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- A Framework For The $10B+ Native Advertising Market
- Whither, Hollywood, Wither?
- There Goes The Weekend! Pinterest, Instagram And Netflix Down Due To AWS Outage [Updated]
- Why Students Should Gain Entrepreneurship Experience Before Graduating
- Twitter’s All Like “We Don’t Need You LinkedIn,” But Still Bends Over Backwards For Facebook
- Unmetric Scores The Virality Of Brands’ YouTube Campaigns
- Alexia’s Headphones: How We Used CrowdTilt’s Group-Funding Platform To Replace Stolen Property
- Paul Oakenfold On The Intersection Of Technology And Music [TCTV]
- TechCrunch Giveaway: Another Free Ticket To Disrupt SF! #TCDisrupt
- Fashion-Focused Blog Aggregator Bloglovin Raises $1M From Betaworks And Others
- Facebook’s First Public Earnings, Q2 2012, Scheduled For July 26th
- AgLocal Raises $1 Million From Andreessen Horowitz & Others To Enable Sustainable Meat Production
- Social Travel Site Gogobot Redesigns: Less Text, More Photos
- Allied Electronics Is Now Accepting Orders For The Bite-Sized Raspberry Pi
- ZURB Launches Foundation 3 To Take On Twitter’s Bootstrap Framework
- Grou.ps Launches LoveBucks, A New Subscription-Based Monetization Platform For Online Publishers
- Ren Ng Steps Down As Lytro CEO, Will Take Over As Executive Chairman; Charles Chi Named Interim CEO
- Tagstand Hits 1M Actions, Launches New Tag Writer To Bring NFC To The Mainstream
- YouTube And Google+ Grow Closer: All Users Can Now Switch Their Usernames To Their Google+ Profiles
- AdMob Founder Omar Hamoui Has A New Polling Startup, Calls It ‘Maybe’
| A Framework For The $10B+ Native Advertising Market Posted: 30 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT  Editor's note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough, the native video advertising company. Dan has been honored as an AdAge "Media Maven" and was recently named to the Forbes "30 under 30″ list. You can find him on Twitter at @dgreenberg. Over the past ten years, publishers have continued to monetize their sites with banners and pre-roll ads, and advertisers have continued to pump billions into these formats, in spite of tanking performance and near- universal disdain. While click-through rates on display ads started out at around 9% in 2000, they now hover around 0.2% – which means 99.8% of banner ads are completely ignored. Meanwhile, led by YouTube and Hulu, the pre-roll ad market is only shifting in one direction: towards "skippable prerolls," not forced interruption. And preroll skip rates are only moving in one direction (hint: when you give users the ability to skip annoying ads, they usually do). As banner clickthrough rates go down and preroll skip rates go up, a new opportunity has emerged for web publishers: native advertising. Native advertising is defined as ad strategies that allow brands to promote their content into the endemic experience of a site in a non-interruptive, integrated way. Most, if not all, major platforms on the web — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, and WordPress — have universally adopted "native" advertising formats, in some cases entirely eschewing traditional display banners and interruptive preroll. For these new native ad platforms, borne of a generation of banner blindness and skip buttons, native is the only viable ad strategy. These native ad strategies are built around twin pillars of content and choice, not banners and interruption. Already, billions of dollars are being spent through Promoted Tweets on Twitter, Sponsored Stories on Facebook, Paid Discovery on StumbleUpon, Promoted Videos on WordPress blogs, and Tumblr Spotlight and Radar (just to name a few). This trend hints towards a native advertising market that's already surpassed preroll video and is poised to overtake display advertising in the next few years. As the native advertising market explodes, the framework presented here aims to add a first layer of structure and definition to the emerging medium. Native advertising on "Closed" platforms is defined by brands creating profiles and/or content within a platform, then promoting that content through visually-integrated, content-driven, choice-based ads within the confines of that same closed platform. But it appears native advertising on closed platforms is just the tip of the iceberg. Over the past year, content publishers and independent technology companies, not just social platforms, have begun to introduce native ad experiences that reach beyond these closed platforms. For example, companies like Outbrain and Disqus power recommended content widgets on publisher sites like Mashable and USA Today, which enable marketers to promote their links through native ads. Companies like StumbleUpon and Devour help users discover great web content, and their advertising models are native to their user experiences: brands promote their videos, articles and websites into the same stream of discovery. In these cases, brands upload their content to a "closed" platform (often YouTube) then distribute that same content into these new "open" platforms with native ads. At Sharethrough, we're betting on video being at the center of "open native advertising" as we help publishers generate new revenue with native video ads from top brands. Our platform distributes video content from the likes of Nike, Old Spice, Pepsi, Microsoft, and Nestle across choice-based, native video ad placements to drive views and sharing at scale. Web platforms like WordPress, Cheezburger, and major websites like Forbes, The Awl, ThoughtCatalog, Breaking Media, and Devour have all committed to "open" native video advertising using Native advertising on these "open" platforms is defined by the fact that brand content can live outside of the site, and can be distributed across multiple platforms through native ad formats. Just as the infamous Lumascape frameworks have helped define and evolve the mobile, video, and display ad ecosystems, having a unifying framework is an important step for the native advertising industry to evolve. To that end, introduced here is the industry's first Native Advertising Framework – a first step in helping the industry understand and define the new native model. It's very much a work in progress, but it's a start. Please leave suggestions and additions in the comments. Native advertising on these "open" platforms is defined by the fact that brand content can live outside of the site, and can be distributed across multiple platforms through native ad formats. Just as the infamous Lumascape frameworks have helped define and evolve the mobile, video, and display ad ecosystems, having a unifying framework is an important step for the native advertising industry to evolve. To that end, introduced here is the industry's first Native Advertising Framework – a first step in helping the industry understand and define the new native model. It's very much a work in progress, but it's a start. Please leave suggestions and additions in the comments. What's Next for Native Advertising?
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| Posted: 30 Jun 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Last week I wrote about television; this week I’ve been thinking about Hollywood. Not least because a screenwriter with a pretty good track record recently attached himself to my squirrel book1 and is hoping to adapt it into a big animated movie. But it often takes five years or more to go from script to screen, so I can’t help wondering–will Hollywood as we know it still be around by then? Internet hero Cory Doctorow doesn’t think so. A few years ago he wrote an essay predicting the death of big-budget movies: “The specific, rarefied animal that is the gigantic film spectacle demands a technological reality that has ceased to exist: just enough technology to distribute the films everywhere, but not so much technology that the audience gets to overrule your distribution decisions.” So far, perhaps surprisingly, he’s been dead wrong. Theater attendance is down 20% in the USA over the last decade, but actual box-office income is flat, thanks to higher ticket prices. Home-entertainment spending (DVDs, rentals, Netflix, etc) is overall down almost 30% in constant dollars since 2005, but that’s counteracted by the huge rise in ‘foreign’ box office over the same period. Hollywood seems to be fighting the Internet to a standstill. But does anyone out there really think that can last? Music and books show that the Internet inevitably grinds ceaselessly and relentlessly away at entertainment prices. It’s a death of a thousand cuts–or, more precisely, ten million BitTorrents and a free alternative around every corner. All the DRM in the world won’t save Hollywood in the long run. They can’t keep raising ticket prices forever, and they won’t keep finding new revenue sources faster than the Internet devours them. In the long run this is probably true of TV too, but there are some significant differences between the two. First, movies are crazy-expensive. Reality TV is insanely cheap; I’ve been behind the camera a time or two myself, helping to craft 30-minute travel shows filmed (on location) for a mere $50,000 plus post-production. Even HBO’s big-budget spectacles like Game of Thrones cost a relatively frugal $5-6 million per episode. Movies routinely cost 20 times as much–plus marketing costs. For network TV, advertising is income; for Major Motion Pictures, it’s a cost that can easily run into the tens of millions. We’re culturally programmed to Go See Movies, which is a huge Hollywood advantage, but that won’t stick indefinitely. Rep and arthouse theaters are everywhere dying and struggling, respectively, and they’re canaries in the coal mine. As Hollywood hikes ticket prices, and fewer and fewer people attend theaters every year, eventually they’ll hit a point at which the cultural cachet and social buzz of going to see a movie seems less and less worthwhile to more and more people. So it seems to me that the predatory price-gouging Internet is more dangerous to movies than television. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Internet, but I love movies too, and I’m worried about them. Hollywood will have to start driving costs down. That can be done to some extent–see digital cameras, digital distribution, and the entire career of Robert Rodriguez–but big-budget movies are fundamentally extremely difficult and expensive things whose creation requires an army of talented people. Yes, technology will change that…but not as fast as it eats away at Hollywood’s revenues. So pity us poor underpaid novelists; Hollywood has been our lottery ticket for so long. At least animation is likely to get cheaper faster, meaning the odds of some day seeing my squirrel book on the big screen will actually probably increase with every passing year. A happy thought. But a much less happy one is that I can’t help wondering how many big screens will be left by then. 1No, really, I wrote a whole book about a squirrel. It won an award and everything.
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| There Goes The Weekend! Pinterest, Instagram And Netflix Down Due To AWS Outage [Updated] Posted: 30 Jun 2012 12:45 AM PDT  Are you out at a Friday night dinner somewhere, trying to take a filtered picture of some fancypants dessert and post it to Instagram to no avail? Are you currently making futile efforts to pin said dessert to your “Fancy Dessert” board on Pinterest but failing? Well you’re out of luck, digital hipsters! Because of storms in North Virginia, power outages have impaired Amazon Web Services data centers in the region tonight, which means no Pinterest, Instagram, Netflix, Heroku and other sundry AWS-dependent services for you. According to the AWS outage dashboard the company is ONIT, yet, as of 12:31AM PST, it is only at 50% recovery. This service outage inevitably begs the question: If someone takes an iPhone pic of a Friday night artisanal beer, and it’s not posted on Instagram, does it make a sound? As one HackerNews commentator put it, “No matter how powerful we become as a species with our technology, we are still at the mercy of the clouds. Pretty cool if you think about it.” Too true. ‘Night guys. Update: As of 9.34AM GMT (1.34AM Pacific), selected services running through Amazon’s North Virginia servers are back up. Instagram still appears to be down, though. Also: Worth pointing out that these outages seemed to also affect services in other markets like Europe — meaning that, despite Amazon having more local hubs in Europe, Asia Pacific and South America, these services appear to be routed through only one of them, in North America. We’ll keep checking and updating.
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| Why Students Should Gain Entrepreneurship Experience Before Graduating Posted: 30 Jun 2012 12:07 AM PDT  Editor’s note: Dan Schawbel is the managing partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and management consulting firm. He is also the #1 international bestselling author of Me 2.0 and was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 list in 2010. Subscribe to his updates at Facebook.com/DanSchawbel. More and more students are realizing that they can't pass their degree in for a job upon graduation anymore. The old promise made by our education system was that if you worked really hard in school, you would be almost guaranteed a job as a reward for your efforts. Furthermore, corporations used to hire most of their interns into full-time positions. Both of these promises have been broken due to economic constraints and global competition. Based on a recent report by my company, we found that employers expect students to have at least one internship, yet only half of them are bringing on new interns and few have hired them into full-time positions. The normal path to growing your career is non-existent. In today's world, you can't rely on anything or anyone to make you successful – you have to be accountable for your own career and create your own path. Students are stressed out because there are few paid internships and it's even hard to get unpaid ones. To me, the solution to this mess is clear: Students who can’t get internships should start a small business or a side project, both of which can act as an internship. If the business fails, they still learn something and have experience on their resume. If the business is successful, they don’t have to worry about getting a full-time job upon graduation. Instead of sending resumes, praying and begging your friends, you can do things your way. Years ago, it would be rare for a student to have entrepreneurship experience on their resume because the cost of starting a business was so high and because they didn't have the resources or expertise to pull it off. Times Now, hundreds of colleges offer entrepreneurship courses and employers are starting to understand the importance of that type of education. In our research, we found that some employers are actually looking for students with entrepreneurship experience when hiring for entry-level positions. Why do you think? Well, it's because students who have an entrepreneurial mindset are accountable for their own actions, aggressive and know how to execute. They also have the communication and sales skills that are necessary to be successful in business today. Smart companies fully understand that if they don't innovate, they won't exist in the future. By recruiting young entrepreneurs, they bring new perspectives and youthful ideas into the workplace. When speaking to employers about this phenomenon, some of the top executives said that they would rather hire a student with entrepreneurship experience over a student that had five internships. Entrepreneurs naturally develop soft skills, such as communication skills and teamwork skills that employers are desperately looking for right now as they scout to find the next generation of leaders at their companies. If you're a student right now, make it your mission to take your career into your own hands and start a project or small business, whether you're selling clothes on eBay, selling products to fellow students or you come up with the next big Facebook idea. Employers don't care if it succeeds or fails, just that you gave it a shot and learned something from it. If you want to graduate with a job, then you better brush up your entrepreneurship skills today – your future depends on it!
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| Twitter’s All Like “We Don’t Need You LinkedIn,” But Still Bends Over Backwards For Facebook Posted: 29 Jun 2012 06:55 PM PDT  Nothing is more fascinating than the tech platform API wars because they are so, so similar to high school. Once a company feels it’s too cool for another company, it starts shutting off parts of its API to that company, like what happened here with Facebook and Google. It’s basically one of those big, swinging dick types of things, that I, as a female, entirely understand. Twitter’s move is completely about growth and engagement. Twitter currently has over 500 million users, LinkedIn, a modest 150 million. Facebook, which is at almost a billion users, is clearly bigger than Twitter — So allowing tweet syndication there helps more non-Twitter users discover the service, sign up, and increase Twitter’s growth. I’m assuming that the same principle applies with Twitter integration on page-view machine Tumblr, which allows for tweet display depending on the theme.. So for the moment I can still post to Facebook from Twitter, most likely because someone over there at Twitter HQ made the assumption that most of LinkedIn's highly monetizable usership is already on Twitter. It wants those people reading tweets on its website where it shows ads, not on LinkedIn, whereas Facebook has another a half a billion users or so of potential lead generation, so “delivering a consistent Twitter experience” becomes less important. As Twitter transitions into monetization mode, keeping people on the site where it shows ads is important, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Tumblr’s access suddenly gets revoked. Welcome to the latest phase of API Darwinism.
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| Unmetric Scores The Virality Of Brands’ YouTube Campaigns Posted: 29 Jun 2012 05:28 PM PDT  Social benchmarking startup Unmetric just expanded its tools to include YouTube, giving brands a new way to measure the effectiveness of their video campaigns. Of course, companies can already see plenty of stats about their videos — views, likes, and more. But Unmetric tries to synthesize all that data into a single score, and then shows how that score stacks up against competitors. The company was already providing scores for Facebook pages and Twitter handles. On YouTube, Unmetric says it looks at 24 different metrics, including tags, views, comments, favorites, and ratings, then gives a channel a score between 0 and 100. Customers can also drill down on individual videos or on specific factors to see what they could be doing better. For example, Chevrolet (Unmetric score for May: 60) has uploaded 66 videos adding up to more than three hours of content, while Ford (Unmetric score: 43) has only uploaded four videos/six minutes, and Dodge (34) and Chrysler (35) only have four minutes between the two of them. The company’s other YouTube features include the ability to compare the length of videos to see whether long or short videos lead to more videos and combining tags into a word cloud to see the types of content that seem to work. Unmetric says it has already scored the YouTube channels of more than 1,750 brands. You can explore the results for here.
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| Alexia’s Headphones: How We Used CrowdTilt’s Group-Funding Platform To Replace Stolen Property Posted: 29 Jun 2012 04:11 PM PDT  On the 25th of June, our dearest Alexia Tsotsis had an incredibly rough day. First, her car was looted by very bad people in San Francisco, who stole her laptop and a pair of excellent Bose headphones that were near and dear to her heart. And as if that wasn’t enough, her car then got smashed by someone running a red light, totaling her vehicle and leaving her in quite a bit of pain.
When fellow TechCrunch sharks heard the news, we knew we had to do something to help out one of our fearless leaders, and so our very own Ryan Lawler stepped up to the plate with a suggestion to buy some new headphones for Alexia. “Knowing that we can’t replace the sentimental value, I was thinking we could maybe (at least) help replace the item that was taken.” After a little back and forth, the team settled on an app to help us accomplish the task at hand (we at TC need an app for everything), and that’s where CrowdTilt enters the mix. CrowdTilt is an online platform that allows anyone to start a group-funding campaign, which is different from crowd-funding. According to CrowdTilt, group-funding is where a group of people give money to fund an objective where the entire group benefits, whereas crowd-funding lets the general public fund an individual’s goal or objective. There are a few small caveats to the service, including a required Facebook login for campaign starters and U.S.-only availability at the moment. For Ryan, our own campaign starter, signing up with Facebook is no big deal. We’re hyper-connected. But for someone who doesn’t want to access third-party apps through Facebook (and there are quite a few people like this in the world), this may be a road block. CrowdTilt explains on its FAQ that the Facebook log-in for campaign starters is meant to make other contributors aware of who they’re giving money to, which is noble for sure, but not always convenient for the campaign starter. Another issue we had was the lack of international availability. Sure, every startup needs time to scale, but our poor Ingrid Lunden and Mike Butcher had to contribute via PayPal, as their UK billing addresses weren’t accepted. If your eye can spy in the image below, founder James Beshara joined us to make his own contribution to the campaign. He was also nice enough to manually close the campaign for us when Facebook Connect was acting up on Wednesday. So Alexia, when you sit down to write everyone a thank you card (likely with another app), make sure to include James. Click to view slideshow.
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| Paul Oakenfold On The Intersection Of Technology And Music [TCTV] Posted: 29 Jun 2012 03:44 PM PDT  So it was really amazing to have Oakenfold swing by the TechCrunch TV studios while he was in San Francisco this week. Watch the video above to see him talk all about the intersection of music and technology — where it’s been, and where it may be going. Here are just a few quick takeaways from our chat: The Trance-Like Connection Of Music And CodeIt seems that many people who are programmers also have a thing for electronic music. Oakenfold says that this could be because the “trance” like state that, well, trance music helps facilitate goes hand-in-hand with hacking. He explained it like this:
Leaving The Laptop In The StudioAs much as Oakenfold has really embraced technology in his career — from the tools he uses to make music, to how he interacts with his fans (his Twitter handle is @pauloakenfold, by the way) — he still draws the line when it comes to putting a laptop screen between himself and the crowd at live sets. He said:
Getting The Crowd To Put Down Their PhonesBut while Oakenfold makes a point of not putting a screen between himself and a live crowd, it’s still increasingly common for the people at his sets to put their own screens up in front of him to record the show on video or take photos. This is not a trend that he’s especially keen on — to really experience live music, he says, it’s best for people to be totally in the moment, not recording it for posterity.
Keeping The ‘Sparkle’ And Avoiding BurnoutWhat’s really clear when you meet Oakenfold is that he’s still so passionate about what he does, even though he’s been doing it for so long. I asked him how he fends off “burnout”, something that seems like it could impact professional musicians in the same way that it impacts people in tech. He had some really cool insights — balance is key, he said, and so is making sure to continue to embrace new things:
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| TechCrunch Giveaway: Another Free Ticket To Disrupt SF! #TCDisrupt Posted: 29 Jun 2012 03:01 PM PDT  TechCrunch Disrupt SF is back and everything is shaping up nicely behind the scenes. Actually, I was in a Disrupt meeting all day and that’s why this post is going out so late. So, you will have an extra day to enter. Congratulations to last week’s winner, Samer Karam. We asked everyone who entered to tell us who they would like to see at Disrupt, and Samer’s choice was Instagram’s Kevin Systrom. We’ve reached out and will let you know. Also, remember to keep your eyes out for announcement posts; we have some exciting news about Disrupt SF coming up. Want to come and hang out with us this September? Make sure to follow the steps below. 1) Become a fan of our TechCrunch Facebook Page: 2) Then do one of the following: - Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TCDisrupt hashtag) The contest will start now and end July 2nd at 7:30pm PT. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will make sure you follow the steps above and choose our winner once the giveaway is over. Anyone in the world is eligible. Please note this giveaway is for one ticket only and does not include airfare or hotel. Now is the time to get the best deal for Disrupt Tickets, so grab them while you can. You can purchase tickets here. If you would like to join us as a sponsor, opportunities can be found here. Good luck!
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| Fashion-Focused Blog Aggregator Bloglovin Raises $1M From Betaworks And Others Posted: 29 Jun 2012 02:50 PM PDT  Bloglovin, a startup that has been compared to Tumblr and RSS, has just raised a $1 million Series A. The company bills itself as a fun, simple way to follow all the fashion blogs that interest you. Like RSS, you can sign up to read updates from any blog (not just the ones on a single platform or content management system), and like Tumblr, there’s an emphasis on high-quality visuals and community. Bloglovin even held a fashion awards ceremony in New York earlier this year. I first spoke to the Bloglovin team about a month ago, shortly after New York City-based incubator and early-stage investor betaworks had bought some secondary shares in the company from a seed investor. At the time, betaworks CEO John Borthwick sounded particularly excited about the startup’s numbers. It has about 1.5 million registered users, and more impressively, its ratio of daily active users to monthly active users is 50 percent. Put another way — people who use the site must love it, because they come back a lot. The average Bloglovin user also follows 37 blogs. The Series A is betaworks’ first direct investment in the company. Other investors in the round include:
Bloglovin CEO and co-founder Mattias Swenson says his next big target is mobile. He notes that even blogs with a tech-savvy readership rarely see more than 10 percent of their traffic come from mobile — compared to social sites like Facebook and Twitter, where mobile usage is more like 50 percent. Bloglovin has already released a smartphone app, but Swenson says, “We’re not really proud of it.” He’s planning to launch a new iPhone app at the end of July, with the aim of presenting one of the first blog reading experiences that looks really great on a smartphone. The company plans to release iPad and Android apps further down the road. In addition to mobile, Swenson says he’s looking to add more social features. After all, he says his girlfriend, a fashion blogger, has hundreds of thousands of monthly readers, but “she doesn’t know any of them — they’re just numbers in Google Analytics.” That’s why Swenson wants to “bring the social fabric to the blogosphere.” And if that’s not enough, the company also wants to release localized versions in key international markets like Japan. After all, when you’re featuring such visually-driven content, it can appeal to readers who aren’t native speakers of a given language.
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| Facebook’s First Public Earnings, Q2 2012, Scheduled For July 26th Posted: 29 Jun 2012 02:04 PM PDT  Facebook will give investors and the world their first official look at its post-IPO earning for Q2 2012 at 2pm PST on July 26th, according to a brief note posted to its investor relations page just now. There’s been no indication of whether CEO Mark Zuckerberg will participate in an earnings call or if more business focused execs COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman will be the ones fielding questions. The company pulled in $1.058 billion in Q1 2012 revenue with a net income of $205 million. Critics will want to see both of those increase and will likely focus on its mobile revenue. Facebook only began showing ads on mobile at the end of February, but monetizing the medium is believed to be the linchpin of Facebook’s future success. The company’s share price closed at $31.095 today, down $0.265 or 0.85% and beneath the recent peak it hit at $32.86 on June 25th. It’s still closer to the $38 IPO price than its been for most of the time since its May 18th public debut, though. Here’s a look at the last earnings and revenue info it released in its S-1 prior to its IPO. Facebook gave potential investors a scare when its showed that despite revenue going up 44.7% from Q1 2012, it was down 6.5% from Q4 2011. While surely influenced by the waning of holiday advertising, many suspected this was the first sign of slowing momentum due to the shift of its user base to mobile where it wasn’t monetizing as effectively. But recent data first published by TechCrunch showed very strong potential for Sponsored Stories ads in the news feed to make mobile a significant revenue stream. Facebook’s biggest advertising API partners showed users were 13 times more likely to click mobile Sponsored Stories than its desktop ads, and they earn the social network 11 times more each. Facebook is purposefully throttling the ramp up the presence of these ads as not to shock users who’ve had their mobile experience ad-free for years. Finding the maximum number of ads it can show without decreasing usage and engagement, or leaving sour taste in users’ mouths will be crucial. While their power won’t be reflected in the Q2 2012 earnings, there are three new Facebook ads products that could make future earnings releases a lot shinier:
Taking these new developments into account, the three lead investment banks who underwrote Facebook’s IPO, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley all issued the equivalent of a”buy” ratings this week. Other banks issued “neutral” or “hold” ratings. Many want to see signs that Facebook will weather the transition to mobile gracefully. If it can show as much on July 26th and the price stays where it is now, investors might flock to Facebook. Regardless of the financials, the sheer presence of Mark Zuckerberg on the earnings call could reassure investors who may worry they’re far down the young CEO’s list of priorities after he skipped several meetings with them during the pre-IPO roadshow. And if he does join the call, I better not hear one analyst mention of hoodies, pokes, or any of those awful Facebook puns.
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| AgLocal Raises $1 Million From Andreessen Horowitz & Others To Enable Sustainable Meat Production Posted: 29 Jun 2012 01:44 PM PDT  AgLocal, a startup that’s using the power of the Internet to disrupt how animal farmers connect with meat buyers and distributors, has just scored $1 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Midwest VC firm OpenAir Equity Partners and other angels including John Fohr (Partner at Lux Capital), Thad Langford (former CEO of Zave Networks), Dan Carroll (founder of Leap2 and AdPredictive), Andy O’Hara (Partner at Tradebot Ventures), and Matt Watson (Founder of Vin Solutions and Stackify). The additional funding will help the company build out its technology platform, hire additional engineers, and establish relationships with potential partners in advance of its late summer/fall launch planned for later this year. Co-founder Naithan Jones said he was inspired to create the company not necessarily because of green concerns, like the impact that large-scale, mechanized farming has on the environment, but because he saw the potential for consumer empowerment. Farmers’ markets help people buy quality produce at a good price, but, he says, “I like meat.” He thought to himself: “I don’t think I’m getting the best price for the best product, and that’s because of the system that controls it. So, how do I break that and disrupt that by using the web?” Those ideas later became AgLocal. However, Jones quickly realized that the consumer-focused approach which would allow everyday folks to buy directly from farms wouldn’t work. It just wasn’t scalable. “People really don’t buy that way, even when they say they will,” he says. “They like to buy their meat in trusted places where it’s stored cold – grocery stores and butcher shops.” The other problem was that farms don’t do business that way either – they don’t deliver their meat throughout the city because they simply don’t have time. Getting into the consumer market would mean turning into a supply chain company, Jones realized, and he didn’t want that. Instead, he looked to who were the biggest buyers of meats, and decided to enable them. Here in the U.S., that’s the distributor businesses which sells to the retailers. There are a number of these businesses which are independent (meaning not under contract from larger distributors like Monsanto or Cargill), but still fairly good-sized companies. Through AgLocal, they’ll be able to connect with and buy directly from the farmers. And in the end, AgLocal could still offer consumers a mobile solution that lets them know where in their city they can find the locally raised, sustainable meats. “Sustainable,” although not the original inspiration for the business, is a key part of AgLocal’s potential. Explains Jones, most farmers have the ability to scale their farm up and produce 4 times what they do now, but they choose not to. The problem is that if they do, in order to maintain their margins, their only buyer is a Monsanto or Cargill, for example. And then they would only get a small piece of margin for three to four times the work. Their only other options for selling off additional product would be to take it to farmers’ markets or go door-to-door, selling to local restaurants. But farmers don’t have time to sell, says Jones, they’re operators. “98% [of U.S. farms] are family and independent farms,” says Jones. However, they have no choice but to work with the large mechanized farms when they want to scale. “But what’s funny is that the market says that animal – that cow, that chicken, that pig – is worth more to the market before it goes through their process. But they have no way of meeting the market and quantifying that demand. That’s why we’re building this.” Besides the impact to farmers’ margins, mechanized farming contributes to a whole host of problems: pollution, what they do to the meat we consume because of overcrowding issues and the antibiotics pumped into the animals, and, ultimately, what they do to our healthcare costs because of the meat we consume. But this is what scaling a farm looks like today, unfortunately. Currently a team of seven, AgLocal is hiring engineers who will work out of the Valley, while its base of operations will be in Kansas City. The service will launch sometime later this summer or early fall across the U.S.
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| Social Travel Site Gogobot Redesigns: Less Text, More Photos Posted: 29 Jun 2012 01:30 PM PDT  Gogobot, the social travel site that recently passed the 1 million registered user mark, just launched an interesting redesign this week that turn the site’s homepage into more of an interactive magazine experience with a focus on photos instead of the site’s previous text-heavy design. As Gogobot’s founder Travis Katz told me earlier this week, the Gogobot team noticed that its users didn’t just use the service to plan their trips and update their friends, but that many of them also used the service just to browse photos. This, said Katz, became especially clear after Gogobot launched its mobile app earlier this year and allowed users to share and create virtual postcards from their trips. Ever since it launched, Gogobot hand-curated images from Flickr and other sources. Now that its users are also contributing thousands of images, Katz said, putting more emphasis on these photos was an obvious choice for the company. Katz stressed that while the new design looks a bit Pinterest-like, Gogobot always focused on the visual aspects of its service. Now, however, the highly visual and more magazine-style browsing experience is at the service’s center. It’s worth noting, by the way, that two of Gogobot’s smaller competitors Trippy and Gtrot look quite a bit like Pinterest, but in our conversation, Katz stressed that while these services may provide travelers with inspiration for their trips, only Gogobot offers users a more complete solution. That said, though, while the company also made some minor updates to the look and feel of the rest of the site, this redesign doesn’t affect Gogobot’s feature set. What the new design does, though, said Katz, is make it easier for the service’s users to find travel ideas and do some aspirational browsing on the site. The main focus of Gogobot, of course, also remains on the social aspects of the service, which lets you see which hotels and sights your friends liked when they traveled to a certain city, for example. Given the success of its mobile app, Katz also said, Gogobot plans to launch a number of new mobile features in the near future as well, though he wasn’t quite ready to share any details yet.
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| Allied Electronics Is Now Accepting Orders For The Bite-Sized Raspberry Pi Posted: 29 Jun 2012 01:21 PM PDT  The Raspberry Pi is a tasty little Linux computing device but it’s so far been rather hard to buy. I’ve wanted to order one since it officially started to ship in April. However, due to the limited quantities, retailers sold out nearly immediately. Enter Allied Electronics. The Texas-based electronic distributor is now taking orders for the Raspberry Pi at the list price of $35 each with the only caveat being shipping is not for 10-12 weeks. But I’ll take it! The Raspberry Pi is a pretty exciting computing devices. The tiny PCB is packed to the gills with respectable hardware: a Broadcom BCN2835 SoC (700MHz ARM CPU), 256MB RAM, Ethernet, two USB ports, and HDMI. Plus, the Linux core allows for all sorts of general coding fun. It’s hard to find a more capable device for $35 — and now you can finally order one.
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| ZURB Launches Foundation 3 To Take On Twitter’s Bootstrap Framework Posted: 29 Jun 2012 01:10 PM PDT  Twitter’s Bootstrap gives developers an easy to use grid-based and responsive framework for quickly designing prototypes and basic web pages, as well as production-ready interactive sites. With Foundation, product design company ZURB offers a direct competitor to Twitter’s product and the company is launching version 3 of its framework today. This new version, which the company just announced at Groupon’s Schmonference, is significantly easier to customize and, as ZURB tells us, almost all of the CSS code has been rewritten to make it more polished and easier to restyle and modify as well. The Foundation team also rewrote some of the grid system – which is really the heart of the framework. As ZURB told us earlier today, the new grid system is “a freakishly powerful original creation which applies to almost any project — we think it's the best grid system out there.” While the earlier grid system used percentages for the margins, for example, it’s now much easier to change the gutters of the grid by just changing one value. Using Sass, a popular CSS3 extension, Foundation now also supports a semantic grid. Indeed, it’s this reliance on Sass that’s one major difference between Foundation and Bootstrap, which uses LESS. Another area the team focused on is typography. Foundation’s typography is now based on a modular scale that should make it easier for designers to ensure that they can “keep a consistent vertical rhythm down the page,” as ZURB puts it. Developers, of course, can still fine-tune the fonts they use as well (you can read more about how Foundation does this here). In addition to all of this, ZURB is also now making Foundation more of a core product and is dedicating a small team of engineers to these efforts.
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| Grou.ps Launches LoveBucks, A New Subscription-Based Monetization Platform For Online Publishers Posted: 29 Jun 2012 01:00 PM PDT  Making money in the online content business isn’t always easy, especially for publishers and bloggers who don’t have huge audiences. Besides advertising, there aren’t too many options for online publishers and even though it looked like micropayments would offer a solution a few years ago, they never caught on with the public. Today, the white label social networking service Grou.ps is taking a stab at solving this problem. It’s launching a new program called LoveBucks that allows users to buy a monthly subscription (starting at $2.95/month) and then lets them spend this money by clicking on the LoveBucks widgets on sites that sign up for the program. The company tested this service on Grou.ps for the last month and is launching it out of beta today. The launch partners include SFGate (which should be live very soon) and developer community Sitepoint. The money LoveBucks collects is split three ways: the first 60% got to sites that that have received clicks in a given month, 30% is provided as residual for as long as a publisher is part of the program and 10% goes to LoveBucks itself. For publishers, Grou.ps says, LoveBucks provides another avenue to establish a revenue stream without sacrificing a lot of real estate on their sites. Instead of just a Facebook ‘like,’ after all, LoveBucks’ users reward publishers with real money. It’s an interesting concept, though it does sound a bit like the approach read-it-later service Readability took a few months ago. There, too, users could buy a monthly subscription and Readability would then divvy the money up between publishers based on how often users saved their articles on the service. Readability shut this service down earlier this month. While enough readers signed up for the service, it couldn’t find enough publishers to also sign up and almost 90% of the money it collected went unclaimed. LoveBucks, it seems, is avoiding these issues by automatically sharing all its money with publishers every month, but the success of this program obviously depends on getting enough publishers and users to sign up for it.
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| Ren Ng Steps Down As Lytro CEO, Will Take Over As Executive Chairman; Charles Chi Named Interim CEO Posted: 29 Jun 2012 12:57 PM PDT  Lytro Founder Ren Ng has announced that he’s stepping down as CEO and will be transitioning into the company’s Executive Chairman effective immediately. Charles Chi, the current Executive Chairman, has been named interim CEO until a more permanent CEO has been found. Ng will remain a full-time employee but will shift his focus to product 100 percent, according to his blog post.
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| Tagstand Hits 1M Actions, Launches New Tag Writer To Bring NFC To The Mainstream Posted: 29 Jun 2012 12:36 PM PDT  Google is making a serious push with NFC on Android. As we detailed last night, Android product management director Hugo Barra revealed yesterday that Google is now shipping 1 million NFC-equipped devices every week. Beyond Google Wallet, the company announced some cool new features to Android Beam at I/O on Wednesday, including giving users the option to share video through NFC or pair their phones to other NFC-enabled devices just by tapping it. Last night, Google showcased Beam’s new functionality with two apps, Paper Camera and Tagstand’s Task Launcher. Y Combinator-backed Tagstand, in particular, has been on a mission to make NFC more of a mainstream technology and is starting to pick up steam as a result. Tagstand co-founder Kulveer Taggar tells us that the startup saw a big jump in demand when the NFC-equipped Galaxy Nexus hit stores, so they rebuilt Task Launcher to include a bunch of new features — and a new interface — in March. Sales picked up almost immediately, and they went on to sell as many tags in March as they did during the entire month of June 2011 (when the app launched). Since then, the growth has continued. Just a few days ago, Task Launcher passed a significant milestone: One million actions executed. To break that down, of the 1 million actions executed, users changed WiFi and Bluetooth settings 300,000 times, 176,000 applications were launched, phones were set to silent or vibrate 150,000 times, 12,000 songs were played, 10,000 alarms were set, and mobile hotspots were set up 8,000 times. Initially, the app was offered on Google Play for $2, but earlier this week, Tagstand began offering the app for free to further accelerate growth, and which Taggar says has resulted in a 5-fold increase in the number of daily installs. As for some background, in case all of those aforementioned actions confuse, Task Launcher lets users create and use NFC tags to automate tasks you perform in everyday life. Swipe your NFC-equipped phone near one of those tags and your phone will perform specific actions or reconfigure to particular settings once swiped. Using Task Launcher, users can turn on Bluetooth with a swipe of their phone, for example, or turn off WiFi and call up their favorite music app when they scan a tag placed in their car — or even set their phone’s ringer to vibrate, dim the display and set an alarm once they’ve placed their phone on their night stand. The possibilities for this kind of technology are many, so to demonstrate how it could work in the real world, Tagstand has been partnering with events, like one that Sarah covered in May. Attendees were given some digital goodie bags when they arrived at the event, including an NFC-enabled wristband. As Sarah wrote, these bands allowed guests to “link up their NFC bracelet with their Facebook and Twitter accounts, enabling them to automatically upload the pictures they take at the party's web-connected photo booths, they can tap to check in on Facebook Places, and they can tweet by tapping on the Library walls – all magically enabled via NFC.” Taggar tells us that the bands amplified the event’s social engagement to 187K Facebook friends and 32K twitter followers, with 20 percent of the people with wristbands tweeting and 80 percent posting to Facebook during the event using NFC, turning the event organizers into happy campers. Finding success at this event (and several since), Tagstand has since been developing another app, with which it aims to streamline the process of programming NFC tags for everyday users. While there’s a great tag-writing app by NXP already in Google Play, TagWriter doesn’t allow users to do bulk programming. So, Taggar tells us that the team made that one of the key features of its new app — NFC Writer — to let users program multiple tags at once, rather than just one at a time. The other key feature, the co-founder says, is its social focus, which makes it easy for users to create NFC-enabled Foursquare tags, for example. (And soon, Facebook tags.) As a whole, if 9To5Mac is correct and the iPhone 5 launches later this year sporting an NFC chip and an antenna, the technology’s penetration is going to accelerate significantly. As mentioned, Samsung already has several NFC-enabled phones, including the Galaxy S II and III and the Galaxy Nexus, but they hadn’t done much to put NFC to use. (The reason they introduced TecTiles, NFC stickers, earlier this month.) So the apps being created by Tagstand (and JFDP Labs’ Paper Camera) give users the opportunity to have some geeky fun with their NFC phones and start making the most out of the technology. For more, find Tagstand at home here.
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| YouTube And Google+ Grow Closer: All Users Can Now Switch Their Usernames To Their Google+ Profiles Posted: 29 Jun 2012 11:11 AM PDT  YouTube’s comment section isn’t exactly known for being a hotbed of in-depth intellectual conversations. One of the reasons for this, some would argue, is the fact that YouTube still lets people post comments using handles like ‘cutepuppies99′ without having to reveal your real identity. Starting today, however, you will have the option to use your Google-wide Google+-based identity that will show your real name (or at least the name you are using on Google+) to all YouTube users. Google actually has been giving new YouTube users the option to use their Google-wide identity on YouTube since March. What’s new today is that even existing users can switch their old YouTube handles to their Google+ profiles. This means you can now use both your real name on YouTube and display your Google+ profile picture. Given that you may have posted some videos or comments under the guise of anonymity that you would rather not be associated with under your real name, Don’t worry. Google also lets you see your comment and video history, as well as your public playlists, and lets you decide whether you want it to be associated with your full name. “Using Your Full Name Isn’t For Everyone”Does this change mean Google is soon going to force all YouTube users to switch their handles to their Google+ profiles? Probably not. In its announcement today, Google acknowledges that “using your full name isn't for everyone. Maybe people know you by your YouTube username. Perhaps you don't want your name publicly associated with your channel. To continue using your YouTube username, just click ‘I don't want to use my full name’ when you see the prompt.” What’s clear, though, is that Google definitely wants its users to use their real identity (or at least the identity they assumed when they signed up for Google+) across its products. The company says that users should “stay tuned for more ways to use this username in other Google products and services in coming months.”
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| AdMob Founder Omar Hamoui Has A New Polling Startup, Calls It ‘Maybe’ Posted: 29 Jun 2012 10:56 AM PDT  Can’t decide what shoes to buy? Or what book to read next? AdMob founder and former CEO Omar Hamoui is launching a new startup called Maybe to help with your decision. Last month, Hamoui told me that he was leaving (and shutting down) Churn Labs, the startup generator that he founded with AdMob engineer Mike Rowehl, because he’d been lured away by one of the Churn startups. At the time, he wasn’t ready to say anything about the startup in question, but now he is, because a preview version of the Maybe site just went live. Here’s how Hamoui explains his goals:
So when you visit the Maybe site, you create questions like “What movie should I watch this weekend?” then list all the different options you are considering. You can add items either by copy-and-pasting a link or using the Maybe bookmarklet. Once you’ve got a question that you want to ask, you can share it with specific friends on the site, or open it to the general Maybe userbase. You can also share it on Facebook and Twitter. Choosing between products is the obvious use case, especially since your choices need to have an online presence, but you can use the site for other decisions. Questions on the Maybe front page currently include “How should I do my hair for the wedding?” and “What paleo recipe should I try next?” And yes, there are other services out there that help you poll your friends to make decisions — there are fashion-focused apps like Fashism, as well as more general polling apps like Thumb. However, Maybe asks the question in a different way — it’s not a matter of “Do you like this?” but rather, “Here are the things I’m considering, which one should I choose?” I poked around the site for a few minutes this morning, and I can see myself using it — the interface is clean and allows you to ask questions without too much fuss. Still, Hamoui emphasizes that this is just a preview version:
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