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

One interesting thing to watch is how social networking platforms mature divergently as businesses around the world.

Sina Weibo, the public microblogging platform that has had a huge impact on online discourse in China, is veering down a path toward e-commerce and transactions after Alibaba took a stake worth $586 million in it last month. The platform is one of the two more influential social networks in China today, with the other being Tencent’s messaging app WeChat.

But unlike WeChat, Sina Weibo’s growth has slowed over the last year and its parent company Sina has had visible issues in monetizing the platform. (It feels a little bit like the heat Twitter had a few years ago for taking longer to bring in revenue-making products like promoted tweets and in-stream ads.)

“Weibo is pretty mature right now,” said Alibaba CTO Wang Jian in an interview. “It’s not in a fast growth period.”

In the Sina’s last earnings report, the company said Weibo made just under $50 million in revenue, or about 12 percent of overall advertising revenue. But investments in the company contributed to an $8.5 million operating loss for Sina last year.

Now with Alibaba’s investment, it looks like Weibo will take a different money-making path than its Western counterparts, which are more dependent on sponsored stories or in-stream ads.

“I think the best way to monetize Weibo is through e-commerce, not by ads,” Jian said. “That’s what I believe. That’s my personal thought. Weibo has a very good chance to integrate with the Alibaba business.”

It’s a win-win deal. Alibaba, which is veering toward an IPO, is China’s dominant e-commerce company and has an extremely data-driven culture. But it hasn’t been as successful with its own homegrown social networking efforts. At the same time, Sina isn’t widely considered to have the same caliber of technical talent as China’s other flagship Internet companies.

While Jian didn’t give a lot of detail on how they would integrate the two platforms, one could imagine that users could get targeted offers on goods and services related to things they’ve posted status updates about.  

“We just need time to find out how to have a synergy of data between the two companies,” Jian said. “Weibo just gave us a new challenge for that.”

As for Aliyun, the smartphone OS that Jian is overseeing, Jian says that he doesn’t think the platform will fit Weibo — which is sort of hard to believe considering that Weibo is a mobile-centric product.

“I don’t think Aliyun really fits the Weibo deal,” he said.  

While Tencent’s WeChat, which has surged to 190 million monthly active users over the past year, isn’t a direct competitor, Jian says it is in terms of other metrics.

“If you’re thinking about time that people spend on their devices, then you can say it’s a direct competitor. If you look at it from just a media perspective, I don’t think it’s direct competition. Two years ago, everyone spent time on Weibo, and now Weixin (WeChat) is becoming that app. It’s really a time spending problem.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ovuline, the big data-driven fertility tracker backed by $1.4 million in funding from Lightbank, Launch Capital and others, is today launching an upgraded version of its Smart Fertility product which now more accurately predicts ovulation, offering real-time feedback plus integration with “quantified self” devices like the FitBit and Withings.

Company co-founder and CEO Paris Wallace had previously founded Boston-based Good Start Genetics out of his Harvard Business School dorm room – a company which, incidentally, just announced $28 million in financing. During his four years there growing the business, he gained a lot of exposure to the fertility space, leading him to tackle what he refers to as the “least talked about public health issue” in the U.S. There are now 7.3 million people (men and women combined) who are struggling to conceive in the U.S. alone, and it’s something they generally suffer through alone.

With Ovuline, the idea is to give women the power to improve their chances at conception by going beyond traditional means, like basal temperature charting, for example.

A number of services and mobile apps offer very basic tools to monitor and track a woman’s fertility, but these tend to be either arithmetic-based methods which make estimates based on a woman’s cycle, or those which offer digitized charts where women input data like their basal temperature and other factors. But Ovuline goes a step further.

It allows for the manual entry of various data points which women working to conceive are already familiar with – things like basal temperature, cervical fluid analysis, ovulation test results, physical symptoms, mood, etc., as well as other metrics like sleep, weight, nutrition and activity. But now, through the integration with quantified self devices like the FitBit, it can also pull in some of this data automatically, like steps taken or sleep cycles, for instance.

Since its beta launch in June 2012, the company has grown to over 50,000 users, who have provided the service with more than 2.5 million of these data points. This data is the critical piece to Ovuline’s true value in this space. It uses machine learning techniques and crunches big data, which in turn has helped to create proprietary algorithms which more accurately predict a women’s ovulation – meaning the best time to get pregnant.

Now that it has data to build on top of, Ovuline can make real-time predictions immediately after a woman enters data and hits “submit.” Right away, the service (web or mobile) can tell the end user where they stand today, and what their next steps should be.

Of course, the bigger question is whether or not it’s actually working. Wallace claims it is, saying the company has received thousands of thank you’s from its users who have gotten pregnant after signing up for the service, sometimes as many as ten to fifteen emails per day. In fact, one of the company’s success stories actually comes from its CTO and machine learning expert, Alex Baron.

“Most people start families by – you know, having sex – but he started his by building an algorithm to figure out when his wife is ovulating,” laughs Wallace. (Baby Michael is now four months old.)

The more interesting data point around success rates, however, is the fact that of those who report they’ve become pregnant, the pregnancy is happening 60 days after they become Ovuline members. That’s three times faster than the national average, which is generally four to six months, Wallace notes.

Soon, Ovuline will begin to help its newly pregnant members, too, with the launch of a pregnancy tracking app later this year which will also integrate with quantified self devices to monitor key health indicators like activity levels and blood pressure, to help women have healthier pregnancies. This app and the fertility tracker will work with more devices in the future, but those discussions and deals are under NDA.

Ovuline is a freemium service, but the advanced features, including calendar integration, expert advice, and fertility predictions are available for a one-time fee of $10 on mobile, or $50 for both web and mobile. Sign up is here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Parse, the mobile back-end startup that Facebook recently bought to set up a new developer-focused business, just launched hosting. Parse  It’s meant to help mobile developers that have a desktop web presence or companion experience on the web. The acquisition has already given Parse a boost, with the number of apps it hosts up 33% to 80,000 since the deal was announced.

“People were building mobile apps using Parse. But when they wanted a web presence or a dot-com landing page, they were using the Parse for the log-in, but the website was being served from something else like Heroku or App Engine,” explained Parse co-founder Ilya Sukhar. “So we’re launching a fully featured web hosting platform.”

Sukhar said the project has been in the works for the last four to six weeks, even while the Facebook negotiations were going on.

The new hosting service lets developers host landing pages, and display user data retrieved using the Parse API. Say if a developer wants to show a leaderboard for their game on the web, they can do it using both the new hosting service and the standard Parse data product.

Parse Hosting comes on top of other products that help mobile developers manage push notifications and user identities and log-ins.

He added that the Facebook deal, which we had independently heard was worth $85 million excluding retention incentives, hadn’t scared away developers. They’re at 80,000 apps now, from the 60,000 apps they said they had when the Facebook deal was announced. “There was an interesting debate about whether people would move off Parse, but all of our metrics are up,” he said.

Facebook had won the deal to buy Parse even as many of the Valley’s best known companies like Apple, Yahoo and Dropbox had looked or expressed interest. They’re starting their very first business-to-business revenue stream through the Parse acquisition and had — like in the case of Instagram — promised the team a fair amount of autonomy to grow their products as they see fit. They’re not tampering with Parse’s SaaS-based revenue model.

He also said that the company hadn’t celebrated the deal yet. “We have a lot of stuff on our plate,” he said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @baigi.

Mobile gaming is a huge worldwide opportunity at the moment, having clocked in at $9 billion in 2012, and it is poised to grow further in the coming years. With the world’s 1 billion smartphones scheduled to almost double in number by 2015 and games responsible for a whopping 66 percent of all app revenue, it’s easy for anyone to do the math and see where this is going.

Game development continues to have a bright future, but only for those who can develop profitable titles. Pursuing such profitability is an exact science now, with monitoring analytics and continuous A/B testing having become the staple of game development. In fact, Zynga – the gaming company to have popularized (if not introduced) the use of analytics – has been often categorized as a big data company.

One can imagine metrics to be ‘levers’ that a game developer can push or pull to create a desired outcome. Some levers have a generous range of motion, while others are more limited. In the end a game developer’s task is essentially to figure out the perfect combination of lever positions that will produce the best financial outcome at the least cost. Notions of creativity, novelty and fun are all confined within the prism of this analytics-centric approach: They have wiggle room as long as they improve analytics. That’s the fundamental philosophy behind modern-day game development.

For those looking for a more visceral understanding of game analytics, I’ve set up a simple mathematical simulation that compares game performances across hypothetical retention and viral profiles. It’s in simple spreadsheet format and can be downloaded here. I’ll quickly list out the assumptions governing this simulation, after which I’ll explain the noteworthy conclusions one can draw from the numbers.

Imagine that a gaming studio has six games under its purview:

As the mobile gaming market continues to spew riches for the foreseeable future, it is imperative that modern day game developers structure their entire operations around the fundamentals of data analytics instead of trying to fit a metrics-based veneer over introverted, blind game development. Their jobs are basically to create digital entertainment products that activate the maximum possible number of highly viral users on a daily basis for the longest sessions.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At Disrupt NY 2013, Glider unveiled its SaaS for corporate teams to bring structure, clarity and reporting to the contract process much like Salesforce.com did for the sales funnel. The visual analytics tool should help shed light on the number of contracts closed, those outstanding and a host of other metrics to help executives get a better view of deal flow.

The service is meant to replace the massive “reply all” email thread and the Excel spreadsheets that have dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of rows listing the tasks necessary to complete a deal. With Glider, companies can manage sales contracts, non-disclosure agreements, partnerships and any contractual process used by the organizations. The service lets users see all of their open contracts in one place, request documents from legal teams, get quick approval from managers, sign documents and see exactly who and what is holding up any given deal.

Glider demonstrated onstage how an employee can import contracts into the Glider platform, track versions of the contract, manage approvals and collect digital signatures. The highlight came with the deal flow analytics. This showed how a larger organization can quickly see how the quarter is progressing, what deals look like, what will close and what will not. The service n users people to sign a contract and tasks that the individual and group members have completed or still need to do.

Glider supports most major file formats and is compatible with services, such as Box, Dropbox, Gmail and Google Drive. Contracts get emailed to other people on the team. Recipients can then view the document in a secure web link or download it as a Word file or PDF.

Glider uses password-based security, tracks the IP address of the user and serves a cookie to verify the signer’s identity. Documents are encrypted and the service uses SSL for communication security. The company says two-factor authentication is on the roadmap.

“We have modeled ourselves after Box,” said Co-Founder Eli Rubel. “Ninety percent Fortune 500 companies trust Box to use Box.

The company has initially built an HTML5 app for mobile, said Co-Founder Justin Thiele. The roadmap includes plans for native iOS and Android apps.

Co-Founder Eli Rubel said Glider, which took about four months to build, targets customers who have a deeper deal flow and need a better picture to help prepare for the end-of-quarter reporting to management or investors. They are still working through the cost, but it will most likely charge a monthly fee for unlimited users and additionally based on the number of contracts the company is processing.

The company has $1 million in seed funding from True Venture Partners and is seeking a Series A.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Adobe is announcing new predictive capabilities for Adobe Social — capabilities that should be particularly helpful to marketers wondering why some social media posts take off while others fall flat.

Bill Ingram, vice president for Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, walked me through the new features earlier today in advance of the Adobe Summit in London. Adobe is using historical data — both in aggregate and at customer-specific level — to predict the likely engagement level and sentiment around a specific Facebook post, and it can recommend keywords, content types, and timing that might lead to a better response.

The predictions integrate directly into Adobe’s social publishing tools. Customers can open up a widget showing the estimated range for the amount of Likes, comments, and shares a post will receive. They can also identify other metrics that matter to them, and Adobe will track and predict those as well. And before publishing, the service will notify them if there are things that could be improved — for example if it would be better to schedule a post for later, because the customer’s account posted similar content a few minutes ago.

To provide these kinds of recommendations, Ingram said that Adobe is analyzing the content of the posts, for example looking at keywords and content types (i.e., images vs. video). He also said that while there are other products that provide general content suggestions for social media updates, Adobe has access to unique user data, and that the product is “tuned to get smarter as data flows into the system.”

Adobe plans to release the predictive capabilities this summer, and to add support for social networks beyond Facebook later this year.

In addition, the company is announcing a partnership with SapientNitro that integrates the marketing agency’s EngagedNow product with Adobe’s Marketing Platform.

And it’s releasing its latest its Digital Index report. Most interestingly, the company says that globally, tablets are now driving more website traffic than smartphones (based on an analysis of 150 billion visits to more than 1,500 websites between January 2012 and February 2013).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

So, you’ve built yourself a nice little product. Maybe you’ve raised a small friends-and-family round; maybe you’re still bootstrappin’ on your own. Either way, now you’re looking to raise at least a million dollars to help with the next steps.

While there’s no perfect formula for stuff like this, these stats from AngelList’s Ash Fontana are a pretty good indication of the metrics you should be aiming for.

As part of a presentation at a startup gathering in Santiago, Chile this evening, Ash presented a slide outlining some ballpark metrics that startups should aim for before swoopin’ in for a big first round:

[Photo Credit: César Salazar of 500Startups]

As a Venture Hacker at AngelList, Ash’s job involves poring over tons of deals to try and work out exactly what makes a good deal go down. In a conversation I had with Ash earlier, he asked me to note that these numbers are just his rough estimates based on this insight; they’re not crunched directly from AngelList’s database.

The bulk of the slide is pretty self-explanatory — just consider each bullet point a sort of theoretical entry bar for companies looking to raise a $1M+ round in a given category.

If you’re a social company, you’d do well to have at least 100,000 downloads and/or signups before going after your million dollar round. If you’re running a marketplace or e-commerce company, you should be aiming for around $50k in revenue each month. If you’re going after the enterprise, you’ll want at least 1,000 paid seats at $10 per seat per month (or the equivalent for your pricing model); if you’re focused on big enterprise, you should lock down at least two huge (pilot) contracts.

You may note that “Product” and “Team” are crossed off at the top of the slide. This is from earlier in the presentation, when Ash reaffirmed just how important traction seems to be. Assuming that we’re talking about an average team with an average product (that is, unless your team has a very well-proven entrepreneur or two on its roster, or you’ve built some truly hardcore, one-of-a-kind tech,) traction is everything.

These numbers, of course, aren’t concrete. In fact, they’re very much ballpark figures. You shouldn’t expect to hit your 100,000th download and suddenly have every VC in the valley bangin’ on your door. If you’re able to get your stats up in these ranges and can score yourself some meetings, however, you probably won’t have too much trouble sealin’ the deal.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in March, Amazon Studios announced that it had ordered six comedy series pilots to debut on Amazon Instant Video, further proof that the current television model is desperate for disruption. Today those pilots are finally available, released into the hands of viewers here in the US and the UK.

Based on user feedback, Amazon will decide which of the pilots will be ordered for a full season available exclusively on Amazon’s Prime Instant Video network in the US and LoveFilm in the UK. In fact, Amazon surprised with two extra comedy pilots, as well as the simultaneous launch of six children’s series pilots which were ordered back in January.

While competitors like Netflix and Hulu are working on their own exclusive content offerings, Amazon has taken a different route. Hulu has been offering exclusive content for more than two years with a broad range of different offerings, whereas Netflix has gone big with one drama, House of Cards, delivered binge-style with a full season available at once.

Amazon, on the other hand, has decided to leave the power in the hands of consumers. User feedback will determine which of the total 14 pilots will become a real-life TV show based on ratings and reviews. Amazon will also monitor a number of other metrics like chatter on social media, focus group responses, and the general voice (or lack thereof) of the internet.

There are no hard and fast rules about how many series will be built into full seasons — it all depends on user feedback.

At first thought, I had some pretty serious reservations about this pilot-first, season-later ploy from Amazon. For one, it’s tough to fall in love with a show after 28 minutes, and only 28 minutes. And let’s say you do fall in love with Tallahassee, just a young guy in love in the middle of Zombieland, or the three charming young high school teachers in Those Who Can’t. How, then, do you stay interested while Amazon takes these shows back to the drawing board for full season production and development.

Yet, after speaking with the company about the reasons behind the decision (and seeing the content myself), it actually makes sense.

“To pick just one show would mean that we’re rejecting many other shows,” said Roy Price, Director of Amazon Studios. “We’re doing it this way presumably because we don’t believe in the guru model of television where we should just make decisions using our great wisdom. When you have the internet as a platform for your service, the right way to do this is to give people a sample and see what they like.”

As it stands now, a very small group of old rich people are the ones deciding which scripts become the shows we watch on Primetime and beyond. But what do they know? They might see me on the streets, but homie, they don’t know me. That’s why Amazon Studios deliberately wanted to do multiple series pilots at once, to offer a breadth of potential content to its users.

If you’re interested in checking out Amazon’s new comedy and children’s series, head on over to Amazon Instant in the U.S. or LOVEfilm in the UK and grab a bowl of popcorn. And be sure to tell Amazon what you think, lest you find yourself five months down the road wondering what became of your favorite characters.

We’ll be hitting you with a full review of the comedy pilots a little later in the day, but for now you can head on over to Amazon Instant to check them out yourself.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook ads provider SocialWire today announced that it has been accepted into the Preferred Marketing Developer program and awarded the Apps badge.

SocialWire provides a platform for advertisers to run self-serve or managed campaigns. It also offers an SDK to help companies integrate with Facebook Open Graph so that their websites are optimized for Facebook and more Sponsored Stories and targeting options are available to them. It’s for this that SocialWire received the Apps badge and gained entry to the PMD program. SocialWire CRO Bob Buch tells us the company is building a few more ads-related features and will be applying for the Ads badge soon.