Mashable: Latest 29 News Updates - including “HOW TO: Improve Engagement on Your Brand’s Facebook Page [STATS]” |
- HOW TO: Improve Engagement on Your Brand’s Facebook Page [STATS]
- Mozilla Hangs Slow Firefox Add-ons on a Wall of Shame
- TV-Tagging App IntoNow Tries to Kickstart Discussions With New Release
- Why Websites Are Slow & Why Speed Really Matters [INFOGRAPHIC]
- New York Times Gets Its First Tumblr
- Online Vending Machine Dispenses Snacks at Your Behest
- Airborne Toxic Event Priming Fans for Album Release With Series of Acoustic Videos
- Justin Bieber Lookalike Covers “Love The Way You Lie”
- Twitter Reverts to Old Interface Amidst Technical Woes
- 80 Startups Rejected from NYC Job Fair Launch Rival Gathering
- Death Cab for Cutie Shoots Live, Scripted, One-Take Music Video: Watch It Here
- LinkedIn Edges Out Want Ads As Job Search Tool for Millennials
- Want to See All iAds in One Place? Apple’s Got an App for That
- Meet Twitter’s New Homepage [PIC]
- Twitter in Talks To Buy Stealth Personalization Startup Bottlenose
- Facebook Reaches Out to Journalists With Page, Workshops
- Closed or Open Source: Which CMS is Right for Your Business?
- How AT&T and Verizon iPhone Users Compare [STATS]
- President Obama to Host a Live Town Hall Meeting on Facebook
- Facebook-Infused Job Search Site Finds Listings From Your Social Graph
- Why Cross-Channel Messaging Is Crucial to Reaching New Consumers
- How New Community Tools Will Democratize Data Analytics for the Good of Society
- Group Video Calling Comes to iPhone & Android in Fring Beta Test
- How Many People Have Actually Subscribed to The Daily?
- Zynga Hires Team Behind Online Poker Stat Tracker
- Rhapsody Premieres TV on the Radio’s New Album One Week Early
- WordPress Upgrades Security With 3.11 Release
- Indexing the Real World: The Enormous Potential of Hyperlocal Data
- GOP Uses Social Media to Respond to Obama 2012 Campaign Launch
- Fashion Industry Hosts Online Auctions for Japan Relief
| HOW TO: Improve Engagement on Your Brand’s Facebook Page [STATS] Posted: 06 Apr 2011 04:59 AM PDT      If you’re looking to boost engagement on your brand’s Facebook Page, a new report from Buddy Media has some key findings for you. The social media marketing company collected data from 200 of its clients’ Pages* over a 14-day period and found that time in an important factor in determining the success of a Facebook post. The study reveals that more often than not, a Facebook post is ill-timed — in fact, office hours could be the worst time to blast content. “While marketers may work Monday through Friday, Facebook is humming with activity 24-hours a day, seven days a week," says Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow. And so, brands must adapt to their consumers’ schedules in order to optimize their engagement. Here are the findings, along with tips about when and how to make the most of a Facebook post. Be Timely The study found that daily Facebook engagement has three peaks: early morning (7 a.m. EST), after work (5 p.m. EST) and late at night (11 p.m. EST). Therefore, posting all of your updates during the workday means you’re missing key opportunities to engage fans at non-work hours. However, not all brands’ engagement peaks at these three times — Playboy engagement peaks in the wee hours of the morning, for example — so you must work on a case-by-case basis.  Good timing on Facebook depends on the day of the week, too. Thursday and Friday have 18% more engagement than other days of the week, suggesting that Facebook is a procrastination tool when people are itching to get out of the office. But don’t start stacking all of your Facebook updates on Thursday and Friday — the study found interesting user patterns and engagement trends throughout the week that are unique to particular industries. Below, the findings are broken down by market so that you can see where entire industries are missing the mark and where — or rather, when — there’s room for improvement.
Joe Ciarallo, Buddy Media’s director of communications, says a lot of smart brands already target their audiences when they’re most engaged. For those who don’t, Ciarallo says they should consider scheduling Facebook posts to go live during times of high engagement at night and on weekends. Be ConciseThe data indicates that the length of the post can determine engagement just as much as the time of the post. The bottom line: Keep it short and sweet. Posts with 80 characters or less — the length of a short tweet — garnered 27% more engagement than posts that were more than 80 characters. But brevity is far from a common practice — only 19% of posts in the study were shorter than 80 characters. And while the content should be short, the URL probably shouldn’t be — posts with a full-length URL had three times the engagement of their shortened bit.ly, ow.ly and tinyurl counterparts. The reason is likely because readers want to know where the link will take them. Ciarallo says a brand-specific URL shortener, like bddy.me or on.mash, keeps a post short while also providing context. Ask For Engagement Words ranked in order of their effectiveness at converting Likes and comments. If you’re looking to get Likes on a post, all you have to do is ask. Ciarallo says simple, outright instructions — “Like us if…” — are much more effective at getting a Like than a post with a long explanation of why you should “like” something. Remember, “liking” only takes one click and then the “liked” item is syndicated on a user’s own page, so don’t be afraid to ask for the thumbs up. The same goes for comments — outright saying “post,” “comment” or “tell us” motivates fans to engage. If you’re seeking answers, put a simple “where” or “when” or “would” question at the end of the post — you’ll get 15% more engagement than if the question is buried in the middle. Shy away from “why” questions, as they seem invasive and ask much more of a user than a “what” question, Ciarallo says. Advice for Smaller BrandsThese findings are insightful and can help brands better target their consumers, but it is important to note that the brands studied are all large and well-established. While URL shortening is a good idea for all brands, the day and time findings may not apply to businesses of all sizes within each industry. For small businesses, it’s important to balance the data above with what you know about your own brand, based on Facebook Insights and your own experiences with your Page. “Small brands can take away some best practices from this, but remember that the data set is all large brands,” Ciarallo says. “Still, a boutique hotel owner could look at the hospitality section and see how it can help his Facebook marketing.” He also says it’s important to realize the social marketing space is constantly evolving, and these statistics can change in a matter of months. If every brand begins to post when the engagement is high, then engagement either will increase because of the optimization, or it may decrease because there’s so much noise at the high-engagement times. Only time will tell for the long-term. “This is 200 large brands over two weeks, so it’s a large data set, but things are moving fast,” meaning your Facebook marketing program must be flexible, Ciarallo says. Though this is the first study of its kind that Buddy Media has publicly released, Ciarallo foresees future reports like this one to help brands maximize engagement in an ever-changing marketing environment. What engagement tips have you picked up from your Facebook Page? Tell us in the comments. Disclosure: Buddy Media is a Mashable sponsor. *Buddy Media did not disclose which of its 600 client brands were included in the study, but the company has a lengthy roster of enterprise clients, including W Hotels, Target, American Express, Playboy and the Food Network. More About: automobile, Buddy Media, business, engagement, entertainment, facebook, Facebook Like, facebook marketing, fashion, hospitality, media, retail, small business, sports, travel For more Business & Marketing coverage:
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| Mozilla Hangs Slow Firefox Add-ons on a Wall of Shame Posted: 06 Apr 2011 03:28 AM PDT   Mozilla has published a list of 10 Firefox add-ons which hinder the browser’s performance the most. The list, available here, shows how much each add-on slows down Firefox at startup. Ironically, an add-on called “FastestFox – Browse Faster” is on the list, together with several very popular ones, for example the developer-oriented Firebug and bookmark synchronizer Xmarks. The slowest add-ons on the list, FoxLingo – Translator / Dictionary and Firebug, slow down Firefox’s startup by a whopping 74%. The list is a result of a recent initiative by Mozilla to put a stop on performance-slowing add-ons. Mozilla announced it will perform automated performance tests of the top 100 add-ons hosted in its add-on gallery every week, and display warnings for add-ons that slow Firefox startup time by 25% or more.  More About: add-ons, Firefox, mozilla For more Tech & Gadgets coverage:
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| TV-Tagging App IntoNow Tries to Kickstart Discussions With New Release Posted: 06 Apr 2011 12:01 AM PDT   IntoNow, the two month-old iOS application that “listens” to and tags television content, is out with an upgraded version Wednesday that emphasizes in-app discussions around shows. The app update also brings a number of enhancements and interface tweaks, including show spoiler indicators, friend-to-friend show recommendations, and a “now” filter in the Popular tab. The new version also includes IntoNow’s not-yet-visible commercial-tagging technology. The idea behind the 1.1 release is to create new experiences that go beyond the startup’s most impressive feature — tagging powered by its patented SoundPrint audio-recognition technology. The technology is flashy, but IntoNow co-founder and VP of product Didier Hilhorst says users have been clamoring for better conversation features. “People really want to talk about their favorite shows while they’re watching them,” he says. The startup is accommodating users with a discuss button they can hit to start public discussions with everyone; they can also use the button to initiate more private chats with just friends. Users can strike up conversations around series, movies and single episodes. While not as fluid as instant messaging, the discussions feature is real-time; and users are notified as new comments pour in. IntoNow’s behind-the-scenes technology for tagging commercials isn’t something users will be able to see just yet. “We put in place certain hooks to enable commercials,” says Hilhorst, “and we will be launching this with a partner later this month.” Eventually, the app should close the loop between viewer, brand and transaction, as Hilhorst describes it. The user will be incentivized with discounts or coupons for tagging certain commercials; the user can then redeem those coupons on his next visit to the merchant. It sounds like a natural extension of the product, especially given that 7% percent of all tags are commercials. Just two months post-launch, IntoNow is making early inroads with users. The startup is fast approaching 500,000 downloads, Hilhorst says, and sees 30% of all tags shared out to Twitter or Facebook. Tag Discussions Thread Recommendation Links Share More About: entertainment, IntoNow, iphone app, Tagging, television For more Startups coverage:
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| Why Websites Are Slow & Why Speed Really Matters [INFOGRAPHIC] Posted: 05 Apr 2011 10:50 PM PDT   What a difference a millisecond can make. When it comes to browsing the web, every tiny moment counts — and the fewer moments that pass between a mouse click and a fully loaded page, the better. Speed is a bit of an obsession for most web users. We fret over our Internet connections’ and mobile connections’ perceived slowness, and we go bananas for a faster web browser. Given this better-faster mentality, the consequences for slow-loading pages can be dire for site owners; most users are willing to navigate away after waiting just three seconds, for example. And quite a few of these dissatisfied users will tell others about the experience. What’s more, our entire perception of how fast or slow a page loads is a bit skewed. While we’re waiting for a site to materialize in a browser tab, pages seem to load about 15% slower than they actually do load. The perception gap increases to 35% once we’re away from a computer. But for the precious milliseconds site owners can shave off page load times, they can see huge returns. For example, Amazon.com increased its revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds of load time improvement. And Aol said its users in the top 10% of site speed viewed around 50% more pages than visitors in the bottom 10%. Site optimization firm Strangeloop has provided us with a slew of graphically organized stats on just how long pages take to load, why they take as long as they do, and just how long the average Joe or Jane is willing to wait around for your site. Check out the infographic below (click to see it at full size), and in the comments, let us know about your experiences with site speed. And site owners, if you’re worried about speed, do a quick pulse-check with Google’s free and easy page speed tool, Page Speed Online. Image courtesy of Flickr, edmundyeo. More About: optimization, site speed, speed, web optimization For more Dev & Design coverage:
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| New York Times Gets Its First Tumblr Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:52 PM PDT   The Gray Lady has just launched its first Tumblr account, but it’s not showcasing the newswriting and photojournalism content you might expect. The new Times Tumblr covers the domain of T Magazine, the style and culture magazine of The New York Times. The subject matter is a perfect fit for the arts- and community-focused mini-blogging platform. The Washington Post recently took to Tumblr with a blog full of behind-the-scenes info and musings on the future of journalism. But The New York Times‘ first foray into the world of Tumblr is less news and more pure fashion. In fact, we recently wrote about fashion brands flocking to Tumblr, and T on Tumblr makes sense for the same reasons: The content is highly visual, and the posts are potentially highly viral. Due to features such as one-click reblogging, Tumblr Fashion Director Rich Tong says, “There's a huge capacity for fashion content to go viral on Tumblr.” And visual, cultural content for the creative communities is exactly what Tumblr is aiming for these days. T on Tumblr is replete with huge, magazine-quality photos of pretty people making funny faces. Captions are brief and contain links to the official T Magazine site. The blog also curates a “Posts We Like” section. Horacio Silva, T’s online director, told The Cutline, “It’s a great way of bringing to the surface a lot of these great visuals that for any reason may have been overlooked. “We take a very curatorial approach to the editorial decisions we make. I think that aspect lends itself perfectly to Tumblr.” Check out T on Tumblr, and let us know in the comments what you think of the project. Is this approach more appropriate for Tumblr than the news-and-commentary tactic of the Washington Post? More About: new york times, NYTimes, tumblr For more Media coverage:
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| Online Vending Machine Dispenses Snacks at Your Behest Posted: 05 Apr 2011 08:22 PM PDT   The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: Snack&Munch is a snack delivery service for your office, college, or anywhere else. Genius Idea: An online vending machine for monthly snack delivery. Sure, your office break room is likely outfitted with a run-of-the-mill vending machine, but those machines are far from reliable. They often run out of your favorite snacks just when you want them most, and they’ll sometimes eat up your change and not spit out your snack. Perhaps Snack&Munch can better satisfy your office snack cravings. The newly launched startup, founded by brothers Farooq and Ammar Yousuf, serves as an online vending machine and lets users build a custom 24-piece snack pack they can have delivered to any home or office address in the United States. Snacks are of the common vending machine variety, though there are more than 250 options spanning seven categories: breakfast, candy, cookies, chips and crackers, gum and mints, nuts, and international. Snack packs cost $24 per pack, and shipping is free. Users also have the option of setting up a monthly plan for reoccurring deliveries and will receive a $1 off discount should they choose to do so. Obviously, Snack&Munch won’t be an immediate solution to your afternoon snack attack, but it could be a more reliable option if you’re prone to candy and/or chips cravings. And if you’re asking yourself, “Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to stop by Costco and pick up snacks at wholesale prices?” the answer is yes. But as most of us who order delivery food know, there’s something to be said (and a price to be paid) for the convenience of having items delivered to your doorstep. We suspect the “lazy tax” applied to Snack&Munch goodies will be far from unappetizing for most. Check it out, and let us know what you think in the comments.  Image courtesy of Flickr, Phillie Casablanca Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark  The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today. More About: bizspark, snack&munch, snacks, spark-of-genius, startup For more Startups coverage:
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| Airborne Toxic Event Priming Fans for Album Release With Series of Acoustic Videos Posted: 05 Apr 2011 06:14 PM PDT Artists can keep their fans waiting for a new release, building up the anticipation by releasing singles to music blogs or album streams to subscription services. Or they could make like The Airborne Toxic Event, who is currently releasing a series of stripped-down, single-shot videos for every song on their album. The L.A. rock band is releasing Monday the video for “Changing,” their first single off of their new album, All at Once, due out April 26. The video is part of a weekly series that the band calls the “Bombastic” (the official video for “Changing” has already premiered). All at Once is the band’s second album; the first, self-titled disc came out in 2008. The first album and the band’s performances in general were well-received by publications such as the Boston Herald and the Los Angeles Times, although notably shunned by the ever-critical Pitchfork. Still, the band didn’t take the blog’s words like a load of lead to the heart, instead penning an open letter to Pitchfork. Yes, The Airborne Toxic Event is resolutely a band that sticks to its proverbial guns. For instance, the band doesn’t see the “Bombastic” series as a marketing shill, but an art all its own. (This is an attitude they share with yesterday’s Music Monday artist, Lovett.) The video above features dance troop Strikers All-Stars, for example, adding a rhythmic mood to the barebones vid. Still, we can’t help but take away a lesson from the “Bombastic” series (they’re on video number eight, by the way): If you’re an artist in today’s tech-heavy world, you have more opportunities to reach out to your fans and share content with them than ever before. Sure, John in WhoKnowsWhere, Illinois, might not be able to make it out to your show, but he can check out that video you upload to YouTube. We’re happy to see bands like The Airborne Toxic Event taking advantage of this medium to bring their music to an even wider net of fans and potential fans. The band stopped by the office recently to chat a little bit about the video series and the web in general. Check out the video below, as well as the rest of the “Bombastic” series, and let us know what you think in the comments. (Pardon the shakiness of the video, I need to procure one of those iPhone tripods, obviously.) More About: bombastic, music, the-airborne-toxic-event, vevo, video, youtube For more Media coverage:
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| Justin Bieber Lookalike Covers “Love The Way You Lie” Posted: 05 Apr 2011 04:52 PM PDT A video making the rounds today features a young woman with a striking resemblance to the Boy King Bieber, covering Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie.” Cue the Internet hysterics. Dani Shay is plenty used to be compared to Bieber — she even has a few videos up on her page parodying the fact. “I’ve had my hair like this for years, and I’ve had my face like this all my life,” she tells TV Guide. We’d say she has a lucrative career ahead of her on the Bat Mitzvah circuit, but Shay actually has talent. Didn’t Bieber get a haircut, anyway? More About: Dani Shay, justin bieber, viral-video-of-day For more Video coverage:
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| Twitter Reverts to Old Interface Amidst Technical Woes Posted: 05 Apr 2011 03:42 PM PDT   Hours after rolling out a new version of its homepage, Twitter suddenly took a trip back to its past. The microblogging service disabled the so-called "New Twitter" (though it's not really all that new at this point) and reverted to a simpler time when users had to check their @replies from a text link on the right-hand navigation menu. In a post on its status blog, Twitter writes, "We've temporarily disabled #NewTwitter. Our engineers are working on re-enabling it and will update you shortly." Update: New Twitter has returned for many users, several hours after the outage. During the outage, a number of users noted that they appeared to be seeing entirely different Twitter feeds from the ones they’d signed up for — many in different languages. Ironically, it was just last week that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams wrote that “the dark days of imminent technical meltdown are over” in a blog post about his transition to a smaller role at the company. Let us know what you're experiencing in the comments. For more Social Media coverage:
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| 80 Startups Rejected from NYC Job Fair Launch Rival Gathering Posted: 05 Apr 2011 03:26 PM PDT   After being turned down from the NYC Startup Job Fair in an email on Monday, Mojiva co-founder Dan Goikhman noticed that about 80 other companies had been mistakenly cc’d, rather than bcc’d, on the same message. He half-jokingly typed a suggestion to those 80 companies they they should band together to form their own job fair. Then he left his desk to go to lunch. “When I came back I found 150 emails and a website,” Goikhman says. In true entrepreneurial fashion, the 80 startups that were turned away from the NYC Startup Job Fair combined their resources to lay the foundation for their own job fair. Various startup founders have contributed logo mockups, press and PR contacts, a Twitter account and a sign-up website for the effort. NYU-Poly’s Varrick St. Incubator offered meeting space for further organizing, and both NYU and Pace University have offered to rent the job fair event space at low rates, says The Hotlist co-founder Gianni Martire, who helped organize the meeting at the incubator. The group’s sign-up site launched with the somewhat bitter title “The New York City Unfair,” but it has since evolved to “The Silicon Alley Job Fair.” The participating startup founders I spoke with also seemed less bitter and more optimistic about what the impromptu job fair says about the startup scene in New York City. “I didn’t realize how active all the startups in New York really were, and how much they all have to offer — even if they’re small, everyone has something to bring to the table,” Martire says. “It makes me happy that I didn’t move to California.” Alex Horn, the author of the cc/bcc mistake, feels the same way about the spin-off job fair. Horn started the NYC Startup Job Fair after he graduated from Columbia in 2009 and realized that startup jobs weren’t visible to students. The first fair he organized in 2010 drew applications from about 60 startups. This year, the number doubled. Horn could only accept 40 of the 120 applications he received because the space offered by his sponsor, AOL, is limited. About 800 job seekers have already signed up to attend. “I wanted to help bring everybody together — great startups and students who didn’t want to go into banking or be a doctor,” Horn says about founding the original fair. Student attendees, he hopes, will “become passionate about something and choose a different path.” By inadvertently launching two job fairs rather than one, Horn may have come closer to accomplishing this feat than he expected. More About: job fair, new york city startup job fair, startup For more Startups coverage:
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| Death Cab for Cutie Shoots Live, Scripted, One-Take Music Video: Watch It Here Posted: 05 Apr 2011 03:15 PM PDT      Tonight, the band Death Cab For Cutie is trying something that (we think) no indie band has ever tried before: premiering the video for its single “You Are A Tourist” as a scripted, one-shot, livestreamed affair. At 7 p.m. EST (so soon), the video will begin above, and the results from said stream, directed by Tim Nackashi, will live on as the official video for Death Cab‘s new single off of its seventh album Code and Keys, due out May 31 on Atlantic Records. Mashable reached out to Nick Harmer, bassist for the band, before the event to see how he’s feeling about the whole ordeal. Check out our interview below. How has technology affected the way you make music videos, particularly this new live video? We have always been inspired by the intersections between creative fields, where music meets film, where film meets Internet, where Internet meets music, etc., and there are so many ways to enjoy the things you love these days that the sky is pretty much the limit with putting things out there. If anything, with so many compelling options it is the difficulty to decide on what to use and how to use it that weighs on our process more than feeling limited by what is available. Option anxiety is a real thing for us. But we are very excited to be able to use the Internet, filmmaking technology and our music to hopefully create an experience that is as fun to watch as it will be to make. Will it work? Here’s hoping… Has/will this video change the way you connect with your fans? I’d like to think that this video is just one more way for our fans to have a live experience with us that is not an actual concert. If it turns out well, hopefully we’ll try something like it again and push it a little further. I mean, I think this could be an exciting thing for lots of bands and artists to try moving forward. We’ve all been performing live on television for years, why not use technology to take it a step further? There are so many unknowns at this point, will it work? Will fans actually tune in? Can we pull it off? If we stick the landing, this could change a lot of things. What has the band done to prepare for this live video? So our role in the preparations has been a small one, we’re really just important in the execution once the cameras are rolling. We’ll do our best to learn our cues and marks and hopefully everything goes off without a hitch. And yet, even if this thing does come off the rails, that will still be fun to watch too, so I’m really not feeling a ton of pressure either way. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed nobody gets hurt, I don’t need the world to see me lose an eye or anything. Image courtesy of Atlantic Records More About: death-cab-for-cutie, music, video For more Media coverage:
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| LinkedIn Edges Out Want Ads As Job Search Tool for Millennials Posted: 05 Apr 2011 02:50 PM PDT   LinkedIn is fast replacing newspaper ads as a source of information about new jobs, according to a survey looking at millennials who are about to graduate from college. Twenty-eight percent of millennials plan to seek work through LinkedIn, according to a report by I Love Rewards and Experience Inc. The previous year, that number was 7%. The same proportion of respondents — 28% — plan to find work via newspaper ads, but that figure was 34% last year. The survey is based on a February poll of 8,088 respondents, 73% of whom will be graduating and looking for full-time employment in two years. The chart below shows how respondents plan to apply to jobs.  The report also found that millenials about to hit the workforce don't care what size company they work for and that 64% of them plan to stay at their new job for two to five years. Another 24.1% say they plan to stay with their employer for more than 10 years. However, the average tenure for millennials is actually 1.5 years, according to the Department of Labor. To Razor Suleman, CEO and founder of I Love Rewards, this discrepancy represents a huge opportunity for companies to try to make those new employees happy. "You leave 3.5 years on the table," he says, "and you spend the first six to 12 months just showing them the ropes." Suleman also suggests that companies put energy into improving their image among millenials so that they’ll want to work there. "The hunted are now the hunters. The top engineers know where they want to work and they're finding you." Image courtesy of iStockphoto, annestahl More About: facebook, jobs, linkedin, millennials, twitter For more Business & Marketing coverage:
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| Want to See All iAds in One Place? Apple’s Got an App for That Posted: 05 Apr 2011 02:40 PM PDT   Do you love the iAds you see on your iPhone or iPad so much that you want to have them on hand for reference? If so, Apple’s got an app for you. On Tuesday, the company released iAd Gallery, a free app that, as the name implies, is a collection of iAds. While the impetus for the launch is unclear, it comes as Apple has had trouble selling iAds. Inclusion in the gallery app can be seen as a value-add for advertisers. Apple introduced the iAd platform, which CEO Steve Jobs dubbed "mobile ads with emotion," in April. Initially, iAds were only available to advertisers who planned to spend between $1 million and $10 million, but in February, Apple cut the starting price of iAds to $500,000, according to a report, which noted that fill rates — the portion of advertising inventory being used — fell earlier this year. In another move designed to make iAds more popular, Apple opened iAd development to third parties with iAd Producer, a tool available on Apple's Developer Page. More About: advertising, apple, apps, iads For more Business & Marketing coverage:
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| Meet Twitter’s New Homepage [PIC] Posted: 05 Apr 2011 02:24 PM PDT   The social media service has changed the color scheme from its traditional shades of light blue in favor of a metallic chrome look. The new homepage also no longer features top tweets or trending topics. Instead, Twitter has opted for a simple bar halfway down the screen that features the avatars of its most popular users. There are a couple of other changes to the interface that focuses on how users interact with the homepage. The search box has been moved down, but a bigger change is that Twitter has made it easier for users to sign up or log in to its website. The “New to Twitter?” section lets users kick start the process of signing up, right from the homepage. The “sign in” area has been expanded as well. The biggest change, though, may be the homepage’s new language. The old Twitter.com led with “Discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” The new homepage has a different pitch to prospective users: “Follow your interests: Instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities, and what’s happening around the world.” It’s a subtle but potentially big difference, as millions of people visit Twitter.com every day. It’s an adjustment to Twitter’s philosophy that it hopes will help it register and retain new users. Twitter is known for constantly updating its homepage in an attempt to refine its message and draw in new users. What do you think of Twitter’s homepage? We want to hear your thoughts in the comments. More About: homepage, trending, twitter, Twitter homepage, Twitter.com, UI For more Social Media coverage:
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| Twitter in Talks To Buy Stealth Personalization Startup Bottlenose Posted: 05 Apr 2011 02:13 PM PDT   Twitter is in talks to buy stealth personalization startup Bottlenose for an undisclosed sum, sources close to the matter told Mashable. The companies are said to be in the process of discussing acquisition terms. Bottlenose, which bills itself as the “the smartest way to personalize and filter Twitter,” hails from serial startup founders Dominiek ter Heide and Nova Spivack. The startup created a Twitter account and splash page in late August but is keeping the site on lockdown until early spring 2011. Bottlenose automatically surfaces important information, tracks a user's interests, visualizes trends and curates knowledge between friends. It sounds like a cross between Cadmus and Summify with a few bonus features. Twitter, now keen on helping users personalize their information network experience through interests, enhanced its search tool Monday with topic-driven suggestions of people and accounts for users to follow. A new homepage with a “follow your interests” tagline is also being rolled out to users. Bottlenose could provide Twitter with a missing piece to the personalization puzzle and finally give users a native way to discover important tweets, matching their interests, that they otherwise would have overlooked or lost in their real-time tweet stream. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, summersetretrievers More About: bottlenose, curation, startup, twitter For more Startups coverage:
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| Facebook Reaches Out to Journalists With Page, Workshops Posted: 05 Apr 2011 02:08 PM PDT   In an attempt to promote the use of Facebook in the newsroom, Facebook has unveiled a new Facebook Page and meetup program for journalists. The new Page, Journalists on Facebook, is intended to be a resource for journalists who want to incorporate social media into their reporting, networking and storytelling. “The Page will provide journalists with best practices for integrating the latest Facebook products with their work and connecting with the Facebook audience of more than 500 million people,” Facebook Director of Media Partnerships Justin Osofsky wrote in a blog post. Osofsky promotes Facebook as a valuable reporting tool, citing NPR’s use of the site to source stories and New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof’s use of Facebook to report on events in Cairo while he was on the ground. The social network also touted its ability to increase referral traffic for news websites, a phenomenon we’ve experienced here at Mashable. The social network is also kicking off a Facebook Journalists Meetup program. Facebook will be hosting workshops around the world, teaching journalists how to use the site as a reporting tool. The first of these meetups takes place on April 27 at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California. As Mashable‘s Vadim Lavrusik wrote about Facebook’s growing role in journalism earlier this year:
What do you think of Facebook’s attempts to make journalism more social? How should journalists use Facebook in their daily reporting? Let us know in the comments. More About: facebook, facebook page, journalism, Journalists on Facebook, media, newsroom For more Media coverage:
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| Closed or Open Source: Which CMS is Right for Your Business? Posted: 05 Apr 2011 01:53 PM PDT   Lisa Wehr is the founder and CEO of Oneupweb, a leading digital marketing agency representing some of the nation's most recognized brands for more than 15 years. The goal of any web development agency is to deliver a website that not only looks attractive but is also manageable. It seems there are new contenders vying to be the top content management system (CMS) every day. Making it easy to add products, articles and just about anything else is a mandatory development skill today. Inevitably, the question always arises: "Do we download something free and open source, or do we buy a solution?" Ask developers and they'll probably explain they have favorites from both realms. However, most marketing execs and decision makers aren't as familiar with CMSs, let alone quick to name drop their most preferred. Feel overwhelmed or torn by CMS choices? Let's discuss the pros and cons of developing within both open and closed source systems. And for further direction, let's scope out the top open and closed source ways to manage content for both ecommerce and general content sites. Open Source vs. Closed SourceOpen source means there are a lot of people working on the software. Plenty of individuals are making sure the code is solid and that the software is easy to use. Documentation is usually easy to find, and there are plenty of people out there writing "how-tos," which make design and development easier and even fun. You can count on regular updates that are continually improving the product. Open source systems let you see what makes the software tick, and you can often change it to suit your needs. Use this to your advantage when it comes to differentiating yourself from the rest of the pack. However, because of the popularity of open source systems, many people are familiar with open source code, which creates a higher risk for hacking. If you choose to design in an open source system, your development team is going to need to put time and work into preventing third-party tampering. This difficulty will scale based on many factors such as how many people need to have access to sensitive areas of the site (like the admin panel). Closed source software usually equates to better security and support. For an ecommerce site, it isn't necessarily more secure to go with a closed source system, but unlike open source systems, developers don't have to spend as much time securing code. If a developer runs into any issues in a closed source software, providers are more than happy to offer you support. This is a convenience, because it cuts down on the development time and cost. Unfortunately with closed source, the barrier to entry is a lot higher. A smaller community means less experience and collective knowledge. This usually equates with much higher costs across the board. You often have to pay for the software or service, and if your support package doesn't include it, you end up having to pay someone else for their expertise. Top Open Source CMSs for Product Management Three of the top open source CMSs for successfully managing ecommerce sites are: Magento, osCommerce and Zen Cart. All three of these CMSs provide well-structured source code, which allows for easier collaboration between developers and designers and an overall smoother workflow. It's important that developers have access to a rich architecture that makes plugin and extension development a snap, while designers have access to a powerful, templating system. Top Open Source General Purpose CMSs It seems that there are hundreds of these out there. With its humble start as a simple blogging platform, WordPress has grown into a full-blown content management system. The community supporting this gem has made it into a powerhouse capable of handling just about anyone's needs. Some big names are using this CMS: The Wall Street Journal, CNN and Ford, to name a few. Although WordPress has achieved notoriety, both Joomla and Drupal are also big names in the open source general purpose realm. Some of the biggest sites online are built with Joomla (Living Well Magazine) and Drupal (The White House, The Economist). Developers and designers have a number of possibilities when creating websites in WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. Top Closed Source CMSs for Product Management If taking the closed source route, it's usually best to make sure the service offers good, customizable aesthetics. Shopify, Volusion and AspDotNetStorefront are all fully functional and secure storefronts to help developers and designers with creating successful ecommerce sites. Though you can't peek at the code running your store, you do have access to the powerful templating systems such as "Liquid" (if using Shopify), which allows your imagination to run wild while designing. When using any of these three closed source CMSs, it's a snap to include custom HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Top Closed Source General Purpose CMSs Where to begin? Many of the closed source content management systems offer different prices for different needs. There are services out there such as CushyCMS for individuals or small companies with mostly static content, and there are the big kids on the block such as Telerik and Sharepoint that operate on Microsoft's .NET Framework. CushyCMS is a designer's dream as there is no development involved — just standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript are used. In the case of Telerik and Sharepoint, the .NET Framework and the powerful editor Visual Studio can make developing and designing much easier. In the end, it all boils down to the abilities of your in-house tech staff and your budget. Many enterprise companies design with open source because they have qualified developers. If you don't feel that your team is ready to take on extra challenges, then closed source (and its built-in support) may be the best route. Although closed source companies will offer support, they may not always offer you programming support. For instance, they may outsource a job for you. The very best design work is created with confidence, so be sure you're working with a CMS that you feel secure in.  Interested in more Web Development resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.Image courtesy of iStockphoto, tioloco More About: business, drupal, joomla, List, Lists, open source, small business, web design, Web Development, WordPress For more Dev & Design coverage:
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| How AT&T and Verizon iPhone Users Compare [STATS] Posted: 05 Apr 2011 01:45 PM PDT   Now that the Verizon iPhone has been out for a few months, what do its owners think of the device? A new survey indicates that while the Verizon iPhone may drop fewer calls, customers who own the AT&T iPhone 4 are just as satisfied. Independent research firm ChangeWave polled more than 4,000 consumers to compare satisfaction and dropped call rates between Verizon iPhone owners and AT&T iPhone 4 owners. ChangeWave says that 82% of Verizon iPhone owners are “very satisfied” with their phone, while 16% are “somewhat satisfied.” On the AT&T side, 80% of iPhone 4 owners say they are “very satisfied,” while 18% are merely “somewhat satisfied.”  Just because both groups of customers are satisfied, however, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any differences in service. ChangeWave compared the reported dropped call rates between Verizon iPhone owners and AT&T iPhone 4 owners. Here, the results are clearly in Verizon’s favor. Verizon iPhone customers report 1.8% of calls dropped in the past 90 days, whereas AT&T iPhone 4 customers report 4.8% dropped. The iPhone statistics match overall call drop statistics across the different wireless carriers in the U.S. On average, 2.75% of all calls were dropped.  Verizon’s Big Opportunity: Future SalesChangeWave’s data suggests that customers — or at least iPhone 4 customers — view the device independent of the network. In other words, a customer may be satisfied or even “very satisfied” with his or her iPhone 4, even if he and she dislikes AT&T. On the surface, that might indicate that AT&T’s history with dropped calls has little impact on iPhone sales. Historically, looking at iPhone sales figures, that appears to be true. Now that Verizon also has the iPhone, however, consumers seem more interested in choosing Big Red as their iPhone vendor.  ChangeWave’s survey indicates that 46% of respondents who plan on buying an iPhone 4 in the future will use Verizon. In comparison, 27% of respondents said AT&T would get their vote. Because it was essentially released in the middle of the device cycle, the Verizon iPhone isn’t necessarily a good marker for overall iPhone demand on the Verizon network. It’s likely that the true impact of the carrier availability won’t be clear until Apple releases its next device on both networks simultaneously. More About: att, data, iphone, iphone 4, report, stats, surveys, verizon, Verizon iPhone For more Mobile coverage:
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| President Obama to Host a Live Town Hall Meeting on Facebook Posted: 05 Apr 2011 01:10 PM PDT   President Barack Obama will be stopping by Facebook HQ later this month to host a live event with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. The event, which was organized by the White House Facebook Page, will include a discussion about economic recovery and funding for innovation. Obama will also answer questions that people post on either the Facebook Wall for the event or submit to Whitehouse.gov. Facebook Live will broadcast the event on April 20 starting at 4:45 p.m. EST. Facebook and the White House announced the event just a day after Obama launched his reelection campaign using YouTube, targeted text messages and a Facebook app that asks voters, “Are You In?” While Obama might be the first president to notably leverage social media in his election campaigns and presidency, he’s not the first to make it to Facebook Live. President George W. Bush stopped by Facebook HQ for a chat on the company’s live video channel while promoting his memoir in November. Part of the Facebook Live event effort seems to be aimed at directing “Likes” to the White House’s Facebook Page, which has 939,400 likes compared with Obama’s 19 million. A flyer for the event on the White House Page prominently highlights directions for “Liking” the page.  More About: barack obama, facebook For more Social Media coverage:
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| Facebook-Infused Job Search Site Finds Listings From Your Social Graph Posted: 05 Apr 2011 01:00 PM PDT   How many of your Facebook friends work for companies that are hiring? Chances are you don’t know, but new job search startup In The Door launches Tuesday and plugs into Facebook to surface that information. In The Door’s premise is simple: Let job seekers use their social graph to find open positions where they might have an inside edge. You need only log in with Facebook and In The Door will find and sort job listings at the companies where your Facebook friends work. CEO and founder Liz Carlson says she wanted to create the site after she learned that a friend landed a job at Google by way of a recommendation from a mutual friend. Her online job applications, meanwhile, were being automatically rejected by computer algorithms and never reached the desk of a hiring manager or recruiter. “I wanted to figure out how to digitize the process,” she says of being inspired by her friend’s success with an inside recommendation. “Instead of just seeing a long list of unqualified jobs, why don’t we start by showing companies where you have an inside connection?” she thought. Carlson took her idea to the Founder Institute, where she participated in the summer 2010 program. Tuesday, she’s ready to launch the bootstrapped Facebook-infused job search site and solicit feedback from users.  The site, in its present state, lets you view all the companies hiring in your network, explore by city and search all the surfaced job listings. The homepage shows friends’ companies that are hiring, with a count of friends employed by the company and jobs available listed next to each company. You can then view a company’s page to check out all job openings and see which of your friends work at the company in the question. For now, In The Door merely aggregates job listings from third-party job sites such as Indeed. It also leaves the friend-to-friend, “I need a favor…” conversation piece to Facebook. Later, these two pieces will become more tightly integrated into the site experience so that companies can accept applications and recommendations through the site. Friends-of-friends job search is also in the works. “Users will be able to explore second degree connections,” says Carlson. At launch, In The Door does a solid job at surfacing positions you might have a better chance landing because you have a friend on the inside. The startup is giving away 100 invitations to companies who want to personalize their company page and link to their career site. Image courtesy of Flickr, Zach Klein More About: facebook, In The Door, job search, jobs, social graph, startup, trending For more Startups coverage:
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| Why Cross-Channel Messaging Is Crucial to Reaching New Consumers Posted: 05 Apr 2011 12:54 PM PDT   George Schlossnagle is president and chief executive officer of Message Systems and a recognized expert on messaging and the PHP language. He's published numerous technical articles and is the author of Advanced PHP Programming. Follow George on Twitter at @g_schlossnagle or through @MessageSystems. Cross-channel messaging (i.e. posting Facebook comments via text message or uploading photos to Flickr via MMS) has become the norm for billions of mobile phone users worldwide. But outside of social media and cloud services providers, few companies are really participating in these kinds of interactions with their customers. Why? Because most large organizations still regard email, text messages and IMs as separate entities. Think of the companies you do business with — banks, telecom carriers, retailers. In most cases, you're dealing with a single brand, but you receive messages from four or five distinct entities under that brand: offers from marketing, billing alerts from finance, service updates from customer care. Is there any continuity across these interactions? Not likely, because each unit within the company sees you differently. Are your device- or message-channel preferences recognized or taken into consideration when you're contacted? Rarely. If you get a text notification from your wireless carrier that you've exceeded your minutes for the month, the logical response would be to text back and inquire what the additional costs would be. Or better yet, text back that you want to initiate an IM conversation where you could have your questions answered by a customer rep. Ideally, the wireless carrier would set the stage for a mutually beneficial conversation by offering a service upgrade and eliminating the overage. That's closer to how it would work if this were an exchange between you and a friend. Individuals have made the jump to cross-channel communication, but businesses haven't caught up yet. Slight Change, Profound DisruptionWe all like to think that technologies mold the way people interact or communicate, but really it's a feedback loop. Human behaviors inform the way that technologies are built, and technology also shapes the way we behave. When tools or technologies become available that help us do our jobs better, communicate more effectively or have more enjoyable life experiences, those technologies are often rapidly adopted in the marketplace — but not always as the developer envisioned they would be. As a software developer, I've seen this again and again. Innovative people and companies can make a slight change to an application or a piece of code and suddenly it is useful in ways no one ever imagined before. That ability to build on technology in unexpected and unplanned ways differentiates successful, viable technology companies from one-hit wonders. A great example of this would be Facebook's alerts that let you know a friend has commented on your wall post or photo via email or an SMS text. It may seem like a pretty unremarkable feature, but these messages are extraordinarily effective at driving traffic and increasing overall engagement with the Facebook brand. In the email business, these kinds of automatic messages are known as transactional alerts. Technically, they're not much different than the confirmation emails you get when making a purchase online. The difference is that transactional alerts from Facebook prompt interaction. They're designed with human behaviors in mind, within the context of what's going to make for a satisfying social interaction. Sparking ConversationsThe distinguishing factor for Facebook notifications is that they are a true B2C dialogue, operating under the guise of a C2C dialogue. When someone writes on your wall, you get a message you can respond to (over email or SMS). You don't have to go back to Facebook's website to participate in the conversation. The value for Facebook is creating user engagement via the messaging channel, not just through the website. And the brilliance of the scheme is that by leveraging the social graph, participation through any vector creates an engagement touch point for a whole circle of users. Not every company wants or needs to be in the social networking business. But every company should want to provide better customer experiences, increase brand loyalty and provide better support. Facebook and mobile messaging have become wildly popular because they are designed to meet peoples' communication preferences and behaviors. There are lessons here for any kind of organization that uses messaging — email, text, IM or any format — to interact with customers, especially marketers. Instead of driving people to a single channel and talking to their customers, they can (and should) allow customers to interact with them (and each other) through their preferred channel. Antisocial: One-Way Messaging from BrandsMeaningful interaction is both the key and the conundrum for marketers. How do you create a relationship where you are talking with your customers versus talking at your customers? There is no silver bullet here, no magic formula outside of looking at the value you bring to your customers and developing an engagement model around that. To go back to our example of the wireless carrier, imagine the marketing possibilities that could be generated from a smooth text- or IM-based conversation. You've exceeded your minutes for the month and you're on the hook for $45 in overage, but if you choose to upgrade your plan, for just an extra $10 per month, we'll waive the charges and your minutes will go from 700 to 1,400 per month. Problem solved. When most major brands in the U.S. think of messaging today, they think one-way email or monologue. That's not going to work in the emerging social-enabled world. When younger consumers think of messaging, they think mobile text — one-to-one dialogue. There's a huge disconnect here. Young people growing up in a world where meaningful two-way dialogue is the norm aren't going to tolerate unresponsive brands. Any company hoping to do business with the next generation of consumers will need to incorporate interactivity into their business processes and create personalized experiences for customers. A two-way messaging capability that lets customers engage in conversations with you across any channel is key to making that happen. Interested in more Marketing resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.Image courtesy of Flickr, Pauly. More About: brands, business, customer service, email, instant messaging, MARKETING, texting For more Business & Marketing coverage:
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| How New Community Tools Will Democratize Data Analytics for the Good of Society Posted: 05 Apr 2011 12:32 PM PDT   Andrew Turner is a neogeographer and the CTO of GeoIQ, which brings data and mapping solutions to the mass market through its location analysis software. You can follow him on Twitter or check out the company blog. We are surrounded by data. Every day we generate petabytes of photographs, messages, emails, comments and mobile tracks. Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, noted that we create as much information every two days as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. The data can be real-time, linked, bi-directional, geolocated and sometimes even semantic. However, while we have access to all of this data, we are lacking in the mechanisms to use it effectively at scale. We’re often behind on reading or responding to emails, we just peruse through Twitter messages, and we’re lucky if we read our RSS feeds. What we need are tools to provide higher-level analysis of this information — to churn the data and glean information and knowledge so that we can make more informed and better decisions. And we need platforms that are as easy to use as those that let us create all this data in the first place. Data-Driven DecisionsAnalysis tools exist in many forms. Some let users ask questions while others simply monitor general data streams to infer interesting answers. Google’s search interface is an analysis of implicit clickthroughs and page links in an attempt to provide us with simple answers to our questions. Software such as Mathematica, MatLab or newer tools such as R and Hadoop MapReduce provide amazing capability to aggregate, collate and operate on data. But these analysis tools are highly specialized and require immense training and expertise to use. So we’re at an interesting crossroads. The web is a platform where anyone can easily publish and consume data, and analysis has the possibility to utilize this data in novel and useful ways. But like the web democratized publication, we now have the capability to enable the same democratization of analysis. Anyone can query and experiment with data from a multitude of angles. With this potential, we could discover new insights and unique solutions to complex and inter-related problems that are unsolvable within the limited confines of a single domain or expertise. Making Analytics Accessible to EveryoneClay Shirky has talked about the cognitive surplus that has led to successful crowdsourced projects such as Wikipedia. Projects like Ushahidi enable anyone to contribute data from a mobile phone during a crisis. Twitter and blogs are both publishing platforms and conversation spaces, where a group of interested readers will share additional ideas, feedback and links to resources. What if we provided the same simple interfaces for accessing analysis tools? Within minutes, a user could be providing alternative solutions or outcomes for a predictive model. For example, analysis of urban traffic patterns could include feedback by scientists, government officials, local citizens, the traffic cop or even the school bus driver. The incentive for each would be to provide their own perspective in hopes of gaining personal value — “How can I make my drive to work easier?” — or to influence development of a solution: “If you put in a traffic light here then the intersection wouldn’t get blocked.” Community analytics allow everyone involved to contribute their understanding of the data to achieve better results. Historically, this has been achieved through implicit mechanisms like Google’s PageRank algorithm, but it can become more explicit, allowing users to take a more active role in analysis. For example, during the response to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, organizations such as CrisisCommons and Ushahidi trained hundreds of volunteers to crowdsource valuable geographic data including road networks (OpenStreetMap and search and rescue needs. Groups worked to gather and analyze the locations of available medical centers and identify the needs and routes between them in order to provide logistical support to on-the-ground teams. Even official organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank and NGA used this information to augment their response and put their information and analysis back into the collective workspaces for the global community. At the time, the collaboration was performed through a collection of wiki’s, email forums, Skype chats, in-person CrisisCamps and assorted online visualization and analysis tools. While the crowd demonstrated amazing collaboration, it also showed the need for better tools and processes to help facilitate this kind of community analysis. What we are going to see are tools that engage users more easily within their existing communities — Facebook groups that can provide local information to climate scientists, who can then publish their results to online mapping tools where anyone can access the data and models. They can then tweak and augment these models in order to share with their local government for increased response and resiliency. The tools are available, we just need to connect them together — sharing data, knowledge and wisdom for a better society. Interested in more Data resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.Image courtesy of iStockphoto, cyrop More About: analytics, community, community analysis, data, data analysis, social media For more Social Media coverage:
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| Group Video Calling Comes to iPhone & Android in Fring Beta Test Posted: 05 Apr 2011 12:03 PM PDT   Fring, a mobile application offering VoIP calling and chat, is expanding its video calling feature released last year with a private beta build of its application for iPhone and Android that introduces group video calls. The group video calling feature will allow Fring users to initiate free video calls on their mobile devices, presumably over Wi-Fi or 3G, with up to four participants. “This is super exciting as it's the first time the world will get to enjoy free Group Video calls,” the company writes in a blog post announcing the limited-edition version of the app. “This Fring feature lets four friends video call each other simultaneously, making it a mobile video calling party of sorts.” The application is not ready for full release and has a few known bugs, but Fring is ready to solicit feedback and test the early release with select users. Interested parties should be existing Fring users and need to sign up and input their UDID or IMEI phone identification numbers. Since group video calling is limited to users with the beta release, would-be beta testers need to supply the same information for up to three friends. Also, if you identify yourself as a Mashable reader (enter “mashable” after your name), you may receive special consideration from Fring. The new beta group video calling feature puts Fring on the cutting edge, but mobile device owners have not yet shown an overwhelming interest in mobile video calling. In a Pew Internet & American Life Project study published in October, just 7% of cellphone owners indicated that they have experience with video calls via mobile phone. Founded in 2006, Fring has raised upward of $23 million in funding and competes with Skype and other app makers in the mobile VoIP and video calling arenas. More About: Android App, fring, iphone app, mobile video calling, video calling For more Mobile coverage:
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| How Many People Have Actually Subscribed to The Daily? Posted: 05 Apr 2011 11:36 AM PDT   How well is The Daily, the iPad newspaper launched by Rupert Murdoch in February, faring thus far? The short answer is: We don’t really know. Despite repeated requests from media, The Daily‘s publishers are refusing to disclose exact numbers. At a PaidContent conference in March, publisher Greg Clayman would only say that downloads were in the “hundreds of thousands,” but not how many of those thousands had become subscribers to The Daily, which costs $0.99 per week. Anonymous sources have since told Jeff Bercovici of Forbes that the app had been downloaded 500,000 times and that 75,000 people have become “regular users” of the app, at least during the extended free trial period. Those aren’t promising numbers, given that The Daily needs about 750,000 subscribers per year to break even, according to media critic and blogger Jeff Jarvis’s estimates. (That figure does not account for advertising revenue.) The title costs around $500,000 to produce each week, after an initial investment of $30 million, Murdoch said at the launch event in February. Other signs are even more discouraging. In collaboration with social media firm PostRank, Joshua Benton of Neiman Lab found that the number of tweets sent each day from The Daily‘s app are declining precipitously — and perhaps, therefore, so is readership and overall engagement. This is in spite of the iPad 2′s launch, which brought millions of new, potential customers to the device.  The graph tells an interesting story: Enthusiasm for the app was high at launch and fell off sharply during the first two weeks as readers became frustrated with technical glitches and, as a recent survey suggests, the lack of original, quality content. Readership remained steady during the rest of the free trial period and dropped again after the its expiration on March 21. Note that in the total two-month period, only 6,026 tweets were generated from The Daily app, according to PostRank’s findings. Given the available data, it’s little wonder that The Daily has been mum about its progress so far. What has your experience with The Daily been like up to this point? Are you still reading — and enjoying — the publication? More About: ipad, News Corp, postrank, The Daily For more Media coverage:
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| Zynga Hires Team Behind Online Poker Stat Tracker Posted: 05 Apr 2011 11:07 AM PDT   Zynga, the social-gaming giant, announced Tuesday that it has acquired the team from MarketZero, a poker services provider. Zynga, the maker of FarmVille, CityVille and other popular social games, says it only hired the MarketZero staff, though, and it won’t operate or acquire MarketZero’s business. “This acquisition leverages the knowledge and expertise of the team,” Zynga said in a statement. MarketZero, with its PokerTableRatings, hosts “the largest online portal tracking career statistics of online poker players,” Zynga says. The PokerTableRatings staff wrote in a blog post that members shouldn’t see any difference on the site. “PTR hasn't skipped a beat and we're working hard to make sure PTR continues to be the best place to find stats on every online poker player,” PTR says. In the past year, Zynga has seen tremendous success and growth. It acquired 11 companies from around the world in as many months. And Monday, Zynga announced DreamWorks co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg was joining the social-gaming company’s board of directors. Zynga is also rumored to be considering an IPO in 2012. More About: MarketZero, Zynga For more Business & Marketing coverage:
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| Rhapsody Premieres TV on the Radio’s New Album One Week Early Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:57 AM PDT   Fans of Brooklyn’s TV on the Radio have been waiting for the band’s next disc since 2008, when its last album, Dear Science, dropped. Now Rhapsody subscribers can check out Nine Types of Light before its April 12 release. Rhapsody isn’t the only outlet to feature the album early — The Guardian is streaming it today, too — but the portability that Rhapsody offers is certainly enticing. The music subscription service is also offering a ton of editorial content, including videos, the band’s responses to subscriber questions, and other interviews and tidbits. More and more, bands are releasing music via alternative distribution channels, such as Rhapsody, which has also premiered music from artists like Jack Johnson, The Black Eyed Peas and Zac Brown. Other services, like Spotify (which premiered R.E.M.’s last album, for one), have had similar initiatives, and Facebook has afforded fans early looks at music from the likes of J-Lo and Lil Wayne. Rhapsody users: Let us know what you think of TV on the Radio‘s efforts in the comments. In the meantime, here’s a single from the disc, courtesy of Soundcloud: Image courtesy of Flickr, angela n. More About: music, rhapsody, tv-on-the-radio For more Media coverage:
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| WordPress Upgrades Security With 3.11 Release Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:33 AM PDT   Self-hosted WordPress users, fire up your update engines because WordPress 3.1.1 is now available. WordPress 3.1.1 might not bring any new functionality to the popular content management tool, but it does fix a number of bugs and potential security issues. These are the new changes the WordPress team announced on the official WordPress blog:
WordPress 3.1 was released at the end of February and has already been downloaded nearly 4.5 million times. Users that aren’t experiencing any issues with WordPress 3.1 should still update because the latest version does address three security issues discovered by the WordPress security team. Users can download by either using the built-in update tool or by going to WordPress.org/download. More About: WordPress, WordPress 3.1, wordpress 3.1.1 For more Dev & Design coverage:
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| Indexing the Real World: The Enormous Potential of Hyperlocal Data Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:04 AM PDT   Shane Snow is a Mashable contributor and the co-founder of Contently.com. Do you think there’s a lot of data on the Internet? Imagine how much there is in the offline world: 510 million square kilometers of land, 6.79 billion people, 18 million kilometers of paved roads, and countless objects inhabit the Earth. The most exciting thing about all this data? Technologists are now starting to chart and index the offline world, down to street signs and basketball hoops. For the past decade, social technologies such as Meetup and Match.com have used the web to help people connect in person. Cheap geolocation technology in cellphones over the past few years gave rise to apps that connect people with physical places. As developers build rich layers of information atop location data, our understanding of the world is changing. Foursquare is the tip of the iceberg. The new wave of hyperlocal data is surging. Here’s how it’s going down. Step 1: Location-Based InfrastructureAt SXSWi 2011, Internet luminary, publisher and media thinker Tim O’Reilly called President Ronald Reagan “the Father of Foursquare.” That’s because in the 1980s when the U.S. government launched its global positioning satellite network into space, Reagan pushed to allow anyone access to the data. At the time, laypeople weren’t generally interested in spending thousands of dollars on GPS receivers. Fast forward a couple of decades to the iPhone, complete with cheap, built-in GPS receiver, and tinkerers such as Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai from Foursquare, Josh Williams from Gowalla, and Sam Altman from Loopt were creating social networks based on GPS. Incidentally, these networks began indexing and categorizing places in the real world, sending digitized information about them into the cloud and back down into people’s pockets. Today, companies such as SimpleGeo are building location-based infrastructure that supports a massive wave of applications interacting with the physical world. Step 2: Crowdsourced Data Capturers Armed With Phones Jordan Cooper, founder of the geo-data company Hyperpublic, notes: “With meaningful smartphone penetration and more powerful cameras on mobile devices, photography is becoming a more frictionless form of mobile information capture than textual input.” Consumers are using cameras to capture moments, documenting their memories rather than simply taking photos for aesthetic value. Thus, ubiquitous camera phones have become utilities that power local data sets. Take, for example, Foodspotting, an app foodies use to snap and share photos of their lunch. The app pegs photos of food to locations so other hungry smartphone users can see nearby dining options, dish by dish. Twitpic, Instagram, Flickr and even Facebook can attach latitude and longitude to photos. Each photo becomes another piece of data. Step 3: Indexing Local Objects and Adding a Data Layer There’s more to the physical world than food and Foursquare venues. Any physical object around you can be made useful when digitally catalogued. Cooper started Hyperpublic after observing just this. “I'd walk to work every morning, with a knowledge that one block to the left or one block to the right from my everyday path there were hidden gems that were, by definition, actionable opportunities that I was missing because nobody had indexed and surfaced them to me.” It’s geo-data at a much more granular level: people, places, objects inside those places, curiosities and more. “If we do this right,” Cooper says, “we'll have indexed every object that exists in every major city in the world and created a rich enough data layer on top of these objects that we will be able to provide not only an incredible local discovery and organization tool … but also an incredible experience [for] the users of an army of third-party applications and publishers that wish to leverage local/physical data.” Cooper’s mission is to “kill the unknown” and make the mile outside every person’s door “completely searchable and actionable.” For example, Hyperpublic considered hiring someone who tagged himself “developer” within a 2-mile radius of the company’s office. “Our thesis is that there is a correlation between proximity and actionability, and I figured someone who could walk to our office would be more likely interested than someone who lived over the river in Brooklyn,” Cooper explains. Other companies such as Thingd are in the local indexing fray at a granular level, producing and procuring an impressive amount of data. "We want to build a database of every thing in the world," said Thingd CEO Joseph Einhorn in November. While most geo-social apps focus on real-time use cases — when you’re standing in 15 degree weather searching for a Moroccan restaurant — vast indexes of hyperlocal data will power asynchronous utility and discovery in addition to on-location help. Step 4: App Development BonanzaSoftware developers are hungrier for data than they are for beer and pizza. Whenever a company releases a large data set to the public — especially through an API (akin to a beer and pizza faucet for data geeks) — programmers race to develop piggyback applications. Twitter’s gargantuan data stream has given rise to thousands of Twitter apps. Facebook’s API has spurred thousands more. As more hyperlocal data shoots out the fire hoses of companies such as SimpleGeo, Foursquare and Hyperpublic, more applications will be built. And because of the sheer amount of potential data that will shortly be available, possibilities are vast, particularly when it comes to things like augmented reality. The local data explosion is upon us. And like Google’s indexing of the virtual world’s information, the future of hyperlocal data is going to be — dare I say it — revolutionary. Interested in more Social Media resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.Image courtesy of Flickr, practicalowl More About: apps, data, geolocation, hyperlocal, Mobile 2.0, social media For more Tech & Gadgets coverage:
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| GOP Uses Social Media to Respond to Obama 2012 Campaign Launch Posted: 05 Apr 2011 08:37 AM PDT   If the Republicans' response to President Barack Obama's campaign launch Monday is any indication, social media will play a major role in the 2012 election. Shortly after Obama's first video for the campaign went up, Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor and potential GOP candidate for the 2012 presidential race, released a YouTube retort. The video (below), which has the urgent music of an action film, features Pawlenty responding to an Obama sound bite, by asking, "How can America win the future when we're losing the present?" Pawlenty concludes, "In order for America to take a new direction, it's going to take a new president." Since its release Monday, the video has gotten about 53,000 views, compared with 168,000 for Obama's. Pawlenty also released the video on his Facebook Page, which has 81,000 fans. Obama has close to 19 million Facebook fans. Meanwhile, another GOP hopeful, Mitt Romney, used his Twitter account yesterday to call out Obama: "@barackobama I look forward to hearing details on your jobs plan, as are 14m unemployed Americans." Otherwise, though, the leading Republican names bandied about for the 2012 presidential race — Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich — declined to respond via their Twitter or Facebook accounts to the Obama campaign launch. A video (below) by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, however, was designed to take the wind out of Obama's sails. The video, a putative campaign ad for Obama, undercuts promises in his speech with images. For instance, the line "I will not rest," appears as a picture of Obama golfing and fishing rolls by. That video has gotten more than 665,000 views since it was loaded on YouTube on March 31. More About: 2012 presidential campaign, barack obama, Mitt Romney, sarah palin, Tim Pawlenty For more Social Media coverage:
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| Fashion Industry Hosts Online Auctions for Japan Relief Posted: 05 Apr 2011 08:08 AM PDT   The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CDFA) has brought together many of the world’s leading fashion and media brands for a series of online auctions to raise money for relief efforts in Japan. The Fashion & Friends for Japan auctions, hosted on charitybuzz, run from now until April 28. Among the highlights? A week-long stay at Diane Von Furstenberg’s Harbour Island Beach House with a $1,000 shopping spree at a DVF boutique, a meeting with Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour and a custom dress designed by Olivier Theyskens (pictured). The CDFA is doing a major push on social networks, asking friends and supporters to spread the word through posts on Facebook, Twitter (hashtags: #HelpJapan and #Fashion4Japan) and website banners. All proceeds will be donated to Japan Society. [via @dkny] More About: cdfa, charitybuzz, fashion, japan For more Social Good coverage:
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