Every marketer uses Twitter to engage with customers. But there’s more to a successful campaign than simply gaining new followers and increasing your number of tweets.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the newest addition to the Inside Network product family: the AllTwitter Marketing Bible.

Whether you’re a first-time user of Twitter for business or an experienced social media marketer, the AllTwitter Marketing Bible is designed to help you build your audience, increase engagement, and improve conversions and customer loyalty.

This comprehensive subscription product is updated weekly with valuable how-tos and best practices, informative case studies, and detailed provider comparisons. This content will help you stay up to date on the latest platform trends and discover great ways to optimize your current Twitter strategy.

Want to learn more? You can sign up for a free trial to get a sneak peak at a few articles, or subscribe to a monthly, quarterly, or annual account for full access.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best social media job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at: Aarki, BrightRoll, King.com and more.

Ecommerce has gotten friendly with the rise of Pinterest, Facebook Gifts, and more ways to sell to peers. So today Inside Network launched a new site called Inside Social Commerce to complement its blogs Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games, and Inside Mobile Apps.

Led by Damon Brown, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook Marketing, ISC will cover commerce startups and giants alike.

Inside Network’s editor AJ Glasser tells me there’s a big gap for the site to fill. “Ad publications like AdAge are looking at marketing apps,  TechCrunch and VentureBeat are looking at third-party commerce startups, but I can’t think of a blog taking a step back and looking at apps that drive users to take a certain activity that will lead to a purchase.”

But what exactly will Inside Social Commerce cover? There’ll be analysis of trends in what ecommerce tools offer, monetization tactics, and deep-dives into apps. Glasser says “you don’t see anyone reviewing Amazon’s Price Check app vs Craigslist mobile vs Target’s new app.”

Glasser went on to say the blog aims to answer questions like “are the food snobs who buy into bulk wine clubs or people who buy from One Kings Lane more likely to buy on mobile or the web? Where can social commerce engage that user and is it the same as the person who shops at Walmart?”

Inside Network was acquired by WebMediaBrands in May 2011 for $14 million, and has been mulling ideas for a new site for awhile. It became clear to the team (where I used to be the lead writer of Inside Facebook) that ISC needed to be its next property when Glasser said it realized that “After you factor out games, commerce is the next biggest app category.”

Inside Social Commerce will start with one to two posts a day ramping up to around three a day, ranging from spot news to the deep, wonky coverage Inside Network is renowned for. Articles will come from Brown as well as social scientist contributor Peggy Albright and the rest of the IN team.

ISC will be pulling in dollars from advertising sponsorships and sales of research reports under the Inside Network Research brand that produces the popular Inside Virtual Goods pdf. Its tools AppData and PageData will help Inside Network share what’s working, what’s not, and what ecommerce companies need to do to keep shopping carts full.

For a taste of what Inside Social Commerce will have on the shelves, check out its breakdown of retail platform ShopIgniter and interview with the promising startup’s CEO. TechCrunch has its own ecommerce channel that all our writers contribute to, but we’re looking forward to learning from the Inside Social Commerce squad who will live and breathe the industry. See you in the press, ISC.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Serial entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis appears to be gearing up for the launch of his next venture, which may also signify one more pivot for his information site Mahalo. And that next step also looks like a new chapter for an internet domain that itself has seen a couple of pivots.

On a tip from a reader, we visited inside.com and found this:

Clicking to subscribe, you get sent to a mailing list creator owned by Calacanis, and an email confirmation referring questions directly to him (or, at least an email address to his name). We have sent an email to that address but have yet to receive a reply.

Putting to one side that we’ve already passed September 1 there seem to be other clues that the company is moving ahead with an Inside.com venture, which seems to be either a rebranding of either all or part of Mahalo. Two recent clues of that:

1) An ad posted by Mahalo is seeking a user experience/user interface graphic designer for Inside.com. In that ad, it describes inside.com as a “knowledge community, focused on creating high-quality videos, apps, iBooks and written courses.”

“We’re well-funded by Sequoia…Newscorp, Mark Cuban, Elon Musk (Paypal) and CBS,” the post reads. If that sounds like Mahalo rebranded to you, the rest of that description, describing what sounds like an existing product, seems to clinch that: “Our library is growing rapidly as we continue to focus our efforts on joining users with expert teaching content.”

2) When Mahalo’s president, Jason Rapp, left the company at the beginning of September, AllThingsD posted a staff memo, which seemed also to give some hints that a name change was on the cards.

“The company has never had a clearer path or brighter future (plus a new name!) and for that reason it’s the perfect time for me to step back and pursue my next adventure,” he wrote, signing off, “Mahalo and see you Inside, Jason.”

Inside.com and Mahalo, in a way, are in something of a similar position, both being ships in the dot-com waters looking for a friendly dock.

Mahalo, founded by Calacanis in 2007 as a “human-powered search engine” as an alternative to Google and the rest. Perhaps because making a dent into Google’s search traffic proved to be actually very hard, it has pivoted several times since. Among them, it’s offered information in a Q&A format (tagline: “we’re here to help”). Most recently, Mahalo settled into life as a how-to video and learning site, spinning apps and other media out of the concept (new tagline: learn anything). Why is inside.com being introduced as a brand within this? Well, it is strong word, like about.com (with which it competes) and it might snag more random users than the Hawaiian word for “thank you.”

Inside.com, meanwhile, was originally a high-ambition, but ultimately-failed website covering the media industry from the first dot-com boom. The domain was eventually purchased by Rafat Ali, founder of paidContent, in 2008, with the intention of putting his different media sites (which also included mocoNews.net) under the Inside brand. That idea appeared to die after the paidContent group got bought by the Guardian, who apparently wanted to sell the name for upwards of $100,000. For a long while — nearly four years — visits to inside.com redirected to paidContent.org.

Interestingly, inside.com is still registered, as of today, to Sedo LLC, on behalf of ContentNext Media, the parent company of paidContent.org that was sold by the Guardian to Giga Omni Media in February. The ownership of inside.com was last updated on June 13 of this year.

That means that either an ownership transfer to Calacanis has not yet been recorded, or… who knows?

TC has reached out both to Jason Calacanis and Giga Omni Media for comment and we will update as we learn more.

(Disclosure: I worked for paidContent.org before joining TechCrunch.)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple’s bringing its brick-and-mortar retail operations to Sweden for the first time tomorrow, with a new flagship location at Täby Centrum in the city of Täby, which is just about 20 miles outside of Stockholm.

The new store opening is timed coincidentally around the launch of the iPhone 5, but when that device hits shelves next Friday, September 21, the newest Apple Store won’t be receiving any stock, since Sweden isn’t one of the iPhone 5′s launch countries.

TechCrunch reader and interior design blogger Sophie Ankréus was kind enough to send us some shots of what the inside of the new store will look like, which you can check out in the gallery below. Spoiler: It looks like an Apple Store. But actually, there are some interesting differences, like Sweden-exclusive products locally sourced and designed, including iPhone cases from Björn Borg and bags from P.A.P.

All images courtesy of InteriorStockholm.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best social media job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at: High 5, King.com, Machine Zone and more.

Abundance

• Social Media / Online Community Manager

• Mobile Analystics Manager

• Social Game Designer
• Senior Programmer
• Associate Producer/Producer

• Flash Developer (AIR Experience Required)
• UI/UX Designer
• PHP Web Developer
• Java/ SQL Developer

International Development Group (IDG)

• Market Analyst

• Director of PR & Marketing

• Senior Advertising Sales Manager (UK or DE)
• IT Manager
• Sales Director
• HR Administrator

• C/C++ Game Developer
• Senior Operations Engineer
• Senior Erlang Infrastructure Developer
• Senior Scalability Engineer
• PHP Developer – Games
• Mobile/Web Advertising Artist

Mixr, Inc.

• IOS App/Game Developer

PT Gaming

• Job Fair – Customer Service/Retail Professionals

ReachLocal

• Sales Executive

• Game Developer
• Project Manager

• Product Manager, Social Game

• Director, Performance Marketing

• Game Artist – Isometric
• iOS Games Developer
• Data Analyst
• Sidekick to the CTO/Technical Consultant

• Product Manager, Growth & Engagement

• Agile Development Engineer

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers and executives in the Facebook Platform, mobile and social gaming industry today.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

We just had our first hands-on with the Microsoft Surface, the brand spanking new device which appears to be Microsoft’s loud and clear answer to the Apple iPad, the MacBook Air, the menagerie of Android-powered tablets, the existing suite of Windows-powered tablets — basically, the entire landscape of today’s most powerful and popular mobile computing devices. It’s a very ambitious effort that the company is making great pains to emphasize has been built by Microsoft from the inside out, from the hardware to the software.

Now it bears mention that quite a few details on the Surface are hard to pin down. There will be two main versions of the device, the Microsoft Surface for Windows RT, and the Microsoft Surface for Windows 8 Pro. Microsoft has made it clear that it has contracted the manufacturing of the device as a whole, but it is not giving much color on the granular level: Who has built the processors that make up the Surface, the other components that make it up and so on. Pricing has not been revealed at all — Microsoft is only saying both the RT consumer version and the higher powered Pro versions will be at price points that are “competitive” to their peers. The RT should be out in time for the holidays (at the same time that Windows 8 should roll out) and the Pro version of the tablet will come out three months later.

Below are images from our hands-on with the device. Click on each one to enlarge it.

First we got a look at the kickstand that’s built in to the Surface, which is a clear differentiator from the iPad, for which users have to buy separate accessories. The kickstand was made to click in and out on the tablet with ease and style, and a satisfying “snap” sound — the company says it spent lots of time developing the three hinges that make it work, modeling them after the doors on a luxury car.

Next we looked at the included cover, which doubles as a touch keyboard. It has a soft rubbery feeling, but the keys don’t compress when you touch them. It also does not bend at all, unlike iPad covers — obviously, as it does more than just cover the screen. Microsoft says it made the hinges and cover to give it a bookish feeling. They come in several different colors.

Then we looked at some of what’s made up the device — Vapor MG, the trademarked Magnesium alloy developed by Microsoft that makes up both the inside skeleton and the outside of the Surface. Microsoft is proud of this because it’s both strong, lightweight, and sleek — several times they pointed out to us that it’s far superior to plastic, which is pretty clear when you get a look and feel of it.

Next was a look at the components that make the touch keyboard work. You can also get a more traditional, tactile “button” keyboard if that’s what you prefer. They say that it’s faster and quicker than the garden variety onscreen keyboards on existing tablets.

Then at the end was the big reveal — the screen switched on (yes, there was only one part of the hands-on that gave me a feel of how the touch screen works.) It absolutely is a high-definition screen, but I wasn’t given the ability to zoom in and out of a photo to see how quickly you could really render an image.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last week, we announced the launch of Inside Network Research, our new subscription service dedicated to providing monthly research reports. What follows is data excerpted from Trends in Facebook Audience and Ad Market, the first report in our new service.

An area of particular focus in this report is nuances in the value of a demographic segment, particularly in emerging markets such India where Facebook’s audience is experiencing 84% growth year-over-year to make it the platform’s third-largest audience in 2012. Despite the U.S. audience being more than three times the size of India, India’s Facebook ad rates are 63% lower than the U.S.

The general Facebook advertising rule of thumb is that ad rates for females are higher than for males, especially in the western market. There is more demand for the female consumer, especially on the Facebook platform, which drives up rates. In most top markets, this holds true; female ad rates are 8% higher in the U.S. India, however, tells a different story: Its female audience makes up 27% of the country’s Facebook audience, yet female ad rates are only 1% higher than for males.

We also see differences in how India’s age demographics impact Facebook ad rates. In the U.S., ad rates for older age groups are higher due to the size of audience and demand of older age groups. In India, we do see an increase in ad rates for older age groups, but we find it to be inconsistent with the increase found in older age groups in the U.S. audience. This despite the fact that India skews younger, with 87% of the country’s audience under 34 years old.

The above chart compares ad rate differences in the 13- to 17-year-old age group in each market.

The still early adoption of Facebook in India is likely a top factor in demographic ad rate shifts. We also expect to see a ceiling to what advertisers are willing to pay in the market.  Volume will be a key factor with 84% year-over-year growth; India is definitely a market to keep an eye on in the coming months and years as Facebook reconciles ad value and demand for the region.

If you have any comments about this topic, we’d be interested in your thoughts. Feel free to email us at mail (at) insidenetwork.com

To read more of Trends in Facebook Audience & Ad Market, download an excerpt of the report here. If you’re interested in obtaining a full copy, a particular report in the Inside Network Research series, or subscribing to Inside Network Research, contact Kieran Barr, our VP of Sales and Social Media Research, at kieran.barr (at) insidenetwork.com.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

The American Booksellers Association sent a letter to its members today announcing that Google was putting an end to its reseller program, which allowed independent bookstores to operate an e-book storefront using Google as the wholesaler. The news was confirmed shortly afterwards by a post on the Inside Google Books blog, saying “it’s clear that the reseller program has not met the needs of many readers or booksellers.”

The news will be unwelcome to the bookstores that were relying on Google, but it’s not all gloom and doom. For one thing, the reseller program will continue to operate for about nine months, giving booksellers plenty of time to make the changes necessary. And, as the ABA puts it, in 2010 the program “was the only viable means for us to enter the e-book market, but, like so much else in our industry, things have changed rapidly, and we have options that simply did not exist 18 months ago.”

Like so many other of Google’s well-formed but not particularly popular services, Books is getting the consolidation treatment. They’ll still offer e-books, of course, but their role as a middle man is coming to an end. They prefer to be the alpha and the omega, and will focus on their own storefront, the redesigned all-purpose Play store.

This means an opportunity for another e-book wholesaler to step in and pick up the contracts Google is leaving behind. The independent bookstores don’t want anything to do with B&N or Amazon, but at the moment power is so concentrated in the biggest companies that there isn’t much room in the margins.

PaidContent has a copy of the letter the ABA sent to members. It’s apologetic but quietly critical of Google for what amounts to pulling the rug out from under an industry that was grateful for its support.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There was more than meets the eye with this week’s rebranding of Android Market as Google Play.

Accompanying the new name and look is a shift in how the store is being managed. Eric Chu, who has worked on the Android team for four-and-a-half years, is stepping away from overseeing Android’s app store and is exploring other options inside Google.

Jamie Rosenberg, who has been a director of digital content for Android and was the public face for the Google Music launch, gets increased oversight for apps and games inside the store. (His title isn’t changing though.)

Rosenberg came to Google two years ago from Microsoft. Before that, he was vice president of premium services for Danger, the company that Android chief Andy Rubin co-founded and that went on to make the T-Mobile Sidekick.

Paired with the Google Play rebranding, the move shows how Google is changing the way it thinks about distributing and selling digital content on Android and the broader web. Google wants to have an online storefront that encompasses much more than apps and that isn’t just limited to Android device owners.

The internal management structure for Android Market was problematic from the start, according to a source who has worked closely with the team. Eric Chu headed up developer relations and business development while David Conway handled product management. Because there were two heads with relatively equal power, it was difficult to understand who had final say and that led to unnecessary politics.

The team behind Android’s app store also needed more resources for years. Because Rubin judges the success of Android primarily through device activations and mobile search revenue, the app store has been a secondary priority inside the group. This is even though apps are a key reason consumers might choose one type of device over another.

I interviewed Chu on-stage at the Inside Social Apps conference last year. We had talked about all the ways Google planned to improve the Android ecosystem over 2011. At the time, he said in-app billing would come out soon (which it did in March of last year) and that the store was going to find ways to give more exposure to apps (which it also did at Google’s developer conference I/O later in May).

While Android has definitely improved over the last year as a revenue source for developers (especially with the in-app billing system Chu rolled out publicly in March), it still causes frustration for some. This past week, indie developer Mika Mobile said it would stop supporting Android because the revenues didn’t make up for the complexity of developing for such a fragmented ecosystem with many devices and versions of the OS.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch