Triggit

Facebook Exchange retargeting partner Triggit today announced that it has secured $6 million in additional funding led by North Atlantic Capital along with existing investors Spark Capital and Foundry Group. Triggit says it will put the investment toward engineering and other talent as it focuses on improving products for advertisers retargeting users on the social network, particularly as Facebook evolves the exchange to include News Feed inventory.

Moontoast
Rich media advertising platform Moontoast today announced a partnership with user-generated video platform VideoGenie to give advertisers a new type of video ad unit within the Facebook News Feed. Brands will be able to post a call for user-generated video through their page, and directly from that post in News Feed, users will be able to record and submit their videos.

Mass Relevance

Social curation and engagement platform Mass Relevance today announced that it has integrated more than 25 billion pieces of content into dynamic visualizations on digital displays ranging from TV and second screens through billboards, stadium displays, websites, mobile apps, conference centers and in-store displays. Mass Relevance is the first Certified Twitter partner licensed to re-syndicate Twitter content for display. It can also aggregate, filter and display posts from Facebook. In the past year, Mass Relevance has powered social experiences for the the 2012 elections with CNN and Facebook; the Olympic Games with NBC and Twitter; as well as campaigns for brands like Pepsi and Doritos.

awe.sm
Social performance tracking platform awe.sm today announced a new CEO: Fred McIntyre, who has held senior leadership roles at AOL, Last.fm and CBS, and most recently has served as an advisor to Univision, SoundHound and other media companies and startups. awe.sm measures the business results of social marketing, such as signups and purchase. awe.sm co-founder and founding CEO Jonathan Strauss will now be Head of Product Development.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

One of the main surprises of Google’s Fiber announcement in Kansas City last week was that the company also plans to provide its own TV service to the residents of its ‘fiberhoods.’ There are some issues with Google’s Fiber TV service, including the fact that it seems to be missing quite a bit of content, but it’s definitely looking to be a very competitive offering. To make all of this work, however, Google apparently needed to license a number of patents. As digital entertainment technology provider Rovi announced today, Google has signed a multi-year licensing agreement with the company that provides Google with a license to Rovi’s “interactive program guide patent portfolio for set-top boxes, as well as online and mobile platforms.”

‘Rovi’ may not be a household name, but the publicly traded company actually owns over 5,100 patents related to digital entertainment. Until 2009, Rovi was known under the name Macrovision, a company that quickly became infamous in the early 2000s because of its widely used DVD copy protection technology. Today, Rovi says, its focus is “on revolutionizing the digital entertainment landscape by delivering solutions that enable consumers to intuitively connect to new entertainment from many sources and locations.”

“Our agreement with Google continues the growth and relevance of our patent licensing program for not only traditional platforms, but also new media experiences across multiple screens,” said Samir Armaly, Rovi’s EVP, Worldwide Intellectual Property & Licensing in a canned statement today. “We are pleased that the relevance of our intellectual property in this space continues to be recognized by leading companies such as Google.”

Given the size of Rovi’s patent portfolio in this market, chances are that Google didn’t have much of a choice but to license Rovi’s patents for its Fiber set-top boxes. It’s not immediately clear if this deal also covers Google TV and other Google products. Today’s announcement focuses on Google Fiber but also mentions “online and mobile platforms.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Only one week after Flipboard’s highly anticipated launch on the iPhone (and iPod Touch), the company is announcing it has added 1 million users to its service and has tripled its engagement. According to the company, that means it now has over 5 million users in total using the app across the iOS platform.

Before last week’s release, Flipboard had registered 650 million flips per month on the iPad. Now it’s trending towards 2 billion flips per month.

“Flips,” for those who don’t get the Flipboard lingo, refers to swiping within the app in order to turn the page.

The magazine-like experience provided by Flipboard has long been one of the most popular iPad applications, having previously been named Apple’s iPad App of the Year for 2010 and Time Magazine’s Top 50 Inventions. In fact, the iPhone launch was so hot, that Flipboard actually went down for hours.

New in the iPhone version is a feature called “Cover Stories,” which is based on the relevance-matching technology Flipboard acquired with Ellerdale in 2010. This uses reader interactions like tweets, retweets and likes alongside manual curation to surface a personalized set of top stories.

Despite its many accolades, not everyone loves the Flipboard way of reading. Our own John Biggs notoriously gave the app a “Die” in “Fly or Die,” but he might just be in the minority.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last night, Flipboard released its long-awaited iPhone app. The app is a companion to its popular iPad reader which renders feeds and realtime streams into a magazine-like experience. The iPhone app is already so popular that it took down Flipboard’s service earlier today.

In this episode of Fly or Die, John Biggs and I take the iPhone app through the paces. (You can watch our episode on the original iPad app here from last January). The iPhone app is gorgeous, as you would expect from Flipboard. Biggs thinks it’s more busy than beautiful. It’s certainly not the most efficient way to go through your information streams, but that is not the point.

It strips down the iPad app and presents it on the smaller screen. You flip vertically through your stories, headlines, and Tweets instead of horizontally and there is a promising new feature called Cover Stories that attempts to pull together the best stories from all your feeds.

Cover Stories, I confirmed after the taping, is based on the relevance-matching technology Flipboard acquired with Ellerdale in 2010. (Ellerdale’s founder, Arthur Van Hoff, is now Flipboard’s CTO). It is based on reader interactions with stories in Flipboard—these would include likes, retweets, and stories from sources you tend to read—and there may be some manual curation involved as well. This is one of the first steps Flipboard is taking to try to filter the stream.

If Flipboard’s iPhone-only Cover Stories can bring you the best stories, photos, videos, and tweets in your social streams, it will become as addictive as the iPad app. But if you don’t like big pictures adorning your tweets, like John and maybe two other people, maybe this app isn’t for you.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter today announced formal partnerships with Mass Relevance and Crimson Hexagon to allow the two companies to re-syndicate tweets for use on websites, television shows, jumbotrons and more. Mass Relevance helps clients curate the Twitter firehose so they can display the highest quality tweets about a given subject. Crimson Hexagon performs sentiment analysis on the firehose to let clients determine the opinions of the Twitter user base.

The two partners will act as intermediaries between the micro-blogging platform and companies that want to display its content elsewhere. This will allow Twitter to grow tweet syndication as a revenue stream without having to build sales, design, and support teams.

Twitter’s firehose includes 230 million tweets a day and over 1.5 billion a week. While social media monitoring tools can help brands find the mentions of them or a certain topic, it’s still difficult to filter out noise, spam, and low quality tweets and then pull out the best tweets or analyze their meaning. Mass Relevance and Crimson Hexagon take care of all of this for their clients, in addition to sounding like Bond villain secret weapons.

For example, Mass Relevance helped E! Online find the best tweets about the 2011 Oscars from the audience, nominees, and critics and then display them on a microsite. Crimson Hexagon powered CNN’s analysis of Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address, allowing the television network to project graphs onto screens in the studio indicating the percentage of tweets that supported Obama’s address, thought it was too liberal, or had mixed reactions. It also helped us figure out why we hated NBC’s Winter Olympics coverage.

The two companies were already platform partners, but the new agreements will allow them to re-syndicate tweets in exchange for a fee without fear of suspension. In the blog post announcing the deals, Twitter’s developer relations manager Jason Costa wrote, “Expect to see additional partnerships of this kind as we look for new ways to help everyone get the best out of Twitter.”

These types of deals will allow Twitter to stay lean while simultaneously building out revenue streams that don’t piss off users like the short-lived “#Dickbar” that obscured the Twitter feed with ads.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you were to sit down and look at all the devices Nokia has for sale in the United States, you may come away thinking that they weren’t in the business of making impressive devices. With only a few exceptions, Nokia’s domestic offerings are low-end, S40-powered talk-and-texters — hardly what one would expect from the self-proclaimed “world leader” of the cell phone industry.

It seems as though the higher-ups at Nokia are starting to feel the same way. Instead of sullying the image of their North American operation, they have announced their intention to kill their low-cost S40 and Symbian smartphone business in an interview with AllThingsD. Instead, they’re putting all of their resources into one big push with Windows Phone 7.

Nokia wasn’t always this clumsy when it came to handling the United States. In 2002, Nokia held onto as much as 35% of the domestic mobile market, thanks in part to some innovative feature phone designs. As the country made the move to smartphones, though, Nokia stubbornly stuck to its S40 and Symbian guns and lost much of the relevance they had worked to gain.

It didn’t help that Nokia’s trouble with carriers also forced them to sell many of their more impressive devices unsubsidized by themselves. Customers, not used to purchasing phones without steep carrier discounts, paid them no mind. Currently, AT&T only has one Nokia device in their inventory, while T-Mobile stocks two.

It’s quite the gamble Nokia is making, as they won’t have a safety net in case their Windows Phone ambitions don’t pan out. The implications aren’t lost on Nokia Inc. President Chris Weber.

“It will be Windows Phone and the accessories around that. The reality is if we are not successful with Windows Phone, it doesn’t matter what we do.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Since the Skype Video Calling and Chat redesign launch a month ago, you may have noticed something missing from your Facebook home page. The Facebook Chat buddy list now only shows you the online status of a subset of your closest or most recently interacted with friends, around 20 on a screen of average size and resolution. You can only determine if the rest of your friends are available to Chat by searching for them one by one.

The redesign makes a bad tradeoff. Quick access to Chat with best friends is helpful, but search is far too inefficient a method of determining the online status of other friends. It’s unlikely that users will ever strike up a casual conversation with anyone outside of the buddy list. This is unfortunate, because it’s the ability to stay in touch more distant acquaintances that makes Facebook special.

We asked Facebook why Chat has been redesigned like this, and Director of Product Peter Deng told us, “The goal of the new design is to give more people faster access to the friends they message most. Looking at the early data of how people are engaging with and using Chat, things are moving in this direction.”

Sure, people spend most of their time Chatting with close friends or people they frequently need to exchange information with, such as co-workers or teammates. The new design makes it very easy to start talking with a friend whose wall you recently posted on, profile you’ve been perusing, or that you Chatted with yesterday.

The intelligent sorting algorithm isn’t perfect, though. For example, I see friends I haven’t interacted with in months, while best friends, people I frequently see in person, and those who’ve recently Liked my status updates remain hidden. With time the algorithm could improve, but now if I’m visiting New York City and want to ask several local friends where I should go for lunch, searching one-by-one to see if they’re online is a ton of work. I’ll probably forget to search for someone who might have the recommendation I need.

A quick glance at the unfiltered Chat buddy list on one of Facebook’s mobile apps reveals the friends that are missing, that I might have asked for advice or invited to dinner if it wasn’t so difficult to figure out if they were available to Chat.

The relevance-filtered buddy list is an especially big problem for users with abnormally high friend counts. Facebook says the average user has 130 friends (though we hear it’s closer to 180 now), and for those people perhaps only a handful of online friends don’t appear on the buddy list. If a use has 500 or 1000 friends, though, the number of missing friends is much more significant, recalling names from such a large set is difficult, and searching one friend at time takes far too long to be feasible.

Its these power users and early adopters that are posting updates, tagging photos, and driving total time on site for Facebook. These are the same people that could lead their graphs to another social network if they got fed up with Facebook, so it’s in the site’s interest to keep them happy.

Facebook should implement a combination of the relevance-filtered and complete buddy list, similar to how the news feed has tabs for Top News and Most Recent. The site has considered ways of eliminating the tabbed news feed because some users never leave the default Top News tab, but the buddy list is not an endless stream, it can be easily displayed in its entirety.

By default, the tabbed buddy list could show users the relevance-filtered list, so the most frequent Chat use cases wouldn’t require any buddy list scrolling to initiate. Then let users click to view their full buddy list. Search could be left in to help those with massive buddy lists, or scrapped for a cleaner design.

With a global user base topping 750 million that includes social butterflies and grandparents just looking to share with their kids, pleasing everyone is no simple task. More options make things more complicated, so in most situations, design that work for the majority are best. But when sleek, algorithmic-focused design creates more friction than it removes, one extra link or button may be the answer. In this case, I hope the answer is “See all online friends”.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook now splits the instant typeahead search results that appear in the drop-down beneath its ever-present search bar into profiles, Pages, apps, groups, Events, and Questions. This helps users find the most relevant results, regardless of category.

Category-sorted results could also help users discover new content they weren’t looking for but that relates to something they were, like a soccer game when they were searching for a soccer Page. Finally, the change has SEO implications, as appearing in the first few results within a specific tip is more important now, and Pages and apps can score incidental traffic by having titles similar to common names.

The different result categories are ordered according to the relevance of the matches, meaning users could see any category first. Since the categories aren’t weighted according to their popularity, the ordering can be a bit awkward at times. Users are more likely to be searching for profiles, Pages or apps than groups, Events, or Questions, yet the first result may still be a Question.

Though this unweighted ordering isn’t necessarily best for the user experience, it may expose people to some of Facebook’s lesser-known core apps.

Its now even more crucial for applications and Pages to attain one of the top spots for a given keyword. It also incentivizes them to name themselves after or something similar to popular names. For instance, an app called “Just For Fun” might receive traffic from people searching for someone named “Justin”.

Facebook has been gradually improving its internal search feature. It began surfacing Liked Open Graph-objects such as news articles in August. If it can continue to improve its internal search, users will be more likely to use it instead of web search engines like Google in order to find things on Facebook.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Newly launched startup Mass Relevance has raised $1.5 million in Series A Funding from FLOODGATE and Austin Ventures.

Mass Relevance is a cloud-based platform for managing and broadcasting content via social platforms. The company says that it aggregates and curates content with social context to help brands deliver “actionable results.” The company’s first product, TweetRiver, is a social syndication platform for Twitter that allows brands to curate and filter Tweets around content.

So marketers could present a particular video and the platform will analyze the content and build conversations from Twitter around the content. The application is already being tested by NBC Sports, Samsung, Cisco and RIM.

As more brands and media companies turn to Twitter and other social platforms to tune into consumer conversations, Mass Relevance will no doubt find an audience for its products. But this is a crowded space where a number of players, including Twitter, are offering analytics and curation tools for brands. That being said, Mass Relevance has the experience (its co-founder was the former CMO of Bazaarvoice and a Dell exec previously) and a few big-name clients under its belt.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today at its mobile event, Facebook has just announced that it’s opening up its Write API and Search API to Facebook Places, in addition to the Read API that launched earlier this year.

So what does that mean? Facebook first launched its location APIs at its Places event in August, but it was split into two main sets of functionality: Read and Write access. Most developers only had access to the former — with a user’s permission, a third-party app could pull in Places data from Facebook. But only a handful of large partners had access to the Write functionality, which lets a user syndicate updates the other direction (for example, a check-in on SCVNGR also updates your Facebook Places status).

Now everyone has access to that feature — any app can use the API to write to Facebook Places.

The other big news revolves around Search. Facebook is given developers access to its database of venues — the developer sends in the coordinate, and Facebook gives back a list of nearby locations. And these aren’t based exclusively by proximity — the list will be ordered based on the relevance to the user.

This database will be competing with Google’s Places API, as well as other sources of location data like SimpleGeo. It isn’t a purely benevolent move, either — Facebook will be able to further improve its database as more people check in.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch