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

Overall, the new Twitter brand Pages are pretty underwhelming. But one great feature they offer is pinned posts — the ability to semi-permanently feature an expanded rich media tweet at the top of the Page. This help brands customize their Page to drive traffic to a specific link, photo, or video, promote a contest or important news, and make sure first time visitors always see a high quality piece of content. Oh hey, you know who else could  benefits from pinned post?  Facebook, because its custom Page app platform is too complicated for some businesses, and Google+, because it doesn’t even have an app platform.

Don’t expect Facebook or Google’s morals to stop them from copying this indefensible feature. Hell, it looks like Google+’s whole UI is a stripped down model of Facebook. Meanwhile, Facebook has integrated every G+ feature it didn’t already have — inline privacy controls, asymmetrical following, high status update character limit, easier friend list / Circle creation. Both teams know and reapply good design when they see it, and the option to pin a post is good design.

The feature could solve a big problem for each social network’s brand Pages. To take advantage of Facebook’s iframe-based Page tab application platform, businesses need engineering talent, an expensive license for a third-party Page management solution, or the know-how to pick and use a free third-party tool. That’s no sweat for big brands, but the long tail of small business don’t have resources or knowledge for this development. They’re effectively shut out of custom Facebook Page design.

A native pinned posts feature could help. Businesses just carry on publishing content to their Facebook Page, but pick the most compelling post to stay visible. This will allow them to publish more frequently without worrying about burying that link to their website, ecommerce store, or latest promotion. Facebook could display the pinned post above the publisher on a Page’s wall, as shown in my mockup below.

For Google+, pinned posts would give brands their first taste of customization beyond photos. It wouldn’t require Google to build out APIs or even significantly alter its design. Without apps to navigate to, the only way for G+ users to find important content and promotions is to endlessly scroll down the wall.

Facebook may one day bring Timeline to brand Pages, and Google could open an app platform. But until richer, more accessible customization options are ready for launch, pinned posts could be a useful stop gap, as well as an easy way to silence a Twitter talking point.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I have one major gripe with Facebook’s Subscribe feature: I have to publish to all my friends to reach my Subscribers. In September, Facebook launched Subscribe, its Twitter-esque option that lets people receive the public updates of other users without being their friends. But I don’t publish my articles to my Subscribers who want to read them because I don’t want to spam my friends who aren’t interested in tech news. This same issue is impacting a lot of journalists, public figures, and other content producers, and I believe it’s preventing wider adoption of the Subscribe feature.

I did a feedback session with Facebook about Subscribe soon after it launched, and the company is well aware of the problem. I commend Facebook’s Subscribe team for building an otherwise useful and ambitious product, and for critically thinking about how to solve the issue without opening new spam opportunities. However, today Facebook announced that embeddable “Subscribe to me” buttons are on the way, and I think it needs a to decide on a fix first.

My suggestion? Facebook should allow users to publish to a “Subscribers” friend list that would cause an update to be public, but not appear in the news feeds of friends (as shown in my fake mockup above). Here’s why:

Facebook Currently Doesn’t Support A Core Sharing Use Case

Below are the 3 core categories of content people publish, and who they should be published to:

1. Personal content only fit for friends (“Friends Only” or a smaller Friend List)

2. General interest content that appeals to both friends and Subscribers (“Public”)

3. Specific interest content that appeals to Subscribers, but not necessarily all friends (“Subscribers” and a Friend List of those interested in that topic)

Most public figures that permit Subscribers typically publish publicly about a relatively specific topic that isn’t necessarily of interest to their friends. Journalists about their beat, politicians about politics, technologists about technology. Even celebrities might want to share what they ate for breakfast with their subscribers, but not their friends.

Unfortunately, Subscribe doesn’t support publishing of content category #3 right now. Instead Facebook functions too similarly to a broadcast channel like Twitter.

That’s likely because it’s concerned that if it added a “Subscribers” publishing distribution option, it would allow spammers to relentlessly publish to their Subscribers without having to worry about losing friends. I argue that spammers don’t care if they lose friends and right now are just spamming both. Also, I believe the audience should be free to sort this out — if they’re being spammed, by a friend or someone they’re subscribed to, they should be trusted to dump that person.

How To Fix Subscribe

There are two ways Facebook could implement a separation between friends and Subscribers:

A. Let the publisher decide exactly who receives a specific update

B. Let the audience decide what type of updates they receive from each friend or person they subscribe to

I don’t think B will work. Users would have to classify each of their friends as someone they do or don’t receive public updates from — a chore most wouldn’t undertake. Even then, just because an update is public doesn’t mean it’s necessarily content #3. It could be a general interest update that their friend might find interesting but isn’t something that needs to be kept private.

The only person who knows who an update should go to is the publisher. That’s why Facebook should permit publishers to choose  ”Subscribers” in the same way they could previously check boxes to distribute an update to multiple specific friend lists. Other journalists like MG Siegler and public figures like Digi Jeff agree. (If changing the privacy  selector back to check boxes from the single selection allowed today isn’t possible, simply offering a “Subscribers Only” option would suffice.)

If “Subscribers” was selected, an update would be public, but only be delivered to the news feeds of their Subscribers. However, publishers could also select additional Friend Lists who would receive that update in their news feeds, or compose a separate update for that Friend List. For example, I could build a Friend List of friends who also happened to be very interested in technology news. Then when I wanted to publish an article I wrote, I could select the “Subscribers” list and the “Tech News Friends” list (or publish to both separately). The update would be publicly visible on my profile, but I wouldn’t have spammed the news feeds of my non-tech news friends with it.

If this solution was implemented, I’d publish a lot more content to my Subscribers. It would allow Facebook to overtake Twitter as the best place to follow public figures. Most importantly, it would improve the user experience by allowing us to share what we want with who we want, without spamming anyone else.

What do you think? Join the public discussion on my Facebook profile.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Appcelerator, makers of the popular mobile cloud development platform Titanium, has raised $15 million in Series C funding in a round led by Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital and Red Hat. Existing investors eBay, Inc., Sierra Ventures and Storm Ventures also participated in the round.

The additional funding will be used to expand Appcelerator’s Titanium product line, with an emphasis on adding HTML5 mobile Web capabilities to its offerings. It will also help the company expand operations in Europe and Asia.

Appcelerator will be opening a U.K. office in Q1 2012 and is working with Translink, a firm with a strong Asian presence, to enter Japan, Korea and Greater China. According to Appcelerator VP of Marketing Scott Schwarzhoff, 40% of its developer base is North America, 40% is from Europe and the rest is “other.” So for Appcelerator, establishing a European office is mandatory, he says.

The company also took the opportunity to provide an update on its growth. It now has 30,000 mobile applications on over 30 million mobile devices in its portfolio and 1.6 million developers in its ecosystem. This makes it if not the largest, then certainly one of the largest, mobile development platforms in existence today.

More remarkable, perhaps, is how quickly the growth was achieved. The number of apps represents a 6-fold increase over 2010, the number of devices is a 12-fold increase over 2010, and the number of customers is a 10-folder increase, with the addition of 1,000 new customers in the past year. Some notable recent additions include NBC, eBay, Medtronic, GameStop, Merck, Progressive, Reuters and Harrah’s. The company has also grown from 17 employees to 100 over the past 12 months.

Schwarzhoff says that around 30% of its customers are enterprise clients, and that number is growing. Another 30% are midsize companies, he adds. These clients increasingly want an integrated solution – one codebase that works across platforms, but not a “write once, deploy everywhere” solution.

With Appcelerator, they take the “80/20″ approach instead, meaning 80% is common code and 20% is unique to a given platform. This allows the publisher to take advantage of platform-specific features like Android’s intents, or iOS’s notifications. Going forward, that approach will continue on the backend, but on the UI side, Appcelerator is working on introducing more HTML5 capabilities through a new declarative UI which will allow it to compile the UI into a native UI.

Appcelerator acquired Aptana in January to create a mobile IDE and just last week acquired competitor Particle Code, which focused on making games compatible across mobile platforms. Red Hat, an Appcelerator investor, also partnered with the company in May, making it the first mobile app development platform to be a part of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service.

Including its Series A and B rounds, Appcelerator has now raised $31.5 million.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One of the most popular ways for publishers to monetize their content — aside from basic banner and AdSense ads — is through affiliate programs. These are often transparent to users: you’ll click a link to an online store, and if you buy something, the publisher gets a percentage of the purchase price (each program varies a bit, but that’s the standard way they operate).

Of course, signing up for each of these programs takes work. SkimLinks is a UK-based company that helps publishers monetize their content by inserting these affiliate links automatically, and today it’s harnessing a recent acquisition that will make one of its products significantly more efficient (and useful for a broader set of links).

The startup makes two main products. The first is its namesake SkimLinks, which will identify any link that’s been included in a publisher’s content and automatically convert it to an affiliate link whenever possible (this saves the publisher the hassle of having to sign up for affiliate programs with each merchant). The second product is SkimWords, which will automatically insert affiliate links into content, even when those words weren’t already linked in the first place. So, for example, if I mentioned the 32 GB iPad in this post, the words ’32 GB iPad’ would be automatically converted to a link pointing to, say, Amazon.

The company launched the latter product in June 2010. But it had one major issue, according to founder Alicia Navarro: the original implementation required SkimLinks personnel to manually approve some portions of the process (in other words, they’d verify that the links that were being generated made sense in context). Which ultimately didn’t scale as the company looked to explore more verticals.

To remedy this, SkimLinks acquired a competing company called Atma Links, which had approached this problem in a different way. Rather than relying on humans to approve these automatically created links, Atma Links looked to automate the entire process, using semantic analysis and listings of 20 million products provided by various online retailers to determine what could be linked. This functionality is what drives SkimWords 2.0, and Navarro says that its boosted efficiency will allow the company to expand into additional verticals that will include fashion, consumer electronics, automotive, and lifestyle links.

The new product is also getting a bit of a facelift, which you can see below — mousing over a link will display the linked product’s full title, along with links to multiple different stores where it’s available for purchase.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch