If you run a big website, you have a range of good options for staying protected from malicious hacks: hardware from enterprise-oriented companies like Cisco or McAfee, your own in-house support, or hosted professional blog services like WordPress VIP (which is what TechCrunch uses). If you’re a smaller site out on the open web, you have weaker options — at least if you want to get auto-updated responses to a wide range of security problems.

Israeli startup 6Scan is out to change that, launching a WordPress plugin today that automatically scans and updates to protect against the latest issues coming up across the web. By “automatically,” I mean that the company’s security team monitors the web and does its own research to find problems, then pushes an update to all of its users. These go out about every hour, according to co-founder and chief executive Nitzan Miron, as they’re discovered and added to the company’s system.

Key problems it fixes include SQL injections, cross-site scripting, directory transversals, remote file inclusion and the other top security risks. The scanning software is offered for free, but it will fix remove risks and provide other features, like zero-day research and additional email and SMS support for $10 a month. Although the Israeli company has only been around since April of last year, Miron and his co-founder Yaron Tal worked in web security in their country’s military over the previous years — they’re not new to the space.

Other website guards that serve small to medium-sized sites include Dasient (now part of Twitter), Armorize, StopTheHacker (also recently funded) and CodeGuard. They each provide a range of competing services for cheaply and quickly identifying threats, and they all offer various methods for containing or removing problems. Miron says that the ability to fix existing vulnerabilities instead of requiring users to take additional actions helps separate 6Scan’s offering from web-based competitors. (Note: I haven’t tested every web site security system around, but so far I haven’t seen others that do this, exactly. Tell me if otherwise in the comments).

More generally, another type of competitor here are companies that offer hosted, supported sites for smaller businesses, that accomplish the marketing goals at stand-alone websites. This can include anything from Facebook pages to Tumblr accounts to hosted site creators like Weebly or Webs.com. On that front, Miron says that they’re also talking to hosting companies to get their software auto-installed, and they’ve been getting some interest — so, they’re not only going straight for consumer-style smaller businesses running their own sites.

While WordPress is the first live version, Miron says support for other content management systems are coming soon, with Joomla and Drupal in the next few days. In its private beta, 6Scan has already added up a few thousand customers, he adds, many of whom are already paying.

The company has so far raised an undisclosed round from YL Ventures, following on seed funding from Israeli incubator Venturegeeks last year. Miron is coming through town now, and planning to present at the SF New Tech cloud meetup at Might tomorrow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Buddy Media, BranchOut and Involver made several new marketing hires this week. If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we’ll get it into our next post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes either from the companies themselves or from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s list of hires:

Buddy Media

• Kate Bodnar, senior designer / marketing & brand team – former production designer for the marketing and brand team.

BranchOut

• Mike Slavin, university marketing associate – former student.
• Elizabeth Magnuson, university marketing associate – former media planning intern at Starcom MediaVest Group.
• Giovanni Javier, university marketing associate – former student.
• Shigeru Konishi, marketing associate – former consulting club member.
• Hyder M. Alikhan, marketing associate – former assistant to the head of digital marketing at ITP.

Involver

• Rodrigo Santana, marketing intern – former supply coordinator at G-Inter Transportes Internacionais.

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at SponsorPay, GREE International, Inc., Social Point, King.com, Atari, TinyCo, Addmired, PlayMesh, Spooky Cool Labs, Identified, XMG Studio, FashionPlaytes, Inc., Stealth Mobile Startup, Plumbee, Mobile Deluxe and Game Show Network.

• Director of Developer Relations

• Director of Business Development
• Senior Manager, Corporate Development

• Product Manager (Video Games)
• iOS Developer
• Senior Systems Administrator

• 3D Artist
• IT Support Engineer
• Game Developer – Social and Mobile Games
• Ad Operations Traffic
• Senior Producer, Social Games – King.com
• Product Manager Network

• Monetization Analyst – Mobile/Social Games
• Acquisition Marketing Manager – Mobile Games
• Mobile Producer
• Mobile Advertising Sales Manager
• Business Development Director – Mobile Games

• Data Analyst
• Product Manager
• C++ Game Engineer
• Game Designer
• UI Artist

• UX Artist
• Erlang Infrastructure Developer
• C/C++ Game Developer
• Tools Engineer
• Scalability Engineer
• Build/Release Engineer
• Senior Producer/Project Manager
• QA/CS Director
• Senior Operations Engineer
• Acquisition Manager/Mobile Ad Buyer

• Backend Game Developer

• Marketing Director
• Software Engineer – Games Front End/Unity

• Core Software Engineer

• Data Jockey

• Social Game Designer

Stealth Mobile Startup

• Senior Android Engineer

• Head of Mobile/Senior Mobile Producer

• Art Director
• Senior Programmer

• Senior QA Engineer-Mobile Games

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 and social gaming industry today.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

You may have heard the buzz by now about a young startup that’s being fueled by some pretty impressive star power, including the likes of the one and only Lady Gaga. The project, called Backplane, was co-founded by Lady Gaga’s manager, Troy Carter, and raised an early (then hush hush) seed round from an impressive set of investors, including Google Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, i/o Ventures, and Tomorrow Ventures.

The startup is also being led by a group of former Facebook and Google employees, as well as other tech-heavy companies, including co-founders Joey Primiani, an ex-Googler and creator of Cortex, Alex Moore, former Director of Operations (and the first employee) at Palantir Technologies, along with Panantir cofounder, Joe Lonsdale, who has become the Chairman of Backplane’s Board of Directors.

The startup is using its star power and tech cache to, among other things, hold a music hackathon at SXSW — which will be judged by music industry veterans, like Scooter Braun, the guy who helped bring you The Bieber — in an effort to continue attracting top-flight engineers to its platform.

There’s a lot of tech development and strategy being applied to the platform to support the startup’s founding value proposition, which is, simply put, to change the way traditional intermediaries connect fans with artists. In other words, it’s a community platform that combines features from Pinterest, Tumblr, Canvas, and Ning to bring together the most effective parts of social and visual design in the name of seriously upping the engagement level on community-centered platforms.

Backplane started with LittleMonsters.com, the first portal to be powered by Backplane, and the new online community for Lady Gaga and her army of fans. Of course, that’s just the beginning, the startup wants to create a bullpen of community sites not only for brands and celebrities, but for virtually any interest group.

But what does “community” mean in the Backplane context? In the case of LittleMonsters, Backplane provides site-wide “like” icons, social commenting, photo capturing and editing, along with integration with Google Calendar and Gmail, and more.

But the real key to Backplane’s community play, says Head of Marketing Sarah Ross (and early TechCruncher), is an i/o Ventures incubated sharing platform and browser extension called Cortex. Cortex was developed by developers, Eric Wolf and Joey Primiani, to be a simple way to integrate social functionality into how we surf the Web. As MG wrote at the time, instead of reworking the UI elements of Chrome, for example, Cortex adds a sharing overlay to any site. All you do is click you mouse and hold it down.

Up pops a prompt to share to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and more. It automatically finds the right image and title, allows you to add a message, and blast it out over social networks. The key is simplicity and speed. When Primiani hooked up with future Backplane co-founders Moore and now CEO Matt Michelsen, they were blown away by the technology and immediately set about acquiring it. Backplane officially announced the completion of its Cortex acquisition today, as well as the fact that the technology is powering all social syndication across Backplane.

Not only that, but on top of the $1.8 million the startup raised in seed funding (mentioned previously), Backplane has today closed a series A round of financing that adds to its already impressive array of Silicon Valley investors, including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Discovery Fund, Battery Ventures, Formation 8, and Advanced Publications Inc. While the startup is not sharing exact numbers, we have confirmed that the round is between $4 and $5 million, as the Wall Street Journal initially reported. That brings the startup’s total funding to over $6 million in just over a year.

The round came in a convertible note to give the startup more flexibility when raising its series B, as the WSJ reported. The LittleMonsters community is in controlled public beta, and by controlled, we mean that there were hundreds of thousands of signups for early testing. TechCrunch got an early look at Gaga’s Backplane community, which you can check out here.

Among other things, the community offers some nifty chat features, as users can instant message each other in any language and have it translated in realtime into the recipient’s language of choice. The CEO told us that about half of the site’s early testers hail from Brazil, with interest from China, and others. No doubt this will help make Backplane sites into international hubs of conversation about Lady Gaga, and soon many more groups and brands. In these bits of tech genius alone, one starts to see why there’s been so much early interest from Silicon Valley executives. Though it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the backing of Gaga Nation.

LittleMonsters.com is slated to go live this spring, with further communities going live over the course of the year.

For more, check out Backplane at home here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook plans to convert business pages to the new Timeline format as early as the end of February when the company will host an invitation-only marketing conference in New York City, according to AdAge.

Marketers have been dreaming up ways to use Timeline for businesses since the new profile debuted at f8, but Timeline hasn’t been an option for brands because the social network requires companies use pages instead of profiles.

Timeline could be a significant improvement for pages, which users typically visit once to Like but they rarely return or spend much time on them. Giving brands more control over their presence on the social network is important for Facebook to maintain an advantage over Twitter and Google+. The change, however, could affect page tab apps, in which some companies have heavily invested over the past few years.

Page owners can look forward to a new design that allows for more branding with a cover photo and the option to resize posts. On the current pages, posts get easily lost, but with the Timeline algorithm, more important posts are surfaced when a user scrolls. Users can more easily find content that was shared weeks or even years ago. With an update to Facebook pages, businesses might also gain the ability to make posts to the past, as users now can with Timeline to share their history. A car company, for instance, might share photos of old models or a drink company might post vintage commercials.

A big question remains: what will happen to tab applications? Many pages — from top global brands to small local businesses — have invested in iFrame apps to welcome users to their pages or provide additional experiences. The company has frequently changed the size of tabs, forcing developers to redesign their apps, and it could do so again.

We also wonder whether Facebook’s mobile product will begin to support page apps, particularly if the company plans to bring Sponsored Story ads to mobile devices soon. Most advertisers will want a custom landing page if they are running a campaign, but perhaps a unique cover photo will satisfy that need.

The last time Facebook redesigned profile pages in December 2010, business pages got a matching update in February. “We hope to make pages more consistent with Timeline in the future, but we have nothing further to share at this time,” a Facebook spokesperson says.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Here’s why social media marketing is broken: my company wants to launch a contest on our Facebook app and website and post about to all our fans and followers, post when we hit 1000 entries, and post again when the contest ends after 5000 entries. Sequencing like this was difficult because marketing team would have to monitor for those milestones to be reached, then manually rotate our apps and publish updates.

Social marketing platform Shoutlet today launches a way to turn the cacophony of disparate campaigns into a concerted push. It’s called Social Switchboard, it uses trigger-based campaign publishing, and your marketing department wants it.

Social Switchboard lets marketers schedule status updates, tweets, YouTube videos, emails, apps and more to be published when a trigger is hit, such as a Facebook Page reaching a certain Like count or a number of contest entries being submitted.

Shoutlet also has a new drag-and-drop application builder and an enhanced social CRM system for creating apps and choosing who to send marketing messages to. Next it’s building its own Ads API product that will leverage the CRM data and taps into Social Switchboard to launch ad campaigns alongside promotional apps and status updates.

I’m not worried for Shoutlet anymore. At least not until other social marketing platforms wise up and add trigger-based campaign publishing too.

[Image Credit: redcmarketing]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

UNO topped our list of fastest growing Facebook pages this week, perhaps in part because of what we mentioned last week, that app profile pages were removed on Feb. 1, spurring consolidation of some game pages.

Musicians were also popular, given that the Grammys were held Sunday. With Valentine’s Day this week, romantic films like “The Notebook” and “Titanic” saw significant gains. Pages on our list this week grew from between 464,600 to 1.1 million Likes. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

	Name	Likes	Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1.	UNO	8,933,532	602,344	+58,424	+1,198,190
2.	Intel	5,878,102	872,867	+94,643	+995,148
3.	Adele	18,026,955	1,079,767	+190,476	+943,523
4.	Facebook	61,461,128	1,212,637	+87,928	+634,879
5.	Titanic	15,920,906	847,646	+87,085	+624,036
6.	Whitney Houston	1,904,219	41,057	+338,617	+617,449
7.	McDonald’s	15,700,621	744,124	+78,024	+597,261
8.	Angry Birds	15,350,190	942,906	+77,268	+587,293
9.	YouTube	52,549,265	818,589	+81,181	+581,042
10.	Will Smith	26,737,765	857,114	+76,561	+529,991
11.	Harry Potter	41,286,908	736,976	+68,280	+524,531
12.	Bruno Mars	18,587,192	688,123	+78,242	+509,117
13.	Google	7,310,668	612,337	+65,956	+503,909
14.	Mr. Bean	18,955,337	632,180	+69,444	+501,417
15.	The Notebook	9,992,921	444,160	+73,483	+486,178
16.	Bob Marley	36,280,882	915,238	+60,592	+485,842
17.	Shakira	46,297,005	676,434	+69,173	+481,061
18.	Google Chrome	9,790,385	585,391	+62,890	+474,285
19.	Shrek	21,546,170	609,078	+59,154	+467,019
20.	The Simpsons	39,938,314	681,667	+63,541	+464,555

UNO has been using status updates to engage fans, while Angry Birds shared more photos. Angry Birds launched a Facebook version of its popular game on Monday. Musicians were popular, especially Adele who was on the “60 Minutes” program before her big win at the Grammys. Whitney Houston‘s page saw a surge in Facebook fans after the singer died Saturday. Actor Will Smith has been posting photos from the set of his latest film.

Google products were popular — Google,  YouTube and Google Chrome made the list. McDonald’s is apparently pairing its new chicken product marketing campaign with a CityVille promotion that might have influenced its growth.

“Titanic” has been on our list for the past few weeks because the movie is coming back to theaters soon in 3D, but as Valentine’s Day approached, it might have gotten another push. “The Notebook” jumped to No. 15 on our list as ABC Family began airing the romantic film from 2004. “Mr. Bean” also saw growth on the page after the trailer clip was released for the upcoming film.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Some page owners are seeing new prompts to invite email contacts to Like their pages.

The feature, which was previously buried under the Resources section of the “Edit Page” dashboard, is now included in the admin module on pages (see image right). This option seems to be available only for pages with a limited number of Likes. We have seen it on pages with fewer than 5,000 Likes but not on pages with more than 20,000.

Facebook first introduced the ability to invite email contacts to pages in December 2010. Up until a few days ago, the feature was called “Tell your fans.” This wording did not convey the feature’s function and might have been confusing for page owners who use the word “fan” to describe people who already Like their pages. “Invite Email Contacts” is much more direct and could lead more people to take advantage of the option when they create new pages.

Admins can use the feature to invite up to 5,000 email contacts.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Marin Software, a company that helps advertisers manage large online ad campaigns, has raised $30 million in a new round of funding.

Founded in 2006, Marin initially offered tools to manage search advertising campaigns, but it has expanded into display, mobile, and social media, and the company now bills itself as “the world’s leading online advertising management platform.” Marin says it doubled its customer base in the last year and now works with more than 1,500 advertisers and advertising agencies, who use the company’s services to manage $3.5 billion in annualized ad spending.

The new round was led by Asian investment firm Temasek, with funding from SAP Ventures (which, like Temasek, is a new investor in Marin), Benchmark Capital, Crosslink Capital, DAG Ventures, and Triangle Peak Partners. Founder and CEO Chris Lien said the money will be spent on building the sales and customer support teams, and on product development. He also said this will probably be Marin’s last round of private funding (it has raised a total of $80 million): “At some point in the future, Marin expects to be a public company.”

When asked what 2012 will hold for the advertising industry at large, Lien suggested that the shifts underway in 2011 (and before) will continue.

“In 2012, we expect to see ongoing migration of advertising dollars from offline media into online media as advertisers seek to have their marketing dollars follow audiences,” he said. “2012 will see continued growth of all forms of online media highlighted by the growth of search, display, social, and mobile.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

More than ever before, venture capitalists are digging in. To stay competitive and top-of-mind, VC’s are no longer loaning their advice and their capital, but actual “core” services that portfolio companies need. This shift isn’t necessarily new. For example, top VC firms like Kleiner Perkins and Greylock play a hands-on role in helping recruit talent. Recently, we’ve seen firms roll up their sleeves for another core competency: public relations.

More often, I’ll be pitched on a story on a startup by the in-house PR rep for an investment firm that has invested in the said startup. Traditionally, either the startup or an outside PR agency tends to do the outreach when it comes to launches, trend pieces, financings or other news items. And the rise in pitches from the VC firms themselves (as opposed to the startups) got me thinking about the evolution of the role of the VC, specifically in the context of PR. But in the past year or so, we’ve seen a rise in the addition of top PR and communications talent to these firms, specifically to help work with portfolio companies on PR strategy.

One of the first major hires in the industry was the addition of PR honcho Margit Wennmachers, co-founder of one of the largest technology and media PR firms OutCast Communications, to Andreessen Horowitz as a partner. At the time, Marc Andreessen told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher that Wennmachers’ brand building and PR experience would be a valuable asset to the firm and its portfolio. Mind you, Andreessen Horowitz wisely realized only a year after launching the firm that building a VC powerhouse would be more than just writing checks, but also a consultancy of sorts.

David Krane, Google’s former Director of Global Communications and Public Affairs, and one the company’s first PR reps back when it was just a startup, wears two hats at Google Ventures, where he is now a partner. He invests in startups but also helps Google Ventures portfolio companies with PR strategy as well.

in April 2010, Sand Hill VC Kleiner Perkins nabbed former head of communications for Hulu (and previous PR/marketing employee at Amazon and Microsoft) Christina Lee to head marketing and PR for the firm. Last fall, PR guru Kiersten Hollars (formerly of Outcast, Yahoo, Digg, and AOL) joined Wennmachers’ team at Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on scaling the marketing and PR efforts for the then 80 companies in the firm’s portfolio. And most recently we saw Google senior manager in PR Andrew Kovacs jump to Sequoia to help the firm’s marketing partner, Mark Dempster with PR and communications duties for the firm’s companies in the U.S. and Israel.

Clearly some of the brightest and most well-regarded talent in the technology PR industry are no longer just at agencies or in-house. As Emily Mendell, VP of communications for the National Venture Capital Association, tells me, the VC market is extremely competitive for deal flow. “There are a lot of firms chasing for deals in the hottest, early stage startups, and PR representation and communications strategy is just another service these firms can offer while at the negotiating table,” she says.

And technology PR is not an easy task—to do the job well, it requires a technical understanding of the product and the ability to digest and relay this information in a communicable way. Startups realize that having this on-hand at their investment firm is an asset to them, Mendell explains.

And many of the pr execs mentioned above are solely focused on helping portfolio companies as opposed to doing in-house communications for the firms themselves. Lee tells me that part of the trend of more VC firms bringing on PR talent is a reflection of how the role of communications is changing in the tech industry in general.

“Now smart entrepreneurs understand the value in being transparent with consumers, and the role of communications has risen to a strategic level,” she says. “PR is expected to play a big part in building brands and more and more startups are thinking about PR and branding at an earlier stage.”

Kleiner, specifically, is taking a holistic approach to company building, and part of this is providing communications and PR help to startups and companies, she explains.

Of course, there are a range of different ways which VC PR reps can help entrepreneurs and companies from simple tasks such as introductions to technology journalists to actually spearheading PR efforts for a product launch, to coaching companies on branding and messaging strategy to drafting press releases.

Another industry source tells me that while some firms are bringing on PR talent for the use of portfolio companies, others are trying to use PR to boost their own images, and promote their VCs to the press.

One factor that I believe is pushing the trend of building reps and even mini-agencies in-house is the rise in seed stage investing by these VC firms and the competitive market at this level. There are no shortage of VCs and angels that are willing to write checks at the seed level nowadays. Many firms can’t just get deal flow based on reputation alone. But the VC firms ability to be a ‘full-service’ agency can be a factor entrepreneurs consider when sitting down at the table. This is especially important for early-stage companies, who may not have the kind of money to hire a top-tier PR firm to handle PR, says one industry insider.

As mentioned above, part of this full-service package also includes recruiting, which is a trend that has been happening for some time now. Kleiner Perkins partner Juliet de Baubigny has been helping portfolio companies with human capital and recruiting for the past ten years. Greylock recently created a dedicated talent team to help its portfolio companies recruit effectively. Firms like Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia are also aggressively working to help startups network and recruit talent.

Interestingly, this ‘full service’ model has been offered by incubators like Y Combinator, TechStars and 500 Startups though both in-house talent as well as through mentorship. While it’s a stretch to call the VC firms mentioned above incubators, it’s certainly interesting to see the overall functionality of these large firms evolve with the current state of investing.

As firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and others create these full-service VC funds that not only dole out cash but come with in-house PR agencies, marketing resource and talent recruiter, there’s no doubt that this trend will filter down to smaller firms and funds.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch