio, pronounced “ar-dee-oh”, costs $9.99 per month for unlimited Web and mobile access (including the ability to listen to music and playlists offline), and $4.99 for Web-only access.

Rdio says it recently expanded its music collection through deals with independent labels and aggregators, hitting the 7 million songs milestone. Apart from the major music labels, Rdio now boasts agreements with the likes of IODA, IRIS, Finetunes, INgrooves and The Orchard.

In addition, Rdio has attracted a number of music publications and other influencers (Spin Magazine, Pitchfork and Los Angeles’ KCRW Radio, to name but a few) to set up profiles and connect users with their favorite tunes (which can now be played without interruption, thank God).

The company has also been consistently updating its iPhone, Android and BlackBerry apps, as the mobile aspect of the offering is really key to their long-term strategy.

The public launch of Rdio in the US and Canada is bad news for European music startup Spotify, which hasn’t managed to make it Stateside yet, despite all its oft-expressed homes and dreams. Spotify says negotations with the labels are moving in the right direction, however, and that they’re confident they’ll be able to launch in the U.S. before year’s end.

Of course, Spotify is far from the only competition Rdio has or will have, with startups like Pandora and MOG doing very well. And let’s not forget three technology giants are plotting their own music-in-the-cloud push, too: digital music sales juggernaut Apple, Web giant Google and HP, still very much the largest information technology company in the world.

Curious to see what the future will hold for Rdio.

You please tell me what you think of it today, though.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Klout, a startup that measures influence on Twitter, is expanding its horizons today with the launch of BirdBrain, a new feature that allows you to measure influence using data from both Facebook and Twitter.

BirdBrain uses Facebook connect to look at the interests listed on a user’s profile and then uses that data to search for the most influential people on Twitter, based on interests. Klout, which recently released a new API, evaluates Twitter users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals and topics around the web.

The premise for this specific development is based on Klout’s belief that Twitter’s suggested user list is flawed. The buckets they use, says Klout, are simply too big. BirdBrain uses Facebook Connect to evaluate your interests, and will mashup that data up with Tweets from Twitter users with terms associated with those interests. For example, if you list the TV show Lost as an interest on your Facebook profile, Klout will search for users Tweeting about the latest smoke, or polar bear conspiracies. And Klout breaks down the influencers onTwitter by the type of influencer they are. For example, a person might be a “chatterbox” which means they like chit chat about the topic on the network while another type of influencer might be a “curator,” who simply sends out the best content.

BirdBrain is part of Klout’s newly launched Labs section, which will experiment with products that assess influence based on the interaction within social networks, beyond just Twitter. Of course, BirdBrain represents Klout’s first data foray outside of the Twitter-sphere. Klout’s CEO Joe Fernandez says that this is a sneak-peak into the startup’s eventual movement to cross-platform influencer data. Considering that Twitter is looking to build its own powerful analytics platform, it’s probably wise for Klout, which just raised $1.5 million in funding, to look for ways to offer innovative technologies that combine both data from Facebook and Twitter.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch