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

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

This is the final episode of my show on TCTV, “In The Studio.” The final guest is a good friend, Parth Shah (no relation), an engineer with VMware, and before that, at Yahoo! Parth combines the precision of CMU CS graduate’s take on web development with a hacker mentality, and has the rare skill of being able to explain some of the most complex enterprise IT concepts to those who don’t have as much context — such as me! In this short conversation, Parth shares with us his work at VMware and his generalized thoughts on how the enterprise stack is being disrupted today. This video would be a great primer for anyone who wants to begin to learn about the enterprise world.

As an added bonus, Parth and I have spent a few months collaborating on a post about the enterprise IT stack, written in lay-terms so that a wider audience can learn more about it. We are proud to publish this post today, which you can read here.

Finally, thank you for being a loyal viewer of “In The Studio” as it ends today (my Sunday column, Iterations, will continue). In the span of 18 months, the show ran for 70 consecutive weeks, producing 70 episodes featuring Silicon Valley’s up-and-coming founders, legendary venture capitalists, emergent seed investors, and focused on producing quality, primary-source content in today’s noisy tech media landscape. For me, “In The Studio” was a terrific platform to get to meet people who excelled at what they do. As someone who is new to the technology world, doing the show was a crash-course in learning by conversation, and making those conversations public will hopefully provide insight to others who are looking to learn. I have worked to organize and reproduce all the videos, which you can access here. This is a great privilege, so thanks again to all those who participated.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

YouEye, a usability testing service that uses a pool of screened candidates to help designers and developer get feedback for their sites, today announced that it has raised a $3 million funding round led by investors Bobby Yazdani, the founder and CEO of Saba Software and an investor in Dropbox, Google, Qwiki, Brian McClendon, the co-founder of Keyhole, Inc (which later became Google Earth) and Beth McClendon. A number of additional investors also participated in this round, which also includes a $400.000 raise from early 2011 led by Bobby Yazdani.

The company, which describes itself as a “UX lab in the cloud,” takes a different approach from other online usability test service. The focus for YouEye goes beyond asking users questions about a site and tracking their cursors. Instead, the service records the participants interactions with a site and tries to capture their emotions.

YouEye’s face recognition algorithms, the company says, can recognize over 50,000 micro-expressions and “can accurately show when a user’s facial expression aligns with several feelings, including happy, surprised, puzzled, disgusted, afraid and sad.” Companies that want to use the service can pick the exact demographics of the testers (age, gender, education level, income, etc.). Users can also annotate their videos. YouEye says some of its customers include Airbnb, Microsoft and Eventbrite. Here is a sample of what those final videos look like.

Typically, these kind of studies are pretty expensive and can take a long time to complete, but YouEye’s prices start at $39 per participant (including webcam and audio recording, as well as emotion recognition data and written answers to post-study survey questions) and most results should be available within 48 hours.

YouEye is also using today’s funding announcement to officially launch a new product: Insite. This service allows you to ask any visitor to your site to opt-in to participate in a usability study. Companies can then capture the full webcam video and audio from those visitors that opt in to these studies. For developers, adding this feature to an existing site is as easy as adding a single line of code. Users then see a little widget on the site that asks them to participate (and sites can sweeten the deal with a discount or other incentives, too.). The service is based on a freemium model.

Insite is currently only available as a limited beta, but you can get on the waitlist here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Online video is booming, and today AOL (owner of TechCrunch) unveiled three new initiatives that spell out how it plans to tackle it: 15 original, unscripted shows; a new creative studio, Be On, to create branded videos; and a deal with FreeWheel and Mediaocean to add in AOL’s video inventory to its platform, so that media buyers looking for multiscreen investments across TV and online video can include AOL in the mix.

The news was unveiled at the company’s 2013 Digital Content NewFront event, the upfront event where AOL presents its strategy for the year ahead to key advertisers and agencies.

The slate of content is not AOL’s move into Netflix-style dramas (for now, at least). Instead, it plays on the network of sites that AOL already owns in the news and information space, which also includes other tech sites like Engadget as well as the Huffington Post. Up to now the AOL On network, the video network that AOL launched last year to span all of those sites and more (the videos go to YouTube and elsewhere) has been going pretty strong, with some 8 billion views in 2012. “We think we’ve reached the point at which it makes sense to produce more, to give us a more distinct voice,” Tal Simantov, GM of AOL On said. The list of shows includes “Fatherhood,” centered around Hank Azaria and his experiences as a first-time father; and “City.Ballet”, produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, covering the cut-throat world of the New York City Ballet.

Simantov wouldn’t say how much AOL is investing in this but says that it will be in the “double-digits, an interesting number.”

One reason that AOL is spinning out more content is because of a growing audience for the material, but it is also looking to sell significantly more ads against it.

Part of that will be coming from the new Be On studio — this is the company’s branded content business, a creative studio that will partner with advertisers and agencies to produce branded content that combines its goViral acquisition with video distribution across AOL’s own network of sites plus third-party sites like YouTube, and AOL Studios production. The offering includes production, distribution, and analytics to measure how they perform.

The move for content companies to move further into video ad production, leveraging their reputation with other content, is part of a wider trend — just yesterday, Vox Media also announced the formation of Vox Creative, a similar initiative. Today, AOL announced the first customer for its service — Team Roma — the Italian football team that is planning a media assault in an attempt to become the next big international media sports brand, not unlike Manchester United or Real Madrid, both of which make more from their branded goods and selling rights to their games than they do from ticket sales to those events.

The third announcement AOL made today for the partnership with FreeWheel and Mediaocean will see AOL tap into the wider market for video ad buys, with ad buyers now able to buy against not just broadcast and pay-TV content, but online video content as well, through a multiscreen ad buying platform being launched by FreeWheel and Mediaocean called FourFronts. Given that the vast majority of ad spend today still goes to areas like television, it’s initiatives like that that will give digital players more of a look in to those budgets. And it’s also a significant move to further defragment the advertising landscape.

As Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL puts it, it’s also a sign of how the “screen” that people use to consume video is no longer just a TV, and that video is no longer just television.

“The device on which consumers view video no longer defines the type of content they’re watching; it’s purely a screen,” he said today. “But until now, buyers have not had an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to buying video on the Web and TV. The industry needs to adopt standards between traditional broadcasting and video streams on the Web to create more opportunities in the buying market. FourFronts addresses a pressing need in our industry and will place AOL at the forefront of this shifting tide, getting us one step closer to bridging the gap between premium digital video and TV.”

Michael O’Connor, global director for business at AOL On, notes that “This will mean that we won’t be seen anymore as segregated buckets.” Since this initiative is just getting announced now, he says that AOL is not yet sharing a target number for how much AOL expects to see going through the platform. “The decision making only starts now,” he says.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Video-editing app Magisto is picking up users, especially in the Android ecosystem, and it’s giving those users a new way to add a creative touch to the videos they produce. Launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, the new Magisto Android app offers a way for users to doodle on their videos, create new borders, and generally add a bit of flair to their videos.

Magisto is best known for automatically creating interesting videos out of content that its users have already shot. Users simply pick some videos they’d like edited, upload them to the cloud, and Magisto does all the hard work of assembling them together in a new and interesting way. Users pick themes and music to set the mood they’d like, and Magisto’s automatic editing algorithm does the rest.

While that’s been a popular way for users to very quickly make their home movies actually watchable, Magisto is now giving them a way to better personalize videos. The new Draw Video feature will let them add their own doodles, set and color in borders, and generally add another layer of interactivity to their videos.

For Magisto, the addition of the Draw feature to its Android app comes as it focuses more on the Google-owned mobile operating system and the Google ecosystem in general. That includes integration with Google Drive, enabling its users to select and add videos that are stored in the cloud storage service. With Google Drive integration, Magisto also enables users to sync all newly created videos directly in that storage service.

The startup has doubled its number of downloads since the beginning of the year, growing from 3.5 million downloads in January to more than 7 million today. The startup has also seen greater adoption among Android users lately than iOS users. Part of that might stem from the relatively large number of mobile video-editing apps available for the iPhone versus those that are part of the Android ecosystem.

Due to all the different manufacturers, devices, and form factors of Android devices, there aren’t a ton of video-editing apps for Android users. Magisto can skirt most of the fragmentation problems that video app makers on Android face because all its processing happens in the cloud, rather than on the video device itself.

Mobile video editing and publishing continues to be a big opportunity, with other startups like Socialcam and Viddy and Twitter’s Vine all seeking to change the way people use video from their mobile phones. Magisto is hoping that by providing a little bit of editing and a little bit of pizzazz, it’ll be able to differentiate itself from the rest of the pack.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The problem with most video apps is that they don’t allow viewers to have much of a clue about what a video is actually like. Too often, video publishers pick a thumbnail that is misleading or only shows a small bit of what their content is about. That can leave viewers frustrated if they invest the time to actually watch a video. And for publishers, it means lost views, if they don’t choose correctly. Cinecraft’s Videogram technology seeks to solve this problem by creating thumbnails that provide more context.

Cinemacraft CEO Sandeep Casi believes there hasn’t been a so-called Instagram for video. Video thumbnails simply don’t provide enough context for what’s happening in a video, and so potential viewers will choose not to click through.

So Cinemacraft has designed a solution: It’s built technology that scans videos and creates a pictorial summary of their content. With both a platform API to look into publisher videos and an iOS app to display them, Cinemacraft’s Videogram products give publishers a better way to display their content and gives viewers more insight into what a video is actually about. Videogram breaks videos down into chunks that it displays so that they can quickly get an idea of whether or not they will want to watch the whole thing.

But there’s other interesting stuff happening on the back end: For instance, since the video previews that it generates are created dynamically, the platform knows not only where users are most engaged, but which moments they are most likely to click on. That enables it to provide more compelling previews as time goes on.

It also provides analytics into what viewers are watching and engaging with within the video. Trending moments can be highlighted, and publishers can use them to better target pre-roll or impression ads.

Right now, more than anything the Videogram app is a showcase for what publishers can do with the technology. It curates content from multiple providers and displays them in its own Videogram format, providing a few other features — like the ability to comment within the app, or share clips with others on social networks. In fact, they can share specific moments, not just the entire video. Videogram users can also upload or capture their own videos within the app and get the same preview thumbnail treatment.

But really, the Videogram technology is best for publishers, as a way to show off their videos. On that front, the company is running pilot programs with 10 publishers, including the likes of Sony, Collective Digital Studio and Big Frame, among others.

The core technology is licensed from Fuji Xerox Labs, where Casi helped develop it. Cinemacraft is based in Tokyo, with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company has received seed funding from 500 Startups and other angel investors.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook video ad units could come with TV price tags – Facebook is reportedly prepping to sell its new video ads with an “upfront”-type marketplace and TV-like prices. According to AdAge, Facebook will have four daily summer slots — women over 30, women under 30, men over 30 and men over 30 — with an asking price close to $1 million. The exact ad format hasn’t been locked down, but it is believed that the videos will be 15-seconds long and users will see no more than three per day at launch. It is unclear whether the ads will autoplay in the feed or not.

More Messenger for Android users get free calling - Facebook this week released an update for its Messenger app on Android, bringing free VoiP calling to users in the U.S. and 23 other countries. Previously, this was in testing with Android users in Canada and iOS users in several countries. From Messenger, users can tap the “i” button inside a conversation and then select “Free Call.”

Facebook simplifies logo – Facebook has updated the look of its “f” logo, eliminating the light blue horizontal line, which was in the previous version. A comparison is available here on the site of developer Tom Waddington, who first noticed the change. The company also created new logos for several of its Facebook pages, such as those for security, privacy, government, journalists, universities and others. The one for safety, for example, accompanies the roundup item below.

Facebook and Attorneys General launch online safety campaign- Facebook and the National Association of Attorneys General are partnering to educate teens and their parents about safety and privacy on the social network. Part of the consumer education program includes a ”Safety and Privacy on Facebook” page, which will be a resource for information and tips on privacy settings and “Ask the Safety Team” videos.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

The team behind mobile video app Socialcam just keeps on trucking. The company, which is now part of Autodesk, is releasing a new version of its app today, adding a bunch of features that users have asked for, like expanded profile pages, as well as the ability to switch back and forth between front- and rear-facing cameras and hashtags and @ mentions that actually do stuff.

It’s been nearly a year since Socialcam was acquired in a deal that was worth about $60 million. Since then, the team has added a few members, boosting its ranks from four to seven. And that team continues to iterate on the app, posting eight updates across its iOS and Android apps since acquisition, some bigger than others.

That said, Socialcam co-founder Michael Seibel wants to increase the rate at which the company puts out updates, getting it back to its pre-acquisition pace of an update every three weeks or so. With that in mind, the company just issued a pretty major update today which answer some of the demands its users had from previous version.

That includes better support for hashtags and @mentions of other users. See, people were hashtagging their stuff all the time in Socialcam, but being able to search or follow or click through those hashtags wasn’t as fully built out as some would like. So users can now search via hashtag, and hashtags are now clickable. Socialcam has also added autocomplete for hashtags and @mentions, so users can get at what they want sooner.

And if what they want to get at is another user page, Socialcam has given them a little more to look at. According to Seibel, the company found that its users weren’t just leveraging the app to share their videos with other social networks, but were actually using it as its own little social network, following and interacting with the other folks there.

One of the requests the team got was to expand user profiles. So it did that, giving them more that they could do to express themselves and tell strangers on the platform who they are and why they should be followed. Socialcam also has added the ability to switch between front- and rear-facing cameras on its iOS app, allowing users to shoot a video intro with the front-facing cam, and then switch to the other one to show people what’s going on around them.

Unfortunately, not all the new features are available on both iOS and Android. Some, like the ability to switch between cameras, is an iPhone-only thing. But Android continues to come along, just a little more slowly in some areas. After completely rebuilding the Socialcam Android app a few months ago, it’s been working on getting feature sets between the platforms at parity. Or near-parity, at least.

Obligatory mention of Vine.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Volio, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (among others) and led by Nuance founder Ron Croen, launched last month with the promise of allowing apps to create a conversational experience with their users. Now it’s adding a social dimension with the launch of Voliocasts.

Founder and CEO Ron Croen laid out his vision for me earlier this week: “If you put a real human image on a computer, you can deliver something that feels real to the user, like an actual interactive experience. You get a lot of the engagement that you have with the human being.”

The first app to use Volio’s technology is Talk To Esquire, which allows the magazine’s readers to engage with Esquire columnists. What users are really seeing is a set of prerecorded videos, but they can actually talk to the, and received advice that’s customized based on their answers — for example, fashion director Nick Sullivan can walk you through what you should wear on a given evening, based on things like who you’re going out with and your affinity for formal versus casual clothes.

When I tried it out, I definitely got the feeling that I was being guided through a conversation, because you’re usually presented with very specific options in terms of answers, but on the bright side you’re not likely to say something that the app can’t handle.

With a Voliocast, apps can now record both sides of the interaction and edit them into a single video, which users can share on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

I tried it out using a demo version of the Esquire app, and given my monosyllabic answers, I’m not sure the results were terribly entertaining. It seems that if app developers want users to create Voliocasts, they’ll want to design experiences with more interaction in mind.

Croen said many of these videos could be entertaining: “There will be user generated content that’s creative, sort of on the order of karaoke, even though it’s not karaoke as such.” On the other hand, the videos could have a significant business or advertising purpose, like recording customer testimonials. (Nuance, another company that Croen founded, recently announced its own initiative in conversational advertising.)

He also emphasized that apps will only record users with their permission. He also said it’s too early to announce any of the publishers who will be using Voliocasts, but when the company announces its next set of partners, “You can expect that they’ll take advantage of the Voliocast capability.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last summer, the guys from Tracks.by launched Hipset as a discovery site for music aficionados. The idea was to provide a place for music fans to keep track of all the latest jams from their favorite artists. And, in turn, to provide a new marketing channel for celebrities to promote their music and to get fans to sign up and like their Facebook pages and posts and whatnot.

The team is still working on Hipset, but over the last several months they’ve morphed it into something totally new. That is, they’ve made it into a YouTube network for musicians and celebrities, providing them a way to reach new audiences, as well as promote and monetize their videos.

The new YouTube network follows the lead of those which have come before it, aggregating various channels of video creators and finding new ways to manage those channels at scale. In that way, it’s not all that different from what the folks at Machinima or Maker Studios are doing. Except, of course, that Hipset is designed for, and is made up of, a whole bunch of celebrities, whom the team has been working with over the last several years.

Today, Hipset has about a dozen different celebrities signed up for the network, including folks like Tyga, Souljaboy, Lil Twist, Daughtry, 3 Doors Down, Rob Zombie, Kraddy, Kris Allen, DJ Skee, Tory Lanez, and Ryan Leslie. Together, they have more than a billion video views, more than a million subscribers, and more than 35 million fans across other social networks, like Facebook and Twitter.

But let’s face it — they’re celebrities and could be doing oh so much better. And that’s where Hipset comes in.

Hipset seeks to leverage celebrities’ existing fan base across multiple channels — like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — grow their number of YouTube subscribers, video views, and ultimately, the amount of money they can make from YouTube as a distribution channel. They’re working on building tools to improve creator metadata, optimize posting times, and to help retain and attract new subscribers to the celebrities’ YouTube channels.

They’re also helping artists to define a strategy for YouTube, and including setting up collaborations with big-time YouTube creators who have millions of subscribers of their own. People who are famous everywhere get to hang out with people who are famous on YouTube, thereby growing the audiences of both. Or at least, that’s the pitch.

Oh yeah, and they have this little feature called “Boost,” which gives celebs the ability to require fans to subscribe to their YouTube channel or follow them on Twitter or Instagram or like them on Facebook before accessing one of their videos.

The team behind Hipset has been working to help celebrities connect with their audiences for a while. It includes former Ustream employees Matt Schlicht and Mazy Kazerooni, who worked with celebs providing VIP product support at the live video streaming site. (Along with former Mashable man-about-town Ben Parr, they’re also behind that silly celeb-centric venture fund with the hashtag in the name.) They teamed up with Node.js contributor Chase Sechrist, FbFund’s Erik Smith, and their former boss at Ustream Bryan Kim. But for Hipset, they’ve added a few new employees, rounding out the team at seven altogether.

The founders had gone through Y Combinator with their original idea, and had raised seed funding from a group of investors that includes Menlo Ventures, YCombinator, Venture51, Matt Mullenweg, Alexis Ohanian, Justin Kan, Brad Hunstable, Josh Elman, Alex Le, Garry Tan, Nils Johnson, David Wu, Harj Taggar, Michael Weiksner, Erik Moore, and Apu Gupta.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch