MavenSay, a social recommendation app, just got a surge of unplanned downloads coming from Indonesia, and its founders are moving quickly to include Southeast Asia in its expansion plans, as a result.

The company’s Toronto-based co-founder, Jesse Dallal, said the two-month old app got 100,000 downloads over the past fortnight. It has a total of 130,000 downloads so far, and the sudden surge was tracked back to a power user based in Indonesia. They’re not sure which one it is, but the source of traffic points to the country, he said.

The way the app works is similar to Pinterest, in that users follow other users’ recommendations. These could cover places they’ve eaten at or music they’re listening to, for example. For its launch, MavenSay roped in what it called “influencers”—featured brands to follow such as Momofuku and Refinery29.

The Indonesian user that triggered the downloads isn’t a celebrity that MavenSay had canvassed, but was clearly influential enough over his or her social network to move the downloads, said Dallal.

“It’s been an unanticipated consequence of our [social] strategy,” he said, referring to the way things get viral on these recommendation platforms where people reblog items from influencers.

“We’ve reached out to influencers in North America, but we’re also going to reach out to influencers in Asia now. We’re thinking of coming out there and talking to users to understand what the differences in culture and usage might be,” he said.

MavenSay has seven people, including its three co-founders Dallal, Mike Wagman and Bryan Friedman. The small company can’t be expected to have concrete plans for Asia yet, but seeding interest in one of the world’s fastest-growing, mobile-hungry countries may pay off eventually.

According to mobiThinking, Indonesia has 260 million mobile subscribers, although those with data connections make up just 47.6 million, or 18 percent of that.

And Indonesians have been quick to embrace social networking sites, with fierce loyalties once something sticks. Aged social network, Friendster started to pivot towards Asia around 2008, when it realised that 90 percent of its user base was coming from the region. While it was, by that time, lagging behind Facebook globally, some markets like Indonesia stayed loyal to Friendster.

MavenSay has raised funding of $890,000 so far.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Does my music do better on Facebook or Twitter? Where should my next tour be? Is my new song too repetitive? Musicians can get free answers to these questions and more from BeatDeck, a Y Combinator analytics company launching today. BeatDeck plans to license this data to labels and music stores to help them sign and recommend tomorrow’s superstars. Yep, BeatDeck is an enterprise music startup.

Everyone (who isn’t a cold-hearted robot) loves music. That’s led lots of entrepreneurs to start companies aiming to help listeners discover new artists and songs. But the fact is that selling music is a tough business. Selling what music to listen on someone else’s service is even tougher. BeatDeck is different. It does nothing for the listener. Zero consumer products. Instead, it focuses solely on the music industry — the artists, the labels signing them, and the stores selling them.

The first part of the equation launches today on BeatDeck.com. Artists sign up and connect their social media accounts like Soundcloud, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Last.fm. This lets them track their performance and compare it across channels, as well as see their fans’ age, gender, and location demographics. Artists also get fan influence and sentiment breakdowns thanks to reputation measurement and natural language processing.

For even deeper analytics about their music, artists can share their songs to social networks through BeatDeck’s publishing system. This gives them a heatmap of which parts of their songs users are skiping to, pausing at, or rewinding to so they can listen again. Conversion metrics indicate which channels best turn listeners into fans, and where they’re getting reshared. It’s valuable data mosts indie rockers don’t have the skills or time to track by hand. It could tell them where to book their next tour date, which part of their song to pitch for commercials, and which social networks they should focus on.

That’s phase one. Soon, BeatDeck will start selling enterprise licenses for its data to record labels and A&R departments (the people who decide which artists a label or management agency should sign). BeatDeck will let them monitor their artists and find new ones to catapult into fame. “We’re already in talks and worked out a couple of deals for enterprise solutions” says BeatDeck co-founder Josh Mangel. He explains that with just six big customers, which would have to include most of the big record labels, BeatDeck can be a sustainable business.

“Sustainable business” isn’t what being a startup is all about, though. BeatDeck will need additional revenue streams to truly succeed. Luckily, I was able to squeeze out of Mangel that the company is working on making its data useful to online music stores. One day it could have iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon paying it to tell them whose music to recommend to you. BeatDeck could tell them that people who try to listen to screechy industrial dubstep hero Skrillex, but pause 20-seconds in, should be recommended a lesser known artist like Robert Delong who is somewhat similar but easier to listen to.

There are plenty of music stores out there that could benefit from these kind of insights. BeatDeck will be battling it out with fellow music analytics services Next Big Sound and Musicmetric. However, they charge artists to monitor their music, and most musicians can’t afford to pay. BeatDeck’s free analytics for artists could win it lots of sign-ups who will fill it with data it can sell. It’s going to be a long, hard road convincing independent musicians that they need analytics, and bundling their data into something lots of companies want to buy.

In the end, the hope is that BeatDeck can help fledgling artists grow and get noticed by the bigwigs. Mangel concludes, “Right now the business isn’t really fair. Artists are not getting big because they’re talented, but because they’re backed by a lot of money. We want to make the music industry a meritocracy.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

References to hashtags in Facebook’s code suggest the social network could be working on bringing the feature — popular on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr — to its own platform.

Developer Tom Waddington from Cut Out + Keep, who has discovered a number of unreleased Facebook features in the past, today pointed us to a mention of the word “hashtag” in Facebook’s Javascript SDK. He says this likely for an XFBML hashtag plugin, similar to the hashtag tracking widget Twitter offers developers and publishers.

Another mention is in the live source code for Facebook.com. A reference to ”EntstreamHashtagOverlay” links hashtags to Facebook’s hovercard feature. This suggests users will be able to hover over a hashtag to get more information, similar to what they can do for people, apps and pages, as seen below.

Waddington also noticed that Facebook.com/hashtag redirects to Facebook.com, leading us to believe the company could be saving this page for an unreleased feature, otherwise it would lead to a 404 error page.

In March, anonymous sources told the Wall Street Journal, AllThingsD and TechCrunch that Facebook was working to integrate hashtags into its service to help users follow trending topics, search for news and contribute to conversations around a particular issue. That same month, Facebook added a job listing for a data editor to join the consumer communications team “responsible for amplifying the many exciting ways people are using Facebook and connecting with others during global events, holidays and other significant moments in time.”

Shortly after, the company added a multiple listings related to strategic partner development, such as roles focused on entertainment companies and public figures in Brazil and Asia, as well as musicians and athletes in the U.S.  In April, Facebook added a listing for a Public Content Partnerships Analyst to use “quantitative analysis, data mining and the presentation of data to communicate how our partners engage with our product.”

Facebook has not commented on the possibility of hashtags on the platform. Users can already include hashtags in their posts — and many do, often for stylistic reasons — but these do not generate links to more posts with the same hashtags. On other services, hashtags serve to label and group conversations. Although they are most associated with Twitter, they have roots in early Internet chat networks and have more recently taken off on Instagram, which Facebook now owns.

Hashtags could give Facebook users new ways to engage with people and content outside their network of friends. The feature could also lead to better ways of searching posts. With Graph Search, Facebook removed the ability to search public conversations. Hashtag search could replace that and improve Facebook’s existing photo search by letting users tag their contents as they do on Instagram.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook today announced the availability of a new native share dialog for iOS, which will give developers an easy way to incorporate Facebook sharing in their apps.

The mobile share dialog is a standard tool that enables users to post something back to Facebook. Similar to the Like button, the share dialog can be implemented with a small amount of code across any app and it works even if users haven’t logged into the app using Facebook. The dialog includes support for location tagging, friend tagging, custom privacy settings, deep linking and more. Previously, mobile developers would have had to program their own sharing mechanism with these features or use the old “feed dialog” or iOS 6 Share Sheet, which are more limited in functionality and can require up to three extra steps for users.

Unlike Share Sheet, the native share dialog supports Open Graph publishing, as seen in the “read a book” example below.

Facebook first announced the native share dialog, along with other new mobile platform features, in April. However, it was only available in limited beta for iOS until today’s wide release. It is still in development for Android. The company says the share dialog should be used by default in all mobile apps that want to enable users to share something to the social network, even if the apps don’t have deeper Facebook integration, such as login or Open Graph.

Facebook offers a detailed comparison of all of a developer’s options for sharing back to Facebook — including the new share dialog, iOS Share Sheet, web-based feed dialog and Graph API – here. Technical documentation on the native share dialog is available here.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

This is a guest post by Mario Zelaya, Managing Director at Majestic Media, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer & digital marketing agency, specializing in custom apps and promotions for web and mobile.

Marketers are starting to focus more on social media efforts, realizing that it’s an important piece of the marketing puzzle. They’ve started to use social media, but only as an extension of a traditional campaign or as a small marketing initiative on the side. Many of them are hesitant to rely too heavily on social media. They’re willing to let social media ride in the car, but they’re reluctant to give them the keys.

According to a report released by Social Media Examiner at the end of 2012, 83 percent of marketers have said that social media was important to their business. However, the CMO survey released in February found that marketers are only allocating 8.4% of their budget for social media.

Many believe that in order for a campaign to succeed, it always needs to be integrated across different channels. This is simply not the case. At Majestic Media, we’ve seen time and time again that a fully digital campaign, or even a fully social campaign, can reach hundreds of thousands of consumers, achieving millions of social impressions and engagement, and generate a tremendous amount of traffic.

Majestic Media recently launched a social campaign for Maple Leaf Foods, promoting their new product, Bacon Portions. It was a simple Facebook Application that allowed users to pledge to “Never Waste Bacon” and enter for the chance to win a year supply of bacon.  Yes, bacon.  Not a brand new car, $25,000 or an extravagant trip, simply bacon.

The campaign was launched organically on Facebook, posting on Maple Leaf’s Facebook Page for current fans to see. Within 12 hours, we had reached 3,458 pledges. Following the launch, Maple Leaf Foods started a small paid campaign on Facebook consisting of Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories. Within a week, we saw nearly 19,000 pledges and #NeverWasteBacon was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in Canada.

Facebook was the primary focus, but Twitter and Instagram also played a large part in the success of the #NeverWasteBacon campaign (which is still running).

Maple Leaf was able to gain a huge amount of traffic without incorporating traditional mediums like radio, TV, or print. They were able to generate such a large amount of organic traffic because they took the time to build an audience. They spent time interacting with their followers and provided them with engaging, relevant content.

Social media has the power to drive a major campaign, but only if you do it right. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many brands blame a failed Facebook campaign on the social network, rather than the fact that they didn’t take the time to prepare.

Social campaigns can be wildly successful if you have the right strategy in place, give people the incentive and the encouragement to share with friends and spend the time listening and building up your audience to ensure what you launch is inline with what they want to engage with.  Campaigns don’t always need to be fully integrated and rely heavily on paid media to be wildly successful.

Mario Zelaya is the founder and managing director of Majestic Media, Canada’s first Facebook Marketing & Technology agency. His extensive experience on the Facebook Platform includes building out social strategy, campaign ideation, app architecture, and social design for brand clients such Volkswagen, Kia, General Motors, Mazda, Gatorade, Hot Wheels, Infiniti, Nissan, Visa and many others. Majestic Media has executed over 200 large-scale campaigns and works with big brands and agencies in helping them to get results and ROI through campaigns that are social by design. Follow Majestic Media & Mario on Twitter @majesticmedia @zelaya.

Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.

Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.

To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:

Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.

The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.

We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After announcing its deal to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion, mostly in cash, Yahoo today started to lay out some of the details for how it intends to make use of the property while trying to stick to its promise “not to screw it up.” Expect more advertising by next year as well as more Tumblr content on Yahoo properties, but more of a cautious step as to how Yahoo will deal with some of Tumblr’s more NSFW content.

Here are some of the more interesting details revealed in the call:

What are Tumblr ads going to look like? Tumblr apparently made only $13 million in revenues last year but CEO David Karp apparently thinks the site is “ready” to make more now that it understands its users, according to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. But she also noted that they will be working from a challenged position, not just because of user resistance but because Karp himself has been “skeptical” about online ads.

In the conference call, Mayer made an early reference to how Tumblr would be able to make good use of Yahoo’s advertising technology, in ways that fit Tumblr’s so-far successful, image-based, quick-blogging, youth-oriented format — what she called “native advertising formats.”

As one example, she pointed to an ad format that Yahoo launched at the end of April, in-stream ads that it runs on its news pages. “On Tumblr we feel we can monetize in ways that are meaningful and add to user experience,” she said. She cited the Tumblr dashboard, or as she called it, the inbox for the blogs you follow. “Today Tumblr already does some ads in that feed. We would like to look at that and understand how to introduce more ads where the ads fit the expectations and follow that form and function.” She also noted that Yahoo may possibly work with bloggers to provide ads that will be run with their permission.

On top of this, expect to see more search ads: there are also plans to integrate Yahoo’s search functionality into the site as well. “We think there is a complelling search story,” said Mayer. “Their body is 50b posts and 5 billion posts of original content so search is already vast. We see an opportunity to integrate with search and provide that. That’s one area we are excited by the acquisition.”

Throughout this, a focus on trying to be Tumblr-centric about whatever Yahoo tries to do there. “It’s not a choice between creativity and monetization,” insisted Mayer.

So when are those ads coming? CFO Ken Goldman said that ad revenues from Tumblr will be “modest” this year — the acquisition is not expected to close until the second of of 2013 — but that they will “ramp up” in 2014 “and beyond.” “We do think those revenues will start monetizing materially [and] will contribute to revevenues in 2014 and beyond,” he said on the call, “not just standalone for Tumblr but also incrementally, helping Yahoo to growth.”

Porn? The NSFW, notorious part of Tumblr was never referred to by name, but an analyst did ask about what Yahoo, while courting mainstream brands to market to that attractive Tumblr audience, would do about content that is not “brand safe”. “The richness and breadth of the content… is what makes it more exciting,” enthused Mayer. “In terms of addressing concerns around brand safety we need to have good tools for retargeting.” [Another acquisition, methinks? In any case, no outright announcement that Yahoo intends to get rid of all those sites that Tumblr has more or less accepted into the fold.]

Mayer continued: “Tumblr is now at the point that they do know what it is and what makes sense to monetize in way that is tasteful.” She also mentioned due diligence but also something else, effectively implying that Yahoo will figure out a way of getting around the NSFW content and serving ads where they want them to go, because that’s what the advertisers want: “There are a lot of marketers eager to participate in Tumblr platform and the demographics,” she said.

What does the $1.1 billion “substantially in cash” mean? Goldman noted that it’s effectively an all-cash deal, save for some shares in Yahoo for David Karp. He also noted that Yahoo still has “ample cash” for more acquisitions and investments, to the tune of about $6.2 billion. These will not likely be along the lines of Tumblr in terms of size. “This is an exceptional company and team,” she said of Tumblr. At 300 million monthly unique users, Yahoo is paying about $3.67 per user for the acquisition.

Complementary properties. Mayer made a lot of the fact that Tumblr and Yahoo actually fit “really beautifully together,” like South America and Africa, in her words. In addition to Yahoo skewing older and Tumblr skewing younger, “We are strong on sports, finance and news; Tumblr’s strong on architeture, travel and fashion. We need great tools for content publishing and creation. They have them. Tumblr prides itself as a home for brands. Yahoo is all about brands.”

Tumblr comes to Yahoo. While a lot of the expectation so far has been about how Yahoo may mess up or spiff up or monetize up Tumblr, another theme that emerged during the call was the idea of Tumblr content going out to Yahoo properties — a way of attracting users to Yahoo that may not have gone there before.

“Our strategy is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” said Mayer. “There are some who will always prefer Tumblr and will never come to Yahoo. [But] as we pull Tumblr content into our news feed and media experiences it will cause them to become that much more interesting and richer and will cause more to come to Yahoo. I imagine engagement will improve as we incorporate that content.”

Flickr. There is a separate news conference today that will likely concentrate on updates to Flickr, but today Mayer appeared to douse out speculation that it will be a move to begin integrating its online photo site with Tumblr in any way: “In terms of how the content of Tumblr evolves it depends on the creators,” Mayer said in answer to a question of what this acquisition will mean for Flickr. “It’s something that we will turn our attention to in the future. It will provide great storage, but we will see how those two cousins should relate to each other.

Image: Tumblr (where else)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sprint has decided to get deeper into the social and mobile space, announcing today that it has acquired Handmark and its subsidiary OneLouder. The acquisition is meant to beef up its Pinsight Media+ advertising group, specifically.

Through Handmark, OneLouder has built social apps like Twitter clients Tweetcaster and Slices, and Friendcaster, a Facebook client. The acquisition price hasn’t been made known, but it’s a huge win for the Kansas City tech space, a place that I visited just a few weeks ago.

Sprint hopes that this acquisition will bring a more “entrepreneurial spirit” to its mobile program, hoping to lure developers to use its own advertising platform. Mike Cooley, VP of New Ventures at Sprint shared: “The business, culture and technology they bring will be a huge asset to our business, and ultimately the customers of Pinsight Media+.”

Through building all of its apps, OneLouder found a niche in advertising, having its own team that has worked on the ad platform and used its own apps to test it out. This deal also brings Sprint some strategic partners like CBS, which has a sports app powered by OneLouder. Tying the work that OneLouder has done on its ad platform with Sprint’s customer base should juice its mobile advertising efforts immediately.

The great thing about the acquisition is that Handmark and OneLouder will stay in its current home of Kansas City, serving as an example of what a budding tech hub it really is. Sprint has been trying to get involved with the KC tech crowd, as all of the activity surrounding Google Fiber has inspired companies to be formed and money and time to be spent on building communities and refocusing on making the area attractive to both coasts as an alternative base.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In what can only be called an exodus, WordPress’ co-founder Matt Mullenweg posted on his blog Sunday night that over 72,000 new blog posts were imported within a single hour. This is a massive spike considering that WordPress usually just sees 400 to 600 imported posts on most Sundays. It’s a tiny percentage of Tumblr’s 50.9B posts but it’s an important consideration that Tumblr – and now Yahoo – cannot ignore.

Yahoo is officially buying Tumblr for a lot of cash. $1.1 billion to be precise. This move makes a few people very happy and very rich. But Tumblr’s content creators – you and me – are the primary reason Yahoo is buying the site. Unfortunately, that content engine isn’t very happy.

WordPress will likely have another banner day as even more Tumblr users look for alternative platforms to host their saucy Brony slashfic.

Tumblr is currently an unfettered corner of the Internet. Nearly anything goes, and with that users have enjoyed this freedom to create a vast variety of blogs and sites. Anything from questionable pornography to vegan cooking blogs are hosted on Tumblr. While Yahoo promises to keep Tumblr independent, it’s unclear whether this includes maintaining Tumblr’s loose posting guidelines.

This has happened before. A small percentage of Instagram users loudly quit the service when Facebook purchased the social network. Likewise, Facebook is losing users as it becomes an established service. WordPress is likely going to be the largest benefactor of Tumblr’s exodus. As Mullenweg notes, the two services have long enjoyed a close relationship. It only takes a few clicks to import a Tumblr site to a WordPress install.

Tumblr users are afraid Yahoo is going to ruin it. After all, Yahoo has set that precedent after scooping up sites like Geocities and del.icio.us only to abandon development and let the sites rot in the Internet sun. But the Yahoo of today is not the Yahoo of yesterday.

Yahoo is booming under Marissa Mayer. The company is a on buying spree, scooping up hot startups, resulting in the acquisition of content, talent, and, press coverage. If anything, Wall Street likes what Yahoo is doing as the company’s stock price is up nearly 71% for the year. But despite Yahoo’s frank promise that it will not screw up Tumblr, a social network is only as strong as its users and in a very direct way, Yahoo is already screwing up Tumblr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” is a truism that Yahoo! wants to monetize with its $1.1bn cash purchase of Tumblr blogging platform.

With 108m bloggers generating 13 billion page views per month on the NSFW-oriented (Not Suitable For Work – read – adult content) Tumblr, Yahoo! is hoping to turn eyeballs into advertising revenue (perhaps using its other recent purchase Summly to curate and summarise Tumblr topics).

Will it work where Yahoo! has failed in the past (think Geocities, del.icio.us, Flickr..)?

The challenge is simple - convert Tumblr into profitable advertising space.  But the solution is less evident.

Tumblr generated just $12m in revenue in 2012 – valuing the company in the real world at $36m – not $1bn. If plastering pixel-spam on Tumblr dashboards and posts was a really good idea, wouldn’t Tumblr have done it already? Facebook has held off haemorrhaging users by not turning Instagram into advertising space (yet), and Google has gone on record promising not to pollute Glass-vision with ads. Perhaps Yahoo! has something different up its sleeve – more than old-style interruptive advertising imported online? But given the ‘adult’ nature of much Tumblr content, how many big advertisers would want to take the PR risk advertising alongside explicit content?

So what if Yahoo! pivots Tumblr away from advertising and towards commerce?  We’re not talking the roaring trade that Tumblr could do in selling ‘adult toys’ and ‘adult content’ – but a bigger social commerce opportunity… Here are three ideas;

1. Since so many Tumblr blogs are themed (most fetishes appear to be covered), could Yahoo! allow bloggers to post a ‘shop’ button on the blog’s menu, that picks up the ball that Google shopping recently dropped with a decent price comparison/top picks).  A revenue share with Tumblr users – a la YouTube – could work? Think Google Shopping 2.0
2. Building on the themed nature of Tumblr blogs, the blogging network would make a ideal platform for a new generation of group-buy commerce – allowing like-minded people to come together and get great prices if they buy in bulk. Think Groupon 2.0
3. The simplicity of Tumblr would make it ideal as a next-generation e-commerce platform, making it easy to sell their stuff to communities of people passionate about a subject.  Tumblr has a real opportunity to tie this content + commerce knot, and become a leading e-commerce solution.  Think Etsy 2.0