They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result.

That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.

To be clear, the site is not about Easy Living turning into a social network itself — there are no followers in different categories, and users cannot “pin” content on the site (not yet, at least) — but the borrowing of the image-based layout, big on images and shorter on text, is unmistakeable.

There are others that have noted how Pinterest has affected the development of web-based content: sites like Quora have topic boards, for example, that also speak to the evolution of content discovery from straight linear timelines to those based on subjects.

This could be one of the first examples of a magazine’s website taking that to heart. It’s a fitting one: Easy Living’s subject matter is squarely in the area of lifestyle, home and fashion, three areas where Pinterest has particularly done well, picking up millions of pinners in the process.

The drive to make magazines more in the mold of hot web properties is something that we may see a lot more of in future, as publishers take tips in their attempt to keep their readers (and advertisers) loyal in the face of a wave of sophisticated (and free) online content. Let by companies like Pinterest.

At Conde Nast, this looks like it is just one part of a big push that Conde Nast is making into digital: today the publisher revealed in London that it is now selling 200,000 digital editions of its UK magazines, and now has 965,000 Facebook fans for its various magazines. Those magazine’s twitter feeds, it said, has nearly has many followers.

It now has a total of 13 iPhone apps, but it looks like tablet content might be a major point of investment in the months ahead:  it said that Vogue UK will start publishing a monthly iPad edition from September; and that 28 percent of its readers now own a tablet, with that number even higher among some of its titles: in the case of Wired UK, 50 percent of its readers own a tablet. With GQ, it’s 42 percent. Smartphones still blow all that out of the water: 90 percent of Conde Nast’s UK readers use smartphones, with more than half of them iPhones.

Still, there is more opportunity to get those mobile types more engaged in Conde Nast content: the company says that only 10 percent of its site traffic is coming from mobile devices.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Israeli company BIScience has a launched a new product called AdClarity, which it says will give advertisers more data than they’ve ever had about their competitors’ advertising plans.

CEO Orey Gilliam notes that the online advertising landscape has evolved to the point where there’s rarely a direct link between advertiser and publisher but rather “a complex deployment chain of ads.”Take your normal banner ad. Just by looking at it, you can tell who the advertiser is, and the publisher, but the intermediaries — the ad networks, agencies, and affiliate networks — aren’t apparent, leaving you in the dark if you really want to understand how a campaign was executed. With AdClarity, on the other hand, BiScience claims you can see exactly where a campaign ran, which mediators were used, and what the ad creative looked like.

There were, Gilliam acknowledges, already “hacks” to obtain some of this data, but none as comprehensive as AdClarity: “There are no solutions that do this across sites, calculate share of voice, report trends and add value to marketers.”

BIScience previously released an ad data product called GeoSurf, and it says GeoSurf customers include CPX Interactive, Playfish, Peanut Labs, and Miniclip. The larger goal, Gilliam says, is not just to serve individual advertisers, but also to become the “system of record” for the industry as a whole.

“Right now we are focused on the display channel and geographical targeting, but in the near future we are adding the mobile, social and video channels which cover their demographics and category targeting as well,” Gilliam says. “Once all is in place we will be able to provide actionable insights and analysis across channels, geographies, demographics and categories.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu, a site that serves as a platform for academics to share their research papers and to interact with each other. Note that Price is not unbiased in this discussion — should the Research Works Act pass, it would decrease the number of papers the site would be able to easily distribute among researchers. But, as he explains, his viewpoint is shared by many academics. Update: The original version of this article had an issue with some text getting stripped — the full article is now here.

Poorly thought-through copyright bills seem to be popular in Congress these days.

Congress is currently considering a bill called “The Research Works Act”, whose purpose is to restrict public access to publicly-funded research. The bill is sponsored by large academic publishers who are keen to keep all research, including publicly-funded research, behind paywalls in perpetuity.

Academics are up in arms about this bill, and so are universities, and funding bodies. Over 5,500 academics have signed a boycott of Elsevier, who is the largest academic publisher, and one of the main sponsors of the bill. Elsevier is the target of the boycott not only because of its support of the Research Works Act, but also because of the increasingly high prices that it is charging for its journals.

Making research accessible: the open access mandate

Currently the US government provides about $30 billion of funding every year for research in biology and medicine. This funding is dispensed by a federal agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

As part of its “open access mandate”, the NIH requires that any NIH-funded research has to be made freely accessible 12 months after publication. There can be a 12 month paywall, during which the publishers can recoup their costs, but after 12 months, the paywall has to come down. The thinking here is that the US taxpayer should not have to pay for research twice: once to fund it, and a second time to read it.

The aim of the Research Works Act is to reverse this open access policy, and ensure that all research remains behind publisher paywalls in perpetuity, even if it has been funded by the public.

Journal publishers have managed to convince two members of Congress, Carolyn Maloney (NY) and Darrell Issa (CA) that this Act is in the interests of the American public.

Journal publishers have two arguments in favor of the Research Works Act. I’ll refer to these publishers generically as ‘the journal industry’, though it’s worth noting that a there is a minority of journal publishers who don’t support the Research Works Act.

Journal Industry argument (1): The moral argument

The journal industry thinks that it is morally wrong for the government to ask for publicly-funded research to be freely accessible to the public.

The way the research process works is like this:

1. An academic does some research, often funded by a government grant
2. The academic writes up a paper and submits it to an academic journal
3. The journal publisher adds some value to the paper, mainly formatting and secretarial services, and then publishes the paper.

The journal publishers believe that the public funding of research stops at step 2, where the academic submits the paper to a journal. At that stage, the journal publishers argue, the academic is free to share their paper with the world.

However, in step 3, the journal publishers add some value to the paper, which we can call the “publisher delta”; this delta, or added value, consists mainly in formatting and secretarial skills around the organization of peer review (the peer reviewing itself is done for free, by academics).

The publisher delta is something they own, and is the result of private investment, rather than government funding. They believe that if an academic wants to share that publisher delta with the world, they should have to ask the publisher first.

In the eyes of the journal industry, it’s unfair, and a case of unwarranted government intervention into private markets, that the government should mandate that the publisher delta has to be shared with the public after 12 months.

Journal industry argument (2): The Sustainability argument

The public has a commitment to fund scientific research, and, as part of that commitment, it is wants to ensure the successful distribution of research.

The journal industry has historically supported itself by charging for access to research papers. It believes that the government’s open access mandate threatens the sustainability of the journal industry.

In particular, it thinks that, with the open access mandate, research institutions will stop subscribing to the journals, and instead decide to wait 12 months to get the research for free.

As a result of this, revenues in the journal industry will drop, leading to the whole journal industry collapsing. If the journal industry disappears, the public will lose out, as it will lose its primary distribution model for research.

The flaw in the moral argument: customers should be allowed to negotiate for better business terms

The US government provides about $30 billion of funding each year for research in biology and medicine. In return, it gets around 80,000 published articles.

In the pre-web days, it cost quite a lot to distribute papers around the world. As a result, the US government understood that, if it was going to support distribution, it was going to have to offer relatively attractive distribution terms to the journal publishers. In particular, it was going to have to allow journal publishers to keep taxpayer-funded research behind paywalls in perpetuity. It was considered that no weaker terms would cover the cost of distribution.

Now, in the days of the web, distribution of content is dramatically cheaper. Correspondingly, taxpayers should be getting better distribution terms for the money they are investing in research. In particular, they should be able to read the research they have funded for free, at some point after publication, instead of being confronted with paywalls that exist for perpetuity.

To reflect the idea that the public should be getting a better deal, the National Institutes of Health, the dispenser of the US government’s $30 billion annual biomedical research budget, enacted its open access mandate in 2008. It’s this open access mandate that the journal industry wants to reverse.

Not only this, but the purpose of the Research Works Act is to make it illegal for the US government ever to negotiate for better distribution terms for taxpayer-funded research.

The journal industry wants the distribution terms that made sense in the pre-web days written into law, so that the US government can never change those terms. Economically handcuffing the US government like this would be a great outcome for the journal industry, and a terrible outcome for the public.

The moral argument carries no weight: clearly a customer who is buying a product should be allowed to seek better terms. In this case the customer is the US government, who is buying published scientific articles on behalf of the public.

A monopsonistic situation

The US government does, however, have to be careful with what it asks for. It is a monopsony in this situation, i.e. a single buyer. It funds virtually all the academic research into biology and medicine in the US. It therefore gets whatever it asks for, and so it needs to be careful that what it asks for is, indeed, in the interests of the public. It does not want the journal publishers to go out of business.

This pushes the focus onto the Sustainability argument. The journal industry argues that the US government’s open access mandate jeopardizes its revenues, and thereby puts the whole scientific distribution model at risk.

The flaw in the Sustainability Argument: revenues and profits in the journal industry are at record highs

The US government’s policy has been in place since 2008, so there are 3 years of revenue data to look at.

The top three academic publishers are Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. From 2008 to 2010:

• Their combined revenues grew 11% from $4.7 billion to $5.3 billion.
• Their profits grew 17% from $1.6 billion to $1.9 billion.

It’s worth noting that these healthy revenue and profit increases occurred during a global recession.

The reasons that revenues have been rising are:

1. Journal subscription prices have been going up
2. The open access mandate hasn’t led departments to cancel their subscriptions

To be research-active, departments have to have the latest research. They can’t unsubscribe, and wait 12 months to get access to free research that is a year old.

The strong revenue and profit growth in the academic publishing industry leads one to wonder what Carolyn Maloney and Darrell Issa were thinking when they said that the US government’s open access policy would jeopardize their revenues and their business model. How did they reconcile the tale of woe that the journal industry has been telling with the annual reports of the journal publishers, which tell of growing and thriving businesses?

The strategic significance of The Research Works Act

The journal industry maintains a very strong grip on academic departments: they can keep on increasing subscription prices, and the departments have to pay up. You cannot be in business as a research institution without access to the journals. That grip currently shows no sign of loosening.

The effect of the Research Works Act would be that the journal industry would have a similarly iron grip on the US government, by making it illegal for the government to negotiate for better distribution terms for research.

Strategically the Research Works Act would be an amazing coup for the journal industry.

The journal industry has two paymasters in the US:

• the research institutions who buy the journal subscriptions
• the US government who funds almost all of the research.

The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up.

Fortunately, there is another paymaster, the US government, who can negotiate for better distribution terms for taxpayer-funded research. With the journal industry squeezing departments with price hikes over the last 15 years, the US government has managed to score a win for the public with its open access mandate in 2008.

If the Research Works Act passes, the journal industry will be able to continue squeezing departments with price hikes, and the only other major negotiating force, the US government will have been gagged. It would be a genius heist by the journal industry.

What next?

The journal industry is very good at lobbying. Somehow it managed to convince two members of Congress, Carolyn Maloney, and Darrell Issa, that the Research Works Act is good for the American people. Through a lack of scrutiny and care, Maloney and Issa are willingly embracing the handcuffs that the journal industry wants the US government to wear.

The brands of the journal publishers supporting the Research Works Act are currently in free-fall within the academic community. Hopefully Congress will notice this, and apply some scrutiny to the journal industry’s arguments for the Research Works Act.

Two excellent blogs for keeping up with the discussion around the Research Works Act are:

• Tim Gowers’s blog, one of whose posts sparked the Elsevier boycott
• Michael Eisen’s blog. Michael is the founder of the open access journal, PLoS.

The Elsevier boycott is gathering momentum on The Cost of Knowledge site. A good resource page of further links is maintained by Michael Nielsen here. The text of the Research Works Act is here.

You can contact Carolyn Maloney and Darrell Issa via their webpages:

• Carolyn Maloney’s Congressional page
• Darrell Issa’s Congressional page

A development in the last few days is that five members of Congress have proposed a counter-bill, called the Federal Research Public Access Act, which requires that virtually all federally research be accessible within 6 months of publication.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Bindu Reddy is the CEO of MyLikes and was formerly Group Product Manager at Google. She was the first product manager for the project that evolved to become Google+. Her Google+ profile can be found here.

Larry Page recently announced that he is quite thrilled with Google+’s explosive growth — with 90 million registered accounts and 80% of the people engaging on a weekly basis across all Google properties. The problem, of course, is that very few of these 90M users are actively publishing on Google+. The Google+ strategy of fine-grained sharing of personal content using Circles has not been very effective. It takes a lot of effort to create and maintain circles, and Facebook has proven that most users seem to be comfortable sharing personal content such as family albums and baby pictures with their complete social graph.

It is indeed a tall order for Google+ to win against Facebook in this area of communicating and sharing with your friends and family as it needs a significant exodus of a your social graph from Facebook.

One area where Google+ seems have gained traction is public sharing and broadcasting – a la Twitter. It has been impressive to see Google execute nimbly by adding multiple features to emerge as the iPhone of publishing platforms.

However, in order to take considerable user attention away from Facebook, Google+ needs to solve the biggest issue with public sharing — it is far less universal compared to communicating with friends and family.

There were 60 million active content creators on Twitter. Compare this to the 2 billion-plus Internet users and 800 million active Facebook users. Even if you include the few million users who are active in other public places like MySpace and Tumblr, only around 5 percent of the world’s Internet population is currently sharing on public profiles.

In order to make public sharing universal, user behaviour needs to change dramatically. The good news is that Google touches pretty much every Internet user and is in a great position to make this happen. Here are some ideas on how they can do this:

1. Help people build a meaningful audience

Most new users who start Google+ or Twitter accounts discover that it is really hard to get a following. Even importing Facebook or email contacts doesn’t help, because one-way follow semantics result in only a few of those contacts following you back.

The suggested-user list approach only serves to make things worse. New users end up following a bunch of famous personalities, with whom they do not have any meaningful interactions. Some brave souls end up posting a few times, but after seeing little or no engagement on their posts, give up pretty soon.

Behavior in online communities is very-peer driven and when people see similar, like minded people posting and interacting with others, they tend to follow suit. Google has the technology chops to suggest following these types of people instead of celebrities.

If we could get people to post about topics that they care about and get them to connect with people who both care about the same topics and are at the same audience level, we will see a lot more high-fidelity content and engagement as opposed to simply re-sharing the most popular image/video on the web.

For example, I am into technology, politics, fashion and food. As part of their onboarding process, Google+ could prompt me to post on these topics (even surfacing existing conversations as inspiration) and based on these posts suggest I circle other people who have the same interests and are likely to interact with me.

Over time, suggesting more of these kinds of relevant, actively engaged people, not only ensures that new users connect with people they want to meet, but also rewards activity with a larger audience.

This new “interest graph” is inherently a lot more valuable to the user than the “social graph” which simply moves your offline friends online.

The serotonin kick that you get from having strangers taking the time to read your post and make intelligent comments will soon get addictive, and kick-start a virtuous cycle of publishing and consumption.

2. Make public sharing safe and clean

One of the biggest issues with sharing publicly is having to deal with trolls, stalkers and unwanted spam comments/messages. I can tell from personal experience, that this issue is exacerbated if you are a woman. This is one of the main reasons you don’t see that many women sharing on Google+.

Google+ needs to identify and actively deactivate spam accounts who post irrelevant links on posts. While everyone should be allowed to like and re-share your posts, by default Google+ should only allow for comments with no-moderation from people you circle. All other comments should only be posted once the commenter has been reviewed by the publisher. Again technology could help with automatic flagging of comments for review.

Of course, users like Robert Scoble, can and will choose to turn off moderation but my bet is a large number of people would rather review comments in some way before having them show up on their profiles. In contrast, Twitter avoids this problem by simply not having any commenting features.

3. Get people to share on Google+ when they are already sharing elsewhere

Email is still one of the primary ways people share information with each other. Every day, millions of videos, links to articles and documents are shared via email.

Just like Google calender integration, Gmail could detect when you are sharing a public link/video and automatically cc that message to post on your public profile. This feature would immediately give Google millions of new active publishers.

Similarly, users on Blogger and YouTube should be able to share blog posts and comments by checking a box that gives them the option to share the content on Google+.

Allowing the user to choose and customize the post that is published on Google+ will ensure that Google+ posts continue to have high fidelity and user profiles don’t turn into noisy “dead-feeds” of information.

—

Twitter has already shown the world how much of an impact public sharing can have even with a small percentage of people doing it. One can only imagine how much bigger the impact will be if this number becomes 5 times what it is now.

Revolutions, large scale social change, shaking up entrenched “old boys networks” all become more possible, when everyone has a voice and an audience.

We are in the middle of a huge shift in how information is created and curated on the Internet. Making publishing more universal plays very well to Google’s strength as an information company. In line with Google’s mission, its algorithms can work their magic to organize this information and make it universally accessible.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new startup called Clearstream says it’s time to tame the “Wild West” of online video advertising.

According to co-founder Brian Mandelbaum, the idea came from his time at ad agencies, including Razorfish and Saatchi & Saatchi. The problem, he says, is that there’s no good way to distinguish between high- and low-quality ad placements. When you buy space in a video ad network, that ad could be running before a video on a premium site, but it could also be stuck in a banner on a random website.

“The advertiser is getting screwed,” Mandelbaum says.

To bring more transparency to the industry, Clearstream has created a rating system for any site wanting to run video ads. Either the publisher can pay Clearstream for a certification, or an agency can require that a publisher get certified. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative evaluation, Mandelbaum says Clearstream gives two ratings, one for general quality, and one for relevance in a given content category, such as sports.

Contrasting Clearstream with existing services, Mandelbaum says companies like Nielsen and comScore are interested in collecting data on who’s watching an ad. Clearstream, on the other hand, helps advertisers understand the “what, where, when, and how.” And while there are services for evaluating the brand-friendliness of a page, Mandelbaum says a web page can have little to do with the video that’s playing — which is why Clearstream applies ratings on a stream, publisher, and agency level. He also calls existing systems “almost extortion” where “the only person who wins is the verification company” — while with Clearstream, even the publisher benefits because they get data on how to make their video content more brand-friendly.

When discussing his vision, Mandelbaum likes to focus on his agency background, but there’s another eye-catching item on his resume — he was a contestant on the fourth season of The Apprentice, getting fired during the eight episode. When asked about that experience, Mandelbaum gamely tries to connect it with his new startup, saying The Apprentice helped him learn how “to listen and to be able to build against what the community wants.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re a developer of applications for iOS or Android — or a publisher looking to better monetize your mobile web content — you’re probably going to be interested in this post.

Today Appstores.com is launching what it’s calling an ‘AdSense for apps’ — in other words, an ad unit that publishers can embed in their mobile websites that will automatically display ads for native applications that are relevant to whatever text appears on the page. For example, if a participating publisher were to write a story about basketball, users viewing the story from their phones might see an ad for a basketball game or ESPN app in the App Store or Android Market.

Publishers get paid on an eCPM basis, while application developers participating in the new ad network can opt to get paid on a CPC, CPM, or CPI (cost per install) basis. There have been similar solutions available for native mobile applications, but CEO Ryan Merket says this is the first solution that can be embedded in mobile websites (to be clear, though, the ads being displayed are promoting native apps).

At launch, publisher partners on the ad network include 9GAG, The Next Web, Topix, and WPtouch — a WordPress plugin that generates a mobile-friendly version of WordPress blogs, and is used by 25 million mobile sites. Appstores.com says it has 300 million monthly mobile pageviews across its entire network right now, and it’s projecting 1 billion by the end of Q1 2012.

Alongside the ad network launch, Appstores.com is launching a complimentary product: publisher app stores. In short, the service is making it easy for publishers to craft their own niche app stores, where they can showcase whatever apps they like (a gaming site might feature a dozen of its favorite games, for example). The company has actually been testing the product for the last 6-8 months, but this is the first time anyone has been able to sign up and build a store for themselves. You can check out example stores at HelloBrit and FabFitFun, or see the screenshot below.

Of course, the Appstores ad network needs some participants on the other side of the equation: application developers willing to pay to promote their apps. Aside from promising broad distribution, Merket says Appstores.com is launching a directory that includes all iOS and Android apps. Developers will be able to ‘claim’ their profiles to access an analytics dashboard tracking how their applications are faring in the directory — and they’ll also be able to see if their app is being included in any of the publisher-created app stores.

Appstores comes from the same company that launched AppBistro, a Facebook app-focused marketplace that launched back at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2010. Merket says that AppBistro is doing very well, though it’s a bit more of a niche product.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in the old days of online publishing (say, 2007), you’d reach the bottom of a blog post or news article, peruse the comment section, possibly leave one of your own, and then move on to the next hot story.

It was a simpler time.

These days, things are a lot different. Many sites are now experimenting with myriad widgets: story recommendations, games, polls, a dozen sharing options — if you can think of it, someone has tried embedding it at the bottom of a post.

One company that’s part of this trend is Urtak, a startup that participated in the most recent batch of TechStars NYC. And today it’s announcing that it’s raised a $500,000 seed funding round with investors including Vaizra Investments, Quotidian Ventures, Advancit Capital, and Esther Dyson.

Urtak’s product consists of a Q&A widget, which allows publishers to pose questions to their readers, who can respond to each question by choosing one of three answers: “Yes”, “No”, or “Don’t Care”. For example, I might include a widget in this post that asks, “Are you a fan of the Oxford comma?”, to which you’d probably respond, “Don’t Care”.

That’s it — you can’t actually leave a more extended answer to any of the questions, though you’re free to quickly answer a bunch of them if you’d like.

Of course, there are already other products out there that focus on engaging readers, some of which offer polls. So what makes Urtak any different from, say, PollDaddy? Cofounder Marc Lizoain points out another feature that he says is unique to Urtak: readers can actually add their own questions, which will then be posed to other readers after the publisher approves them. Which means that if a publisher embeds an Urtak widget in one of their stories, they could wind up with hundreds or thousands of votes — and dozens or hundreds of questions asked as well.

I’m not sure how defensible this difference is (I don’t think it would be very difficult for other polling services to integrate a similar ‘Ask a question’ feature), but it seems to be working so far, as the company has landed some notable publishers who are using the widget: Andrew Sullivan has started using Urtak in his Daily Beast columns (you can find one here and here), and it’s been used by The Huffington Post, CBC in Canada, The Blaze, and Colombian site El Tiempo.

They’re also showing some encouraging stats: Lizoain says that around 10% of readers wind up engaging with the Urtak widget, and those who do wind up responding to an average of 23 questions per session (remember, it’s pretty low-friction to answer, as you’re voting with ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Don’t Care’ instead of typing in an answer). Thus far, the service has collected over 22 million responses overall.

Lizoain says that the company isn’t making any money at this point, but that it is considering allowing publishers to include sponsored questions in their widgets (e.g. The NYT could run a question asking, “Are you a subscriber to the NYT?”). The company was first created back in 2008 with the mission of trying to organize the world’s ‘opinion information’ on just about any subject. That’s still their long-term goal, but for the time being, they’re focusing on this more straightforward widget.

As for the volcano above — Urtak’s homepage notes that the word ‘urtak’ means statistical sample in Icelandic.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Financial Times has acquired London-based application development firm Assanka, which built a nifty HTML5 web app – and other applications – for the publisher.

(Hat tip to Benedict Evans)

FT staffers such as Katie Morley and Jonathan Wheatley started spreading the news on Twitter, garnering retweets from FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw and PR rep Tom Glover, who confirmed the acquisition to me but declined to share more details.

Read more at TechCrunch Europe.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new mock-up from Facebook and other recent changes suggest the social network could be making another push to make Events seem less formal.

Facebook has long wanted to make its Events product a tool for users to organize casual get-togethers not just parties or big events. Still, users are unlikely to use the feature for more spontaneous plans unless Facebook introduces a way to create events from mobile that can compete with the efficiency of group text messaging.

In the mock-up Facebook provided to illustrate Sponsored Stories in the News Feed, we noticed a design and name change for Events. Instead of “Create an Event” being on the right hand side of the home page squashed between Ticker and ads, there is a “Make Plans” option in the publisher at the top of the page. Last month Facebook made two other semantic changes within Events — using “Join” instead of “RSVP” and “Going” instead of “Attending.” This less formal language could lead more people to use Facebook Events for everyday plans.

Whenever Facebook has made changes to Events, designers have emphasized the product’s potential for spur of the moment gatherings. The first time event creation was added to the publisher, an official blog post suggested it was a way “to plan a more spontaneous get-together.” When Facebook added an Events box to the home page, the blog post mentioned “casual get-togethers,” “an impromptu day trip” and “last-minute plans.”

The website no longer features a way to create events from the publisher or directly from the home page. Users are also unable to create events from the iPhone or Android apps. The mobile touch site includes the capability, but the design is not optimal since the many of the buttons are too small.

To really get users making plans with Facebook Events, the company would have to develop an even easier flow and bring it to the native apps. Events could be an appropriate addition to the standalone Messenger app, which has made one-to-one and group messaging faster than in the main Facebook app. Some mobile apps, like Holler and Hurricane Party, aim to give people ways to create events on the fly, but without integrating Facebook’s social graph, they are of little use.

Facebook wants to position itself as a platform providing the tools for users to share social data that can be accessed by any developer to create new applications, but the company doesn’t shy away from encroaching on someone else’s territory. Developers operate in fear that the social network may eventually release a competing product, crushing smaller competition with its massive userbase. Checkin services, photo sharing apps and group messaging platforms have all faced this challenge, and it is unclear whether Facebook will wait for the pain points of organizing impromptu events to be solved by a third-party developer using the Events API or integrate this into the Facebook product itself.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Today, content discovery platform Outbrain is announcing it has secured $35 million in Series D funding in a round led by Index Ventures. Existing investors Carmel Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the round. As a part of the deal, Dominique Vidal, partner at Index Ventures, will join the company’s Board of Directors.

The New York-based startup helps online publishers recommend additional content to their site’s readers through a website widget technology. The system combines contextual analysis, collaborative filtering (people who like X, also like Y) and personalization to determine which links to show readers at a given time. The personalization of the links shown is based on cookies, but is not tied to any personally identifiable information, nor is the data collected by one publisher shared with another.

You see Outbrain’s technology in action everywhere, but you probably don’t realize it. Its “recommended reading” widgets often show up at the bottom of a publisher’s page as sections titled “You might like:,” “We Recommend,” and “Elsewhere on the Web,” for example.

The service suggests two types of links to readers: inbound links to the publisher’s own content, which are not paid for, and outbound links to content on other sites which are paid for by Outbrain’s buyers, and involve a revenue share.

Currently, publishers using Outbrain’s technology include CNN, Fox News, Future Publishing, Hearst, Hachette Filipacchi Media, IPC, Mashable, MSNBC, Reuters UK, Sky News, Slate, Trinity Mirror and Ziff Davis. The company also works with brands and agencies like Digitas, Mindshare, P&G, Allstate and American Express.

Outbrain’s recommendations are now viewed more than 3.5 billion times per month, generating over 200 million monthly clicks, the company reports. A growing number of those publishers are now using Outbrain’s newly launched mobile product, says Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai. Even though it’s only a few months old, mobile now accounts for 5%-10% of Outbrain’s business. With the Outbrain for Mobile widget, publishers can now add the same “recommended” sections to their mobile sites which link exclusively to other mobile-optimized content.

Video is another newer focus for the company, based on publisher demands. For publishers, explains Galai, “content is content” and they want one system to recommend it all. The video recommendation technology has been soft-launched and is live now on some partner websites. A public announcement will follow shortly.

Going forward, Outbrain wants to continue to expand to any platform where people are consuming content, says Galai, a statement which hints at the still untapped e-reader market.

As a result of this additional funding, which brings Outbrain’s total raise to $64 million, the company will focus on investing in both business development and global expansion. Outbrain had already been working towards these goals through its acquisition of Surphace from AOL (disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL) and the opening of new offices in London, Paris and Hamburg. Going forward, there will be further moves into Europe as well as Asia.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch