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

Ditto, a startup that helps users virtually try on different pairs of eyeglasses, has launched an Indiegogo campaign to help fight a big threat — the company says it’s being sued by 1-800-CONTACTS and another company called Lennon Imaging Technology.

Ditto’s technology allows users to create webcam recordings of their faces, which they then use to see how different designer glasses will look with their facial shape and size. Both Lennon Imaging and 1-800-CONTACTS are claiming that this technology infringes their own patents. But Ditto’s campaign describes them as “patent troll” lawsuits — Lennon is a non-practicing company, meaning that it doesn’t have a product or service of its own, and Ditto co-founder and CEO Kate Endress said 1-800-CONTACTS (which is owned by WellPoint) didn’t purchase the patent in question until after the company’s CEO visited the Ditto website.

1-800-CONTACTS did not respond when I emailed for comment. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published its own blog post in support of Ditto saying that 1-800-CONTACTS has “a long record of using the courts to bully its competitors.” That prompted a complaint from the company’s lawyer saying that 1-800-CONTACTS is not a patent troll. The EFF writes:

Sure, the company is not a classic patent troll — a shell company that does nothing but buy patents and sue—but it’s little better. Patent trolls generally want to use the club of litigation to extort licensing fees. But all indications are that 1-800-CONTACTS isn’t interested in a license from Ditto. Rather, it wants to destroy the competition.

Indeed, Endress said she’s in a tough spot, where “we cannot afford to win” — in other words, the company doesn’t have enough money to defend itself in court, and even though Ditto has raised venture funding, the threat of litigation scares off any additional investment. The company has already had to lay off three engineers, Endress said.

That’s why the company has turned to Indiegogo to fund its legal efforts. (Endress said the money will only go towards legal costs.) So far, it has raised about $5,700 of its $30,000 goal. However, the campaign page states that Ditto is looking at $30,000 to $100,000 in legal fees over the next three to six months (and potentially much more afterwards), so I’m guessing Ditto could use a lot more help if possible.

Update: A 1-800-CONTACTS spokesperson just sent me the following statement:

1-800 CONTACTS has a history putting the consumer first by promoting competition. In fact, 1-800 CONTACTS spent years working in concert with consumer advocacy groups to support the passage of the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act. This legislation was passed by Congress and gives all Americans the right to their contact lens prescription so they can choose where to purchase contact lenses. 1-800 CONTACTS also compelled the largest contact lens manufacturers to sell to Internet retailers. Both efforts were successful and led to a more open and competitive market that has benefitted numerous online competitors and ultimately, millions of consumers.

As a leading vision retailer, 1-800 CONTACTS recognized the need to improve the online purchasing options for eyeglasses and began developing an enhanced virtual try on system that would vastly improve the consumer experience. As part of our due diligence when developing our virtual try on technology, we investigated the existing rights in this space, as is standard practice. The granted patent that 1-800 CONTACTS purchased in 2012 entitled “Interactive try-on platform for eyeglasses” was filed in 2001 and granted in 2006. Like most other companies operating a business that depends on technology, 1-800 CONTACTS purchased this patent for a reason – the patent covered what the business was doing so the patent either needed to be licensed or purchased. Ditto could have licensed or purchased the same patent, but chose to ignore it and launched their website with an infringing virtual try on feature anyway.

1-800 CONTACTS began working on our virtual try on system for Glasses.com long before Ditto was formed as a company. Glasses.com had a working demonstration of its more robust 3D virtual try on system running in 2011 – before Ditto launched its website in April 2012. Members of the 1-800 CONTACTS team visited Ditto’s website to try the virtual try on technology when it launched. Viewing competing products that are on the market is not unusual, and is in fact a responsible business practice.

1-800 CONTACTS has offered to discuss an amicable resolution to the lawsuit through licensing or other options, but instead of responding to our offer, Ditto has spent time and energy engaging in online discussions and issuing an inaccurate and misleading press release.

Ditto has found its strongest supporter in the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who has been quoted multiple times in blog articles and in Ditto’s press release. What Ditto and the EFF failed to disclose is that three members of the advisory board at the Electronic Frontier Foundation all work for Durie Tangri – the same law firm representing Ditto in this case. It is disappointing that the EFF concealed this inherent bias from the public, instead holding itself out as an impartial observer.

1-800 CONTACTS will launch our virtual try on technology next month, providing an enhanced consumer shopping experience. Our approach has taken longer to bring to market, as we developed a revolutionary virtual try on system customized for the iPad. We were honored to present our ground-breaking technology at TED in February, where we also demonstrated the app 1,650 times on 100 iPads.

Complaint 1-800-Contact v. Ditto by TechCrunch

999 016 – Ditto Motion to Dismiss With Memo (00354120) by TechCrunch

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In what is effectively a follow-on round, Brightpearl, the cloud software provider for multichannel retailers, has raised $8 million in Series B funding from previous backers Eden Ventures and Notion Capital. Both Eden and Notion seed-backed the UK company, before adding a further $5 million Series A in May 2011. This brings the total raised by Brightpearl to $14.5 million.

Brightpearl provides cloud software for small to medium-sized retailers, which integrates orders, inventory and customer data across multiple retail channels — both online and bricks ‘n’ mortar. The problem that it’s set out to solve is that whilst it’s arguably easier than ever to start an e-commerce business, even a blended off-line/online one, there’s fragmentation in terms of the number of channels that you’re expected to sell into. The headache here occurs when trying to manage stock/inventory across channels, and dealing with things like double-selling, support, delivery, and tracking customers from one channel to another.

Brightpearl’s cloud offering aims to take care of this heavy lifting, helping businesses scale and manage a multitude of SKUs across all of their online and brick-and mortar channels, with a “unified system for inventory, order, and customer data.” The customer data element is particularly noteworthy.

To that end, earlier this month, Brightpearl announced further multichannel support by adding integrations with Amazon, Bigcommerce and Shopify, claiming to make it even easier for retailers to accelerate growth through “more effective merchandizing, better customer data and fully synchronized inventory management”.

Since 2011, the company says that more than $600 million of gross merchandise value has been traded on its Brightpearl Commerce Acceleration Platform.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The bookend to Yahoo’s Big News Day — a major refresh of its photo sharing site Flickr — will see the company drop its Flickr Pro pricing tiers as part of a bid to compete better with Facebook/Instagram and the rest of the crowded market in the online photo space. But it is not getting rid of paid tiers altogether: it’s keeping an ad-free tier, called Ad Free, as well as a tier for power users, doublr, respectively priced at $49.99 and $499.99 for a year of use.

The Ad Free service, at $49.99, will do away with the advertising the runs along the right side of the current photo feed — and if today’s discussion of what Yahoo intends to do with ads on Tumblr is any indication, ads that may be appearing soon within your photo streams.

The doublr service (again with those dropped vowels… this had to have played some small role in warming the company to buying Tumblr), priced at $499.99, gives users 1 terabyte of extra space, on top of the 1 terabyte that they will already get free as part of a Yahoo account.

The Pro tiers — priced at $6.95 for three months, $24.95 for 12 months and $44.95 for two years — included unlimited uploads and storage, as well as no ads, and a particularly mean-spirited allowance: those who did upload pictures could download more than just a smaller version of them. (Meaning: those who didn’t pay up wouldn’t get the full copies until they did. Their originals have always been stored by Flickr.)

From what we understand from a person close to Flickr, dropping Pro isn’t going to make much difference to the company because Pro never did very well.

“It has always been a relatively small percentage of the overall user base,” our contact says, adding that while now-distant past CEO Terry Semel had made a big push on premium services, after his departure (and actually during his time) there was “virtually no investment made” in trying to develop or push the Pro tier.

Nevertheless, there are now currently Pro users wondering how exactly Yahoo will be compensating them for the rest of their annual subscriptions. Yahoo notes that as part of the changes it will be removing “pro” badges beside people’s names and people can no longer gift pro subscriptions. Strangely, in a bit of an AOL subscription move, Yahoo says it will continue to offer renewable subscriptions to pro to “Recurring Pro users.”

The Pro tier did have another role to play. Today, CEO Marissa Mayer recounted how the small-image download was what prompted her to rethink Flickr altogether. “When we looked across our services we asked, why are we doing that? That started a thought experiment,” she said. The decision was that Flickr no longer wanted to offer “degraded” images. “We keep your images and you have high resolution images everywhere which is a huge differentiator.”

But in the age of Dropbox, BitTorrent, Mega and more, there are so many places to store pictures online today: will anyone really want to pay such a premium price for that place to be Flickr and Yahoo? In any case, as one person has pointed out already, why users wouldn’t just register for two accounts rather than pay for the extra space?

In the meantime, Flickr users are taking a page from the Tumblr book of user reviews, and laying out their vitriol about the changes over here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s easy to forget that Yahoo has had a long on-again-off-again love affair with online video. Remember Broadcast.com, which kicked off the Mark Cuban Era? But you might not remember that, because other online video platforms long ago left Yahoo in the proverbial dust. Today, as Yahoo streamed its Flickr product and Tumblr acquisition announcements, we were given a demonstration of why Yahoo has been left in the dust — and why it’s had to turn to acquisitions for help in, well, nearly every department.

The event was nearly impossible to watch. Because, well, you know, Yahoo! As you’ve heard by now, Yahoo has been on an impressive buying spree over the last month — including, by the way, a scuppered deal to boost its video tech and buy the “YouTube of France,” Dailymotion — snatching up a new company seemingly every week.

But today, the company raised the bar even higher with the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, hoping to turn back the clock and gain access to Tumblr’s millions of young users.

The company held a media event in New York City this afternoon to formally announce the acquisition — along with sharing the news that it will be moving into new digs in Times Square — but something was stealing the spotlight from Mayor Bloomberg and Marissa Mayer. And that would be Yahoo’s questionable video tech. Those who watched the event from home spent most of that time enjoying a hiccupy stream. Or none at all.

You can see the error message above. The video-streaming technology is Yahoo’s own, running through Yahoo! Screen, first launched back in 2006, renamed Screen from Yahoo Video. With all the acquisitions Yahoo has been making of late, it makes one think that, for its next acquisition, Yahoo should go for some new video technology. Of course, after Tumblr, it may be broke.

But, come on, Yahoo has somehow become the Rudy story of the tech industry. At the very least, someone should launch a Kickstarter page so that it can continue to make acquisitions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today is turning out to be quite a memorable Monday — hot on the heels of Yahoo’s Tumblr acquisition announcement, online food ordering services GrubHub and Seamless have officially confirmed that the two companies will merge into one as we previously reported.

Many of the juicy details — like what this new entity will actually be called — are still shrouded in secrecy, but the announcement has shed some light on how the new company’s executive structure will be set up. GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney will take the reins as the entity’s chief executive, while Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky is slated to become the company’s president.

As our own Rip Empson pointed out on Friday, the tie-up is set to take place as the online good delivery and ordering space has begun to heat up. A handful of new startups have their respective eyes set on cracking the market (think ChowNow and HealthyOut, just to name a few), while more entrenched players like Delivery.com continue to putter along.

Now that two of the most prominent companies in that space are dedicating to combining forces, we may soon see some of those small fries get pushed out. After all, by combining the resources of both companies (which jointly generated over $100 million in revenue in 2012), the new combined entity will have enough resources to grow its business both in the United States and in the U.K. where Seamless has maintained a foothold for some time. Of course, this whole shebang is still subject to regulatory approval, so it’s possible someone could raise those same sorts of anti-competitive concerns down the road. For now though, I suspect that more than a few people are just happy knowing that they’ll be able to order even more food from a single service.

Developing…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ok, admittedly, the headline is a slight misrepresentation. However, in the best online dating tradition, not only did it hopefully catch your attention but it has more than a grain of truth, too.

YouLike, a startup backed by the founders of Turkish eBay clone GittiGidiyor (which in 2011 was acquired by the online auction giant for $217 million), describes itself as an interest-based social network and dating site that takes into account a user’s dislikes, as much as what they do like, when helping to find likeminded people to friend or date.

Unlike a lot of other dating sites that ask you to fill out a lengthy and data-heavy questionnaire or simply pen an open-ended profile, YouLike presents a series of fun questions ranging from what activities you love or hate, your food and entertainment tastes, or your relationship preferences. Each question requires a simple multiple choice response — “love”, “like”, “dislike”, “hate”, or “skip” — which forms the basis for how YouLike matches users.

This home-grown approach to generating a user’s interest graph is also intended to produce less so-called dirty data that simply importing a user’s Facebook ‘Likes’ (a technique used by other dating sites and interest-based social networks) can produce. Not only is the site intentionally starting out clean, but Zuckerberg’s social network famously lacks a ‘Dislike’ button, which for YouLike’s match-making purposes would only tell half the story. After all, they do say that opposites attract.

So, for example, YouLike might ask a user to rate an activity related to “cooking” or “shopping”, or to express their disposition to “waking up early” or “never being late”. Other questions drill down to a user’s dating preferences more explicitly, such as “a guy should always make the first move” or whether or not “kissing on the first date” is the done thing.

This data is then employed when visiting another user’s profile. Members can compare their rated likes and dislikes with those of a prospective match. The results are displayed as “you both like”, “you both dislike”, “you like but he/she dislikes”, and “you dislike but he/she likes”.

The idea is to surface not only a user’s interests but their “morals, habits and beliefs… and the things that make them angry or happy,” says the Istanbul-based startup. Arguably that’s a much better reflection of how people really click (or don’t) in real life, since not all differences of opinion or taste are weighted equal in importance and aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker when it comes to matters of the heart.

However, whether or not this amounts to enough of a USP for YouLike to cut through the plethora of online dating sites (or broader interest-based social networks) that already exist is a different question entirely. It’s also a question that YouLike isn’t shying away from. “Online dating is a highly saturated industry with many competitors fighting to find people looking for love online,” says YouLike co-founder Levent Gültan. “Many start-ups try to differentiate themselves by playing the innovation card, however very few to none has successfully replicated the track record of OkCupid or HowAboutWe.”

As canned statements go, that’s an unusually honest appraisal of the status quo and the difficulty faced by any new entrant in the online dating sector. But that isn’t stopping Gültan and YouLike’s other co-founders, which include Ersan Özer who previously founded a Turkish dating network, from giving it a shot. In the end, however, the site’s success will ultimately hinge on if users like, dislike or skip it entirely.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

BrandYourself is expanding its efforts to take on the big names in the online reputation market (particularly Reputation.com) with the launch of a new version of its service.

The company started out as a fairly simple self-service tool for trying to improve your presence online, for example by creating a website and other content to push down undesirable results when someone Googles your name. (It has become increasingly focused on Google results over time.) The basic service is free, but BrandYourself charges $10 a month for additional features and usage.

With BrandYourself’s freemium, self-service product, it seemed to be serving a difference audience than Reputation.com, but now the newer startup is challenging its more-established competitor in a direct way. With a recently-launched concierge service, users aren’t just presented with a list of to-do items for improving their Google results — they can also pay BrandYourself team members to work with them on a strategy and actually do the work for them. So if, say, you don’t have the time create and maintain your own personal website, BrandYourself create and maintain one for you. And co-founder and CEO Patrick Ambron said that where Reputation.com can cost thousands of dollars per month, BrandYourself’s concierge services can cost as little as $200 or $300.

Why the dramatic price difference? Ambron insisted that it’s not because BrandYourself delivers lower-quality, cheaper work — he showed me one of the websites created for a BrandYourself customer and it did look like a real personal page. In contrast, he showed me content that he said had been created through his account with Reputation.com, and it was basically just an empty template. (I emailed Reputation.com to discuss how the company saw itself stacking up against BrandYourself, but I did not receive a response.)

The big difference, Ambron said, is that existing online reputation services are built around a model of high acquisition costs and low retention rates — they pay for a lot of advertising to attract customers, and those customers don’t stick around for very long, so the companies have to charge high rates. BrandYourself, on the other hand, can treat its free tools as the marketing funnel for its paid version and concierge service. Plus, Ambron said that with lower prices, customers can use BrandYourself on an ongoing basis.

“We’re really trying to fix the online reputation space, ” he said. “Until it was only meant for rich people and it was notoriously ineffective.”

In addition to the concierge service, BrandYourself is launching a new interface that makes it easier, among other things, to submit links that you want to promote in your Google results. And there’s a new report card showing users BrandYourself’s score of their current search results, the progress that they’ve made with the service, and details about who is actually visiting your BrandYourself website.

The company says it has been used by more than 200,000 people. It has also raised more than $1.5 million in funding and is now based in New York City.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the big new world of business intelligence, RJMetrics has found a market helping ecommerce companies easily analyze operations data and make smarter decisions as a result. Big startups have signed on, including Fab, Bonobos, Threadless and thousands of smaller businesses. Today, the momentum has landed the Philadelphia enterprise startup a $6.5 million first venture round led by Trinity Ventures.

SaaS BI, as online business analysis software is called within the industry, is full of competitors. Tableau Software, which is planning to IPO, along with GoodData, Domo and others, have been successfully selling to big companies who need complex integrations to best analyze their own data. On the low end, Datahero and Chartio provide quick and inexpensive ways for a small business to get some quality integrations.

RJMetrics has focused on what ecommerce companies need, Moore explains, although he notes that its clients range from online gaming companies to nonprofits. The secret isn’t some magical new type of BI software, but a better focus on lucrative online transactions businesses. If an online retailer wants to analyze how colors of different types of hats are selling against each other, for example, a non-technical sales analyst at the company could go into RJMetrics and quickly create a visual explaining what’s happening.

The company promises to replicate client data to hosted, secure servers and optimize it for analysis within seven days, versus the months required for more complex products, with a set of APIs developed around systems that ecommerce companies are already using. Then it makes a dashboard of data visuals available to the company, including key stats for transaction businesses, like customer lifetime value, repeat purchase probability, and cohort analysis on database segments. This lets a company answer questions like which types of customers are likely to regularly buy red fedora hats. For clients with technical staffers, it provides access for them to run their own queries on more complex data sets hosted on its own servers. Prices for the basic version of the online service start at $500 per month.

Fab cofounder Jason Goldberg has written effusively about his experience with RJMetrics, and how its analysis helped him prove Fab’s worth to investors when it raised $40 million in 2011.

From a fundraising standpoint, providing access to the RJ data basically said to the VC’s, “here we are, here’s the data, we’ve got nothing to hide, take a look and decide for yourself if you want to pursue investing in Fab.” Effectively, we turned the pitching on its head. Since the RJ data updates several times per day directly from our database, it was many times more powerful than providing powerpoints and excel spreadsheets. This was the real stuff, auto-updating! And, since RJ enables all the data to be downloaded into excel, the analysts at the VC firms were able to do all of their own analysis on the front end of the investment process.

The core RJMetrics product grew out of Moore’s own data analysis work (which has separately resulted in some great guest posts for TechCrunch, like this formative 2009 analysis of Twitter user behavior). The new funding round, which includes participation from existing investor SoftTech VC, will go towards sales and marketing. With the overall growth in the Saas BI industry, Moore says it’s time to focus on the ecommerce part of it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Until now, you’ve had to track your free storage on Google products separately. It was just another thing that Google hadn’t brought together to make it easier on users. Today, the company announced that you’ll now have 15GB of free storage to share between Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos. Google Apps customers are getting a bump for Drive and Gmail to the tune of 30GB.

This falls in line with what Google has been pushing along with its Chromebook laptops — one huge cloud to manage all of your stuff. The company says that with this change in approach you’ll no longer be limited to a 25GB upgrade for Gmail, meaning if you grab more space for your Google products, it’s shared everywhere.

Also, it’s a push for unification and a nice shove for the “Drive” brand, which now serves as your online hard drive for everything…not just documents. It’s easier for consumers to get their heads around thinking of their email being stored on their “Google Drive.”

Here’s a look at the updated dashboard to check in on how much space you have left, which should be rolling out soon:

Here’s a look at the existing dashboard, which doesn’t push the 200GB option like the new one does, and still lists the 25GB upgrade, which also bumped your Gmail storage up. Confusing, right?

This approach will help Google onboard new Android users as well, as it’s much easier to grasp one number that applies to storage, much in the same way that Apple’s iCloud works. For example, when a new Chromebook user opens their laptop for the first time, they’re given free Drive storage, but that approach isn’t complementary to the rest of Google’s services.

The storage will be important to those uploading photos on Google+ though, which wants you to share your full-sized images, specifically if you’re a photographer. It’s easy to run out of space after sharing a few hundred of those. For Google, this makes upselling storage much easier, especially if someone is heavy on uploading photos and not so much filling up their allotted email storage.

The sweet spot for Google would be to get as many users to invest in $9.99 for 200GB a month as possible. This is more space than most will ever need, but the comfort that comes along with not worrying about running out of space is worth the 10 bucks for most. As Google continues to unify all of its products, that extra space might come in handy. For enterprise App customers, it’s one less thing to worry about when managing an entire team’s worth of accounts.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch