This is … Marketing Biz.

Centzy Raises $1.6M Seed Round From Cowboy Ventures, Founder Collective, Lightbank & Others To Bring Offline Biz Data To Web & Mobile

Centzy is focused on bringing detailed business data online – especially information that doesn’t exist anywhere else. As Shek explained earlier this year, 90 percent of Centzy’s data isn’t found anywhere else online because the business has never put that info online to begin with.

Centzy is one of a number of new companies trying to bring order to the chaos of small business promotions. I like that Centzy is focused on ‘errand’ type of businesses which brings focus to what could easily become a frustrating boiling-the-ocean proposition. Marketers should keep a close eye on Centzy and others to ensure they ride this wave of new data.

comScore Announces U.S. Launch of Media Metrix® Multi-Platform to Deliver Unified View of Desktop, Smartphone and Tablet Audiences

“We are excited to formally introduce Media Metrix Multi-Platform, a revolutionary development that combines comScore’s flagship products to accurately account for unduplicated audiences across the desktop, smartphone and tablet platforms,” said Jeff Hackett, executive vice president of comScore. “This unified view of digital audiences not only establishes a new measurement standard for the industry, but also has the potential to unlock insights that can deliver substantial, currently unrealized value to our publisher, advertiser and agency clients.”

Love them or hate them, comScore is a consistent standard of reporting for Internet properties and this official launch is good news for marketers who want greater clarity on screen penetration.

Twitter’s Developer Event Will Deal With Cards

At the event, Twitter plans to announce additional types of Cards beyond the three that third parties currently have available, according to sources. The aim, Twitter will argue, is to help app developers incorporate their content into the tweets themselves, which will help drive traffic back to developers’ applications.

Twitter Cards are essential to developing a platform of meta-entertainment. While Twitter may argue that it will help drive traffic back to sites or apps (and it will to some degree) the larger effort is to make Twitter a robust and visual destination for social conversations about entertainment and events.

Apple Acquires Indoor Location Company WifiSLAM

The two-year-old startup has developed ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals. It has been offering the technology to application developers for indoor mapping and new types of retail and social networking apps.

The mapping wars are going indoors. And remember, maps are directly connected to search and offers making it a very powerful and lucrative space.

Rev.com freelance market launches with $4.5M funding

The company was founded in 2010 and has operated in beta for the past 18 months as FoxTranslate and FoxTranscribe. It charges $1 a minute for transcription and delivers most transcriptions within a day.

Unlike oDesk, customers of Rev.com don’t have to manage the freelancers they hire through the service.

Whether or not Rev.com turns out to compete with oDesk more broadly, the initial market of transcription and translation is huge and growing in importance as video adoption grows and companies move into other geographies.

Introducing Offset

Offset’s purpose is to offer high-quality commercial and editorial imagery with simple and clear licensing terms through an elegant customer experience. Offset images will be available with royalty-free licenses at flat, per-image pricing.

Offset images are gathered from world-class assignment photographers, publishers, and agencies, with a focus on unique, authentic content. This collection of images is not available on Shutterstock or vice versa, and Offset images are not available by subscription. Offset images are independently sourced and do not come from Shutterstock contributors.

Offset is to Shutterstock as Banana Republic is to Old Navy or Lexus is to Toyota. It’s a smart move as the Internet continues to get more visual. The hand selected, curation angle seems aimed at lowering the friction to finding high quality images. Reducing the time it takes to source visual content sounds like a winning strategy to me.

Posthaven Launches In Public Beta, Has Saved 850K Posts Since Posterous Announced Its Shutdown Date Of April 30th

Today, Posthaven is launching its public beta and is available to anyone who would like to pay $5 a month to host their Posterous data forever. Yes, Tan and Gibson have promised to keep the service running as long as it has users. The best part about Posthaven is that you can continue to use it just like you did Posterous, so it’s not merely storing your old posts. You can keep going. Its creators are also inspired by Google Reader’s recent demise and hope to set a good example for how to continue a service for the folks who really love it.

I never got on the Posterous bandwagon but I think marketers should watch Posthaven because they seem to have a larger goal in mind, preserving content from the evils of bitrot. Should they pivot completely, this might be a great tool to retain brand assets built on other platforms.

Planspot Aims To Take The Pain Out Of Event Marketing

Competing with the likes of London-based Evently, and indirectly, HootSuite, Sproutsocial and Mailchimp, the web app’s dashboard hooks into social media, Press Release distribution, mailing list management, and partner publisher and event-listing websites to take the pain out of event marketing and promotion online.

Event marketing is a bear. It’s messy and it’s time consuming and full of last-minute surprises. So anyone who tries to make it easier is likely to get some traction. The question is whether the services truly reduce the headaches or just create different ones?

Yahoo! To Acquire Summly

Mobile devices are shifting our daily routines, and users have changed not only what, but how much information they consume. Yet most articles and web pages were formatted for browsing with mouse clicks. The ability to skim them on a phone or a tablet can be a real challenge — we want easier ways to identify what’s important to us.

Summly solves this by delivering snapshots of stories, giving you a simple and elegant way to find the news you want, faster than ever before. For publishers, the Summly technology provides a new approach to drive interest in stories and reach a generation of mobile users that want information on the go.

This is the most important move by Marissa Mayer to date. Very few seem to be thinking about whether the content needs to be changed per screen instead of just the design. Summly was one of the outliers in that regard and Yahoo!’s purchase points to their desire to be a major content delivery platform of the future.

And Then …

Yieldbot Appoints Media Pioneer Cathleen Black to its Board of Directors

Coupons.com Acquires Pinterest-Like Recipe & Meal Planning Service KitchMe

This is … Marketing Biz.

Yahoo in Talks to Buy Stake in Video Site Dailymotion

Dailymotion, which is similar to Google’s YouTube site but is smaller in scale, would immediately make Yahoo a bigger player in Web video outside the U.S., where the company is looking to grow. More than 70% of Yahoo’s $5 billion in annual revenue comes from the Americas region, and the vast majority of that is from the U.S.

This isn’t the worst idea in the world if Yahoo is serious about trying to be a real media platform. But there are a lot of mixed signals from Mayer-led Yahoo so it’s tough to know exactly what Yahoo wants to be now that they’ve returned from their backpack, youth hostel-like trek.

Dropbox acquires email app Mailbox

One reason Dropbox may have been interested in Mailbox is because people often use Dropbox instead of attaching large files to emails. Gmail recently rolled out a feature that lets users attach files to emails seamlessly using Google Drive, which arguably reduces the usefulness of Dropbox since you have to visit another site to access your files. While there are no signs that Dropbox will announce its own email service, receiving Dropbox attachments inside messages from Mailbox users could be both smart and easy marketing.

Not only is this interesting because of the product which is pretty nifty but because of Mailbox’s story. If you want Exhibit A for how to pivot a product and succeed this is it. Agile marketing FTW!

YC-Backed Fivetran Launches A Smart Online Spreadsheet For Data Analysis

Fivetran, a new Y Combinator-backed startup that is launching today, wants to bring spreadsheets into the modern age and make it easier for users to work with messy data and analyze large amounts of information. Most people, for better or worse, use their spreadsheets as databases, and Fivetran acknowledges this by combining SQL-like queries with standard spreadsheet functions and statistical tools that will look familiar to users of more advanced tools like Matlab.

For an Excel nerd who also geeks out on SQL queries this sounds really, really interesting. If you’re a data driven marketer (and you should be) then this might be worth checking out. I know I will.

Experian Marketing Services and Research Now Alliance to Deliver Unique On-Demand Survey Capability Tied to Online Behavior

The goal of the team is to apply this innovative approach to provide actionable insights such as understanding customers’ path to purchase by tying online behaviors to surveys that capture offline activities, influences, motivations and purchases. These insights show where consumers in a brand’s category begin the shopping process, the offers and exposure events that trigger a purchase, the competing products and brands consumers are considering at each phase of the purchase process, and more. By understanding the consumer purchase journey, marketers and their agencies can optimize their engagement and targeting of in-market consumers throughout their purchase journey.

The big hulking offline data and marketing providers are beginning to absorb online data like the Borg cube on Star Trek TNG. Marketers will be better off for their efforts and insights.

Pricing Engine Launches the First Solution for Small Businesses to Create, Manage and Optimize Online Advertising from a Single Platform

“The vast majority of small business owners are either too busy running their operations to effectively manage their online advertising campaigns, or can’t afford optimization platforms used by the Fortune 500 – or both,” said Kagan. “Because of this, we saw a clear need in the marketplace for a solution that allows small businesses to improve their ad performance in a simple, efficient and unified manner. Pricing Engine gives small business owners a decided edge in terms of their ability to get more sales and leads through digital advertising.”

I’m not sure Pricing Engine is the first solution to do this but it certainly addresses a major pain point for small businesses. I expect that there will be a lot of companies trying to tackle this opportunity and it’s the one with the best UX that will wind up winning.

VendAsta Raises $8.25 Million in Funding from Vanedge Capital and BDC Venture Capital

“For any business, digital fragmentation creates acute challenges in managing local brand reputation. The various channels that businesses must monitor and engage are seemingly endless. VendAsta’s platform closes the loop for businesses, supplying them with tools to succeed in the digital world,” says Jed Williams, Senior Analyst at BIA/Kelsey.

Reputation management is becoming more and more important as the Internet has become more social and the ability to produce content (both text and visual) becomes easier. It makes sense for any marketer to use tools to help stay on top of the sprawling mentions of their company or brand.

Transparent Ad Platform Human Demand Closes $900K Series A

For background, the company initially offered a platform that made it easier for indie developers to optimize ad campaigns by introducing transparent metrics which showed exactly what the acquisition price per user is on each app. Human Demand also offered a toolkit for these developers which included something called a “power level” – a simple, color-coded system that allows developers to target or block apps via color codes instead of having to calculate actual dollars and cents.

I hadn’t heard of this mobile media buying platform but was struck by their authentic voice and smart approach. Using color codes to show performance reduces the friction of analysis and action, which leads to better performance.

Facebook Hires Co-Founders Of Trustworthiness Verification Startup Legit

Legit, a startup working on a universal reputation system that could help sharing economy services verify whether users are trustworthy, has announced its team will join Facebook. Specifically, co-founders Jeremy Barton and Rob Boyle will now work for the world’s top social network.

Seems legit. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. But in all seriousness, this is an interesting move by Facebook that may point to a greater emphasis on identifying expertise and influencers within their ecosystem.

And Then …

TapInfluence, Formerly BlogFrog, releases cloud-based software to automate and scale influencer marketing

2013 Top 10 Bloggers and Blogs

This is … Marketing Biz.

CDN.net Launches as First User Customizable Global CDN for Everyone

“Today’s rich content demands plague online businesses with bounce-back, high latency and downtime that are harmful to their customer retention, marketing and SEO efforts. That’s why CDNs are now essential for all Web property owners. However, buying CDN is generally an expensive, frustrating experience where customers pay for resources they don’t end up using, and get a pre-packaged service that doesn’t match their business,” said James Fletcher, Marketing Director, CDN.net.

It’s not just Maverick who feels the need for speed. Users demand it as well and speed improvements are uniformly shown to improve results. CDN.net could help level the playing field for small businesses.

Twitter acquires We Are Hunted, readies standalone music app

The app, to be called Twitter Music, could be released on iOS by the end of this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. Twitter Music suggests artists and songs to listen to based on a variety of signals, and is personalized based on which accounts a user follows on Twitter. Songs are streamed to the app via SoundCloud.

Twitter wants to capture the social entertainment space. They’ve conquered TV and are now aiming at music, which puts them squarely in competition with Facebook. Make no mistake, both companies use music as a way to increase attention, which allows them to increase advertising inventory.

PayPal acquires award-winning and innovative engineering team of Duff Research

This talented team of engineers will be joining the PayPal technology team to help us build creative and simple ways for our customers to use the PayPal digital wallet.

I suppose you can’t count PayPal out of the digital wallet game, but moves like this make me believe they’re further behind than they expected. Too many competitors have a head start, and PayPal is still lurching under their corporate culture.

Facebook acquires Storylane team, but does not get its product, stories or data

Storylane was a ‘story telling’ site that bent the personal blog paradigm in ways reminiscent of Obvious Corp.’s Medium. Facebook, exemplified by its latest News Feed redesign, has been trying to rejuvenate its standing as a place where people share photo-centric stories and read those stories, rather than simply resign itself to being a place where people dump stuff because they feel obligated.

I think the observation in this excerpt is spot on. Facebook understands that the platform needs to be more personal and not viewed as a utility. The story angle should be a sign to marketers as to the direction Facebook is headed.

Market Research Provider AYTM Rolls Out Its Biggest Update Yet With Bigger Panels, Video Questionnaires & More

The company has also now brought in its own market research experts to aid those who either don’t know how to or don’t have time to use the service’s still free DIY tools. Instead, starting at $995 and up, AYTM offers a turn-key service with a seven-day turnaround time. Mazin says that 80 percent of its research assistance is handled by its own in-house staff, while another 20 percent is outsourced to external experts, given the subject of the customer’s questionnaire.

I love the idea of online market research. So much so I worked for a company that did it before pivoting to a different model. What AYTM is finding is that conducting market research the right way isn’t that easy. Not every schmo off the street can do it. The question is whether there’s a big enough market in the middle between expensive market research firms and products like Google Consumer Surveys.

Outbox: Yahoo Mail Head Sharma Leaves Company

Some sources said he clashed with CEO Marissa Mayer, who has been involved in the recent overhaul of one of Yahoo’s key consumer products, due in part to recent issues related to email vulnerability and other issues. But others said he simply wanted to move on and has a new job lined up already.

The fact that Yahoo is bleeding email client market share, has a gaping hole in their email security and can’t seem to get product updates to work correctly might have something to do with the exit. This is a good thing for Yahoo if they can find someone who can turn the tide on such a sticky product.

Announcement

Bitly is announcing today that Peter Stern has resigned to pursue other interests.

Looks like the actual announcement of Bit.ly’s CEO resigning got shortened. This slap-dash post and recent wrong turns in their product make me fear for the future of Bit.ly.

A second spring of cleaning

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader.

I’m sure you’ve heard this news by now. But it merits an inclusion since it could make it far more difficult for curators to find and distribute content. A very sizable portion of Marketing Biz is sourced via Google Reader.

This is … Marketing Biz.

With $2.1M FromTrue Ventures (And Others), TripleLift Builds Ads From A Brand’s Trending Images

“The web is increasingly dominated by images, and images are quickly becoming the primary currency with which brands communicate with their potential customers,” CEO Eric Berry told me in an email. “TripleLift identifies how consumers engage with brands across the web and uses that data to create more relevant and effective advertising. “

It’s a bit shocking that it’s taken this long for something like this to surface. Dynamically changing ad units to reflect popular images is smart and reflects the way in which more and more people are interacting with brands.

AdStage Launches Its Cross-Network Ad Creator, Raises $1.4M

The company offers a single, self-serve dashboard for creating ads that run across Google, Bing, Facebook and LinkedIn. Every feature seems designed to create an optimized campaign with as little work as possible. Most notably, AdStage provides recommendations throughout the process based on data from similar and competitive companies.

I haven’t been able to test drive this yet but it’s a winner if it works as advertised. SMBs are continually frustrated by ad interfaces and either abandon the channel or wind up paying someone to manage the programs which all but wipes out any incremental revenue and profit.

Discoverly Nabs $750K From Salesforce, Bessemer, And Others For Stealthy Social Enterprise App

“The role of the employee in a company is changing to be more of a company ambassador. Employees who were traditionally only doing communication work that was company-facing are now taking on public roles on social media, whether it’s a rank-and-file staffer answering a Tweet about a product or an engineer answering a question on Quora,” Summe said.

“Employees at all levels now evangelize, help recruit, retain new customers — essentially, they act more like company owners. Discoverly helps companies employ the social data they have access to [and in turn] make them more successful.”

There is a sea change in the dynamic between employee and employer. Discover.ly seems to understand this and instead of fighting against it is working to give employers a better way to monitor, manage and leverage the new value employees can bring to a company. This dovetails nicely into Google’s Authorship efforts and the potential for Author Rank.

Tumblr to Introduce Mobile Advertising to Help Achieve Profit

In the first half of this year, companies will be able to promote their posts and blogs to bigger audiences on Tumblr’s mobile application, similar to the way the Web version works, Vice President Derek Gottfrid said in an interview yesterday. Closely held Tumblr has already tested the product internally and is looking to sign up advertisers to debut it, he said.

In six years Tumblr has (relatively) silently built up a massive platform and is now poised to become profitable as they unlock mobile advertising. The problem most marketers face is that it’s difficult to quantify the impact of going viral on Tumblr. I think of it as the place where memes are born or at least raised, which makes it incredibly valuable.

Local Discovery App Spindle Debuts Google Now-Like “Search Alerts” Which Match Nearby Happenings To Your Personal Interests

The way Spindle recommends businesses to users is different, as well. The app considers signals which other local discovery applications may not, including things like time of day, and most importantly, terms and phrases businesses are using in their tweets and Facebook updates. Spindle’s emphasis on social is its standout feature, in fact, and the key way it differentiates itself from the competition. Instead of relying on check-in data (as Foursquare does – and still needs, apparently), Spindle uses these social updates to figure out what’s trending right now.

Spindle does two things which make it powerful. It provides push recommendations (Google Now-Like) and is able to take all the unstructured data from local businesses and make sense of it. They reduce friction on both sides of the equation, for the business and consumer.

Yodle Acquires Lighthouse Practice Management Group

“We are one of the leading pioneers in helping small businesses acquire new customers through online marketing, and now look forward to supporting them in nurturing and growing their own customer relationships.  Traditionally marketers have siloed acquisition and relationship marketing; Yodle is now breaking down that wall as a result of acquiring Lighthouse and will be the first in the industry to optimize SMB lead generation based on actual transactions.”

Too many SMBs focus all their efforts on acquisition and don’t invest in retention. This move addresses that pain point and should help to deliver more value over-time.

Sophia Closes Series A Financing

Sophia’s solutions are used in some of the world’s largest advertising and publishing houses to automatically understand the meaning of content users are consuming and to intelligently leverage this insight to deliver the information and services they need. Advertisers can achieve up to three times higher click through rates by providing more relevant ad content without using cookies.

This announcement caught my eye because of that last phrase: ‘without using cookies’. While I personally think that cookies will survive and flourish there are those who foresee a cookie catastrophe which would make non-cookie based insights very valuable. So for the paranoid out there, this might be your hedge bet.

Twitter Ads Get DVR-Like Buying Platform

TBG Digital’s Calendar Live presents buyers with a programming grid akin to a TV guide that lists the 35 or so channels’ shows by air dates and times. Advertisers can then select the shows they’d like run Promoted Tweets against, including the time zone. So, a brand like Nestlé would be able to pick out cooking shows or Pep Boys could select NASCAR races. Advertisers also could choose to run Promoted Tweets during TV shows that they’re advertising on or during programs they can’t afford to buy ads on.

Late last year I argued that Twitter would win the social brand advertising race. Innovations like this make me believe that Twitter is further ahead than expected, becoming a secondary but necessary piece to any television ad buy.

Outbrain acquires Visual Revenue

By merging the two companies, we combine the leader in online editorial decision support and optimization with the largest player in paid content recommendations. This will offer publishers an unmatched end-to-end solution for optimizing content on all of their pages across any channel, screen size and device, with both editorially-controlled and automated solutions.

What more is there to say? Outbrain is making a lot of moves to improve the quality of their platform and service and this acquisition continues that tradition.

And Then …

Hybris Raises $30M Led By Meritech And Greylock To Take Its Multi-Platform “OmniCommerce” Solution Global

Unified Helps Facebook Marketers Turbocharge Their News Feeds

Silverpop Launches Advanced Mobile Messaging Capabilities

Meltwater Upgrades Social Media Marketing Suite to Deliver Real Social ROI

Introducing the BuzzBar: Qualify Link Prospects at Warp Speed

GinzaMetrics Adds Automated Keyword Management

This is … Marketing Biz.

Few Marketers Aware of IAB’s Rising Stars Units

There’s a big gap in awareness of the IAB’s Rising Stars units between marketers and agencies, finds Undertone [download page] in a recently-released study. Only 31% of marketers surveyed said they had heard of the IAB’s Rising Stars, which promise to “drive brand equity at scale,” according to the IAB, and which the IAB has found [pdf] to outperform standard units in several brand metrics.

I knew about most of these units but not all of them. So, take a moment to review the Rising Stars ad units (after you finish reading the column.) These new units are important because the standard units we are accustomed to are dated, Gutenberg-like units that will be passed by the more advanced and rich formats our technology demands.

Umbel Partners with Janrain to Provide Secure, Actionable Social Analytics

The combination of Umbel and Janrain provides the easiest way for companies to enable user registration through social login while securely capturing valuable social data insights. This partnership provides a much deeper understanding of the social audience for joint clients, properly valuing audience and improving customer engagement.

Janrain is moving fast in 2013, and this latest partnership will deliver greater insight to marketers on users. The question is whether these moves are enough for Janrain to hold off other social login entrants.

MediaBrix Benchmark Report First to Reveal Social and Mobile Gaming Advertising Dramatically Outperforms Standard Online Display

“It comes as no surprise that social and mobile gaming advertising sees results 30-100 times better than standard online advertising campaigns,” said Ari Brandt, CEO and Co-founder, MediaBrix. “This is largely due to the fact that people are driven by a deep well of positive emotions — such as joy, excitement and brand affinity — when playing social and mobile games. In-game ads offer marketers 100% share of voice through 100% viewable ads, which in turn produce digital ad campaigns that truly perform.”

Honestly, this was a surprise, but the explanation does make a lot of sense. Serious brand marketers should be looking more closely at how to leverage in-game advertising, particularly for brand awareness.

Google Is Making Moves To Seriously Disrupt Groupon

By putting offers into the mainstream of Google ad-buying and opening them up to its entire customer base, Google is cutting out the middleman, and creating the powerful feedback loop of data—tracing a transaction from the search results or Web page where a user saw the ad to the redemption of the discount on-site.

The new(ish) Google Offers ad extension certainly does cut out the middleman to some degree. But, I’m not sure Google needs to do much to disrupt the daily deal market, which is unraveling before our eyes.

Video chat startup Rabbit raises $3.3M from Google Ventures, others

“Rabbit’s design and user experience is unlike anything I’ve seen,” said Kevin Rose, general partner at Google Venture, in a prepared statement. “Video chatting is always designed for utility, but Rabbit has created an online social experience that is closer to hanging out with your friends in real life. I can’t wait for the world to see it.”

Video chat is one of those things that everyone thinks should work but rarely does. A staple of many science-fiction films, it’s seen as much real world success as the flying cars we were also promised. But, marketers shouldn’t give up on video chat platforms because one of them will work at some point.

And Then …

Sharethrough Sponsored Stories Brings Native Ads to the Rest of the Web

CleverTouch drives B2B Marketing Automation uptake with 70% growth

Viralheat’s APIs Help Bring Social to Applications

SocialCode Unveils Analytics Tool, Message Optics

Lenovo Wins eTail Search Marketing Award for Global SEO Campaign

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

This is … Marketing Biz.

Elasticsearch Closes $24M Series B Round and Exceeds Two Million Downloads Milestone

Elasticsearch is on a mission to organize data and make it easily accessible. We deliver the world’s the most advanced open source search and analytics engine available and make real-time data exploration available to anyone.

I admit, I didn’t know that much about Elasticsearch. I’d heard of them and understood their value proposition but didn’t quite realize that they had clients like Foursquare and SoundCloud. (Insert Neo reaction here.) I can see a number of other applications, particularly in eCommerce to fill in unmet intent and demand.

Demandbase now offers B2B ad-targeting based on the software companies use

For example, if the maker of a CRM software wants to target the users of its largest competitor, Demandbase can identify individual employees of those companies online according to their corporate IP address – rather than through cookies – and then deliver targeted advertising.

Today, the five-year-old company rolled out a new ad customization feature called Company-Targeted Advertising that allows marketers to serve uniquely relevant ads to each target customer based on attributes beyond their employer. For example, an ad may dynamically read “A CRM system for the financial services industry,” when encountered by a member of that industry, and then later change to “A CRM system for the insurance industry” when next served.

This is like LinkedIn company targeting on steroids and makes it highly efficient to reach previously hard-to-find prospects with the right offer.

Twitter Hires Its First Research Chief From Google

Twitter has poached Google’s advertising research lead for the Americas to be its first-ever global head of research.

This is an important move in my view. Google is still very interested in capturing brand marketing dollars moving online and that’s exactly the market Twitter is poised to grab starting this year.

Announcing the Twitter Ads API

What this means is that as marketers, you’ll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns — and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies. Equally important, users will continue to see the most relevant Promoted Tweets from advertisers. With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale.

That pretty much says it all right? Twitter is pushing hard and fast this year after rebuilding itself in 2012. The question is whether other sites will follow suit and develop Ads APIs. Marketers should be hoping so.

Yahoo’s latest attempt to reinvent the portal is too little and too late

New CEO Marissa Mayer launched a redesigned version of the Yahoo homepage on Wednesday, but the site’s new features seem like a lukewarm rehash of the company’s old portal strategy and imitations of what Facebook offers.

I’ve been seeing this new design for about a month. I guess I was part of a test group. It’s an improvement but it does seem a strange place to invest and not particularly innovative. Perhaps Marissa feels like sizzle is still necessary to keep things afloat until she turns the infrastructure around. In short, is this just buying time until her local, mobile strategy takes hold.

Jumio Brings Identity Verification To Mobile Apps – Just Hold Up Your ID To The Camera

To do so, all the customer has to do is hold up their identification to the mobile device’s camera. Netverify then uses computer-vision to then “see” what the ID card or document says. The technology is meant to be integrated directly into the sign-up flow or checkout process, where it can serve the dual purpose of confirming identity and auto-filling forms.

The part of this that is most interesting is the idea that identity could be integrated into checkout processes and forms. Marketers should be very interested in anything that reduces the friction in these areas, which would certainly increase the top of the funnel and improve conversion rates.

Palantir Acquires Team Behind YC Voice Email Startup Voicegem

Private companies and governments transmit enormous amounts of audio but don’t do much to make sense of it. Palantir’s purpose is to “radically change how groups analyze information,” so it has to know how to crunch voice data. We’re awaiting comment from the Voicegem and Palantir teams, but we bet the startup’s team will be helping Palantir turn audio into insight.

There’s a good chance that many of the interfaces we use in the future will be voice activated. I’m sure you’ve all seen the new Google Glass video, right? Even now, imagine if you could really mine the information in all those conference calls? It’s a bit creepy but quite powerful too.

And Then …

Announcing our Acquisition of Idealizer and the Launch of BlueGlass in Switzerland

Demand Media Announces Plan to Explore Separating Its Business into Two Public Companies

enVu Names New Executive Vice President of Sales

Branding Brand teams up with Nomi to expand mcommerce reach

This is … Marketing Biz.

DataSift Query Builder Powers the Next Generation of Social Business

With its embedded Query Builder, DataSift is powering the next wave of Social with an intuitive yet powerful, tool that enables business users to filter, find, and glean insight from social data across every facet of the business and customer experience.

Capturing and storing big data is no longer a real issue for most. The problem now is how to use it and make it available to stakeholders in a timely manner. Soon, marketers will have substantially more information at their fingertips.

Apigee Redefines Big Data Analytics in the App Economy

Apigee Insights is a highly distributed platform that stitches together data from a customer’s API programs with data from internal systems and online data sources. It delivers in-depth analysis and performance with a multi-channel data aggregator, distributed processing engine, intelligent data storage, analytic accelerators and expert services. Apigee Insights is flexible enough to deal with the changing number, volume, size and sources of app economy data, and it enables customers to get near real-time feedback loop to test, experiment and rollout changes immediately. It allows enterprises to gain insights through the entire app value chain or to focus specifically on the context of the app user, the app developer, or on information analytics.

Despite the adjective mania, this is another interesting big data analysis play with a focus on apps. In particular, marketers should be very interested in analyzing and combining the interactions taking place in third-party apps.

Shortwave Aims To Spur Video Conversations By Launching A Reddit-Style iPhone App

“Imagine if Reddit had video responses only” — there’s a section in the app where you can start a conversation around any topic, users can respond, and other users then vote to either “float” or “sink” each video, with the most popular videos rising to the top.

Video conversations or replies seem like a good idea but it’s never really caught on (see Seesmic). I’m still not sure that this is going to work because there’s simply too much attention necessary to engage. What do you think?

Vimeo acquires GIF-making app Echograph to challenge Vine & Cinemagram

Echograph is an app that creates a GIF by first taking five seconds of video and then using your finger to animate which parts of that video you want to move. Essentially, it creates a photograph with a little bit of video in it. The app used to cost $2.99, but now it will be free.

The one place where I think video is gaining traction is in the micro-video or pseudo-video market. Whether it’s Vine or Cineagram, these short bursts of media are interesting without having to invest too much time or effort. Marketers should be rushing to this new and creative medium.

Facebook Lays Groundwork For Ad Network Off The Social Site

The acquisition, expected to be less than $100 million, is the surest sign yet that Facebook has designs on becoming an even bigger player in advertising. Facebook is methodically laying the groundwork for an off-Facebook ad network powered by social data, but its plans for Atlas go beyond that.

Essentially, Facebook is looking to rival Google by building out its own “ad stack,” or the array of digital-advertising technologies that can power ads from end to end.

Facebook has been doing so much on the ad front lately – from Facebook Exchange to Lookalike Audiences. So, pull the trigger already, and let’s see how this all shakes out.

With New Alike Mobile App Acquisition, Yahoo Pushes Into Local Discovery

Alike, a mobile app that helps users discover nearby venues and places to visit based on their interests, was acquired by Yahoo on Tuesday. The app is focused on an area in which many companies are dabbling right now: Mobile-based location discovery.

Marissa Mayer made it clear that local and mobile were going to be a focus for (the new) Yahoo! The question is whether the hulking inertia of the property can be rehabilitated fast enough as other more nimble rivals pounce on the market.

Nextdoor Closes $21.6 Million In New Series B Funding To Take Its Neighborhood-Focused Social Network Global

Nextdoor, which first launched back in October 2011 and verifies the home addresses of all of its members to ensure privacy and security, now purports to have private social networking groups created for more than 8,075 neighborhoods from all 50 U.S. states, with daily message counts of more than 500,000.

I’ve always thought there’s a future in hyper-local but the demise of EveryBlock and Yardsellr and the struggles (and likely closure) of AOL’s Patch seem to show the difficulty in making it work. But if Nextdoor can make it work, they’ll have a rich ad-targeting platform.

Backed by $3 million, Nomi seeks to bridge online and offline retail with omni-channel platform

The company says it is the first tech startup to address “omni-channel” marketing, which is a new buzzword that basically means “online plus offline.” Omni-channel marketing seeks to tear down the silos between the two, integrating data from inventory, point of sale systems, marketing, and customer service departments together. “Retailers are realizing that no single customer is online only or in-store only — it’s usually a mix of the two,” Barrow says.

While I think the ‘omni-channel’ buzzword is ridiculous, Nomi does address a real problem with many established retailers. Too many run their online properties in a silo. In fact, many times they’re still the red-headed step child of the company, even though they probably contribute far more to traditional retail sales than most understand. That’s where Nomi could really be important, giving digital retailers more credit and, ultimately, resources.

And Then …

EPiServer and Silverpop Join Forces to Connect Multiple Touchpoints, Improve Time to Conversion

OnRamp, A Free, Open Source Ad Server From OpenX, Gets Shut Down After Getting Besieged By Hackers

Ontology Launches Solutions for Financial Services Industry

Everything We Know About The Ad Plan That’s ‘Plastered Over Every Single Whiteboard In Twitter HQ’

Squarespace Adds Commerce System For A High-Class Blogging/Sales Experience

This is … Marketing Biz.

Finally, A QuantCast For Mobile Apps? Onavo Launches Insights

In Onavo Insights, you can look up apps and see how much marketshare they have in the U.S. (or what percentage of U.S. iPhone users actually use the app every month).

Getting accurate and reliable stats on mobile app usage has been trying. Onavo Insights is a nice and slick looking product that could find an eager audience of marketers trying to measure their campaign effectiveness.

Quantcast Measure for Mobile Apps

As a Quantcast user, you’re likely already familiar with the rich audience insights that Quantcast Measure delivers for your online and mobile web properties. Now you can get an even more complete picture of your digital audiences with the introduction of Quantcast Measure for Mobile Apps. This new enhancement brings directly measured traffic data and rich audience insights to your iOS and Android mobile apps.

Oddly enough, just as Onavo Insights comes out Quantcast launches their version of app tracking with an emphasis on how users interact on both platforms. While I like what Onavo is doing Quantcast has an advantage with such a large embedded user base.

Gravity Fully Launches Its Content Personalization Tools, Making Them Available To Any Publisher

Kapur lays out a pretty ambitious vision about how personalization is “the future of content,” but publishers can implement Gravity in more limited ways — for example, by using the technology to create a “Recommended for You” widget that’s personalized for each reader.

Personalization is making everything more relevant for users across the web. This new initiative by Gravity is bold and includes a sponsored stories advertising platform that will compete with Outbrain. Marketers looking to drive traffic from the ‘right’ users should give Gravity a look.

Book open appointment times with MyTime

Start-up MyTime, which officially launched Thursday in Los Angeles only, is eliminating those various channels by consolidating appointments onto one site. Half a million available appointments for several thousand small businesses — including nail salons, auto shops, dentists, doctors, pet groomers, spas and pilates studios — are already on MyTime.

Here’s a new twist on local now that the daily deal mania has subsided. It’s a nice idea for the small business market but MyTime will have to build momentum on both the consumer and business markets to succeed. That’s no small task.

Tagwhat launches real-time feed and redesign for iPhone

Tagwhat now gives you access to more deals, specials, events, and things to do than anyone else on the planet. And they’re served up based on where you are and when you can act. For example, when the pizza shop next door posts a 2 for 1 for lunch, Tagwhat lets you know. When you pass a happy hour, Tagwhat lets you know. When your barber has an open chair, and uses Facebook to announce it, Tagwhat lets you know.

Tagwhat says that they create these feeds “based on the social media posts of nearby businesses.” This might solve the problem of trying to get businesses to use a standard format or submit something in a certain way. I’m not sure how well it works but I’ll be trying it out once an Android update is launched.

How to discover and share the best content on the web

Today, I couldn’t be more excited to let you know that Buffer is available in Feedly across all platforms. It should make sharing the great content you find more spaced out and at a better time super easy and intuitive.

I can’t say that I use Feedly or Buffer. I’m a bit old school in my discovery and like to be present when I share my content. But for the vast majority I think this combination is going to make social discovery and sharing far easier. It reduces the friction of sharing content and I’m always a fan of that.

Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

Today we announce the launch of Discourse, a next-generation, 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

The goal of the company we formed, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., is exactly that – to raise the standard of civilized discourse on the Internet through seeding it with better discussion software

Forums have long been a staple of the Internet but haven’t seen any innovation in … dog years. So this venture by Jeff Atwood is pretty interesting. Is it forums or comments or conversation? It’s tough for me to tell but I applaud him for trying to improve the level of discussion on the Internet. My hope is that it doesn’t identify links as inherently bad in this context since they can be valuable meta content that improve a discussion or conversation.

And Then …

DataXu Closes $27 Million of Growth Capital to Solidify its Lead in Programmatic Marketing

Radware Acquires Strangeloop Networks, Leader in Web-Performance Optimization (WPO) Solutions for e-commerce and Enterprise Applications

Centzy, A “Kayak For Local Services,” Expands To Top 10 U.S. Metro Areas

Kred Owner (And Twitter Firehose Contester) PeopleBrowsr Buys Swaylo, The Loose Thread Of Facebook’s Threadsy Buy

There were beginnings with SEMPO and Google looking to grow digital marketing talent in the future. And there were endings with Payvment closing up and being acquired by Intuit. There were advances in new platforms like mobile analytics as well as advances in old platforms like email. We also saw a flurry of activity around social marketing software.

This is … Marketing Biz.

SEMPO Partners with Google to Host Free Student Summit

The summit will feature educational presentations, workshops, and panels composed of leading national and local professionals. Students will learn about the landscape, business, future and potential careers that are tied to search and digital marketing.

Talent in the digital marketing and search industry is often difficult to find. (I’m trying to be nice here.) Not only that but many college students don’t seem to view these industries as viable career options. So it’s great to see SEMPO and Google doing a bit of advocacy and education. We need more of this.

Table for Two: Foodspotting Joins the OpenTable Family

Rest assured that Foodspotting will continue to live on as a standalone product, as OpenTable deeply values the Foodspotting community and your contributions. You’ll still be able to spot food anywhere in the world, from street food stalls to seven course meals. But you can also look forward to smarter recommendations, better restaurant information and a more visual, social and design-driven dining experience as we bring the best of Foodspotting to OpenTable.

The trend continues. First it was Adobe snapping up Behance. Then ZURB acquired Forrst. Now OpenTable acquires Foodspotting. Tool-focused companies are embracing content and community and integrating them into their marketing plans. Whether grown or acquired, these robust communities and the content they throw off are vital in the new marketing landscape.

Put your analytics where your revenue is

Mixpanel is designed to encourage exploration of data. We already give our customers the ability to measure how their customers use their apps and to communicate with them in a more relevant, measurable way. Now, with Revenue Analytics, they can easily use Mixpanel to instantly assess the performance of their business based on the ultimate key metric–revenue–and instantly measure who their most valuable customers are.

This is sort of a no-brainer. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Mixpanel has been a cult favorite for many and the addition of revenue will only make the data they provide that much more useful. If you haven’t tried Mixpanel yet this certainly provides extra incentive to do so.

Payvment to shut down social commerce platform, direct customers to Ecwid after being acquired by Intuit

Social commerce platform Payvment today announced it will be ending service on Feb. 28, after nearly three and a half years of powering Facebook storefronts through which users could buy items from merchants.

I can’t say I was ever sold on Facebook stores (pun intended). Even with consolidation I’m not sure that the context of shopping fits Facebook’s social environment. Do we really need (or want) eCommerce to be in the walled garden too?

Message Bus Partners With AdStack to Deliver Key Insights for Marketing and Transactional Email

“The problem with email is the fact that people see it as just that: email,” said Dan Quintero, COO at AdStack. “Email is a core channel, and recipients aren’t just numbers in your database, they are unique individuals. LiveOptimizer makes it possible for organizations to treat their customers as individuals by serving personalized content on the fly, and in doing so, marketers avoid being bogged down in heavy database queries to extract segmentation data. That said, all the personalization in the world is meaningless unless the message reaches the inbox. That’s where Message Bus comes in, they ensure that content designed to drive conversions reaches the intended recipient.”

Email is part of that dark social everyone is talking about lately and for good reason – it’s still a huge and powerful medium. So while you should certainly be exploring shiny new social and mobile opportunities don’t ignore the advances being made in the steam engine of many customer relationships.

Your check-ins. Your tips. The best places across the U.S. ranked by the millions of you who actually went there.

These best of lists are based on the ratings we give to millions of places on Foursquare. We use signals like tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, local expertise, and nearly 3 billion check-ins from over 30 million people worldwide to determine how much people love a place.

Foursquare continues to evolve and is on a crash course with Yelp in the recommendation vertical. At this point most local business should be managing their Foursquare presence. While these ‘best of’ lists aren’t well optimized for search now, I predict that over time they will and that’s when Foursquare’s outside in strategy will gain traction.

Elastic launches Close.io, sales software designed by salespeople

The result was a product that allows salespeople to “spend more time communicating with their customers and less time on data entry.” Close.io is the first sales performance tool to combine customer management with communication tools like VoIP calling and two-way email, meaning users can execute all of their core tasks within a single interface. Within the product, salespeople can make and receive calls, while taking notes tied to each address book contact, without leaving the application or ever picking up a desk or mobile phone.

There’s another quote in this piece about everyone using Salesforce but no one really loving Salesforce. I’ve heard that sentiment echoed by a number of people as well. Is the reduced friction that Close.io promises enough to get people to switch? You’d think sales teams would do nearly anything to improve yet there seems to be a lot of inertia in the industry. Whether Close.io becomes a major player or not I think they’ll push the market in the right direction and that’s good for everyone.

Admeta Follows Online Advertising Growth Trend with North American Expansion to Canada

Through its holistic, white-labeled Private Ad Exchange, Admeta offers premium publishers the possibility to have 100% control over their brand, advertisers’ relations, and inventory through the creation of their own ad marketplace.  Admeta’s Private Ad Exchange provides a complementary offering to premium sales and bypasses intermediaries such as DSPs, SSPs, and costly agencies and trading desks.

Control, that’s what Admeta really sells and there are plenty of publishers out there who desperately want it. I anticipate that Admeta will continue to grow along with other private ad exchange offerings. The advertising ecosystem remains a convoluted mess so any company bringing some amount of sanity to it will be in a very good position.

And Then …

Ontology Expands Sales Operations

Unified acquires PageLever

Kenshoo Social 2.0 Release Empowers Marketers to Fully Activate and Illuminate Social Media

Rio SEO Now Offers Full Line of Social Sharing, Online Word-of-Mouth and Search Marketing Tools with Integration of Meteor Solutions

Circa is doing interesting things with mobile content. Swipp has a new twist on local recommendations. Yahoo! snapped up curation tool Snip.it. Boomerang launched a B2B gifting product. Quora opened up a blogging platform.

I wouldn’t call any of this new, but digital Darwinism is pushing companies to be better, faster and more efficient.

This is … Marketing Biz.

Circa Raises $750K From Group Including Lerer Ventures To Revolutionize Mobile News Delivery

Circa allows you to follow an ongoing story, like Lance Armstrong admitting that he doped during his cycling career. It updates as individual bits of information come in, rather than making you read an entirely new story each and every time.

I’ve been wondering whether it’s not just how the information is presented on phones (and tablets) but whether the actual content itself will need to change as well. Should it be shorter? More visual? Marketers should watch Circa to see if it catches on. If it does, it has implications for how content should be delivered in a multi-screen landscape.

Unlocking The Wisdom of the World

We believe that when the collective knowledge of the social graph is aggregated and displayed, it will create a better-informed world. The best part? You don’t need to be a data scientist to understand it.  Swipp gathers social data and gives it right back to the community in the form of data dashboards (also known as ‘infographics’) that are built right into the products. They’re yours and they’re free. And the more people use Swipp, the better the data gets, and the more informed we all get.

You’d think that the recommendation space was crowded enough as it stands, but there’s a rising grumble of people who are finding traditional recommendation platforms (aka Yelp) to be both overwhelming and decreasingly useful. I’m not sure Swipp has it solved but it’s a reminder to marketers to investigate alternative recommendation platforms such as Swipp, Foursquare and Facebook Graph Search to name a few.

Snip.it is Joining Forces with Yahoo!

We are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Snip.it’s vision to a larger scale at Yahoo!. While we can’t share the specifics of what we’ll be building, we are excited about the opportunity to take social news to new, exciting heights at Yahoo!.

Yahoo! is making moves in their quest to be the content source on the Internet. Snip.it was a curation tool which may point to a broader curation marketing strategy. I actually like this better than the current contributor network model which is rife with poor content. Better to be the portal and aggregator of quality content. The question is can Yahoo! deliver on this before someone else does and pirates their customers away?

Simply Measured Debuts Google Analytics Reporting, Expands Deeper into the Enterprise with Marketing Analytics for Business Users

“It’s a well-documented trend that marketers are becoming increasingly inundated with data,” said Adam Schoenfeld, CEO of Simply Measured. “Our goal is to translate data into deliverables that bring analytics to life, making business intelligence more accessible and consumable for users across departments.

Armed with a new round of funding Simply Measured is hoping to be a major player as information becomes more important. Because it’s not having the data but transforming it into information that counts. Even better, Simply Measured reduces the friction by making it easy to use Excel and Power Point. Sounds stupid, but that’s a big deal.

Vine: A new way to share video

Today, we’re introducing Vine: a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity. Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.

Twitter continues to move away from their text based roots with the launch of Vine. I sort of see these as glorified animated GIFs. That’s not a bad thing though if you know how to create something interesting or viral. A smart brand marketer could create a series of these to tell an interesting story. Think of it as Burma-Shave advertising for the Internet.

Social gifting startup Boomerang goes antisocial

Boomerang has developed a channel that lets brands give gift cards to their marketing email lists.

For a brand, it’s a bit of a white label version of the social version of Boomerang, but gift card recipients familiar with the service will still recognize the Boomerang presentation. When a customer receives the digital card, he or she is also given the chance to share the card with 10 or so friends on Facebook to receive rewards like another gift.

This is a smart move by Boomerang since the consumer gifting space is incredibly crowded. A B2B product that appeals to marketers could gain traction quickly. Obviously, it has to be implemented carefully so it’s not interpreted as corporate spam.

Mercury Media Acquires iMarketing to Establish the Largest Independent Integrated Performance Marketing Agency in the U.S.

Mercury Media, a leading direct response television media agency, announced that it has acquired iMarketing, a full service digital agency, creating the largest independent online and offline performance marketing agency in the country. The acquisition will enable Mercury Media to offer fully integrated cross-channel media and marketing solutions to cost-effectively drive sales, customer acquisition and lead generation for its clients.

Yet another merger of offline and online capabilities. Convergence is upon us and it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to work with an agency that doesn’t have their fingers … everywhere.

Introducing Blogs on Quora

Blogs on Quora are great for people who (1) don’t have a big, established online presence already and (2) don’t want to do the time-intensive, heavy lifting of marketing their blog and slowly building an audience. If you are a good writer but don’t have thousands of Twitter followers or a big audience for your blog, Quora is an ideal place to write. Your blog will be discovered quickly without you having to do any work besides writing.

Here I thought that people should have to hustle to earn their readership. Silly me! In my view part of becoming a better blogger and marketer is figuring out how to attract that audience. I’m a better writer, blogger, marketer for the struggle. Not only that, but I’d be careful putting your own intellectual property on someone else’s domain.

Extole Raises $7.5M To Build Brands’ Word-Of-Mouth On Social Media

Extole allows businesses to find the best advocates in their customer base and offer them rewards to promote the company to their friends on social networks — in other words, it gives companies a way to build word-of-mouth.

Identifying natural advocates is important. I’m not thrilled with the rewards angle myself but I know it has better short-term results. The problem to me is whether you short-circuit the motivation for evangelizing that brand. I’ll be interested to see if there’s a diminishing returns to this type of effort over time.

Optimal Announces $7 Million in New Funding to Fuel Social Media Ad Buying and Analytics Expansion

“I’m excited to join Optimal as an investor and board member. They have the most efficient platform for reaching and managing a brand’s reach across social media. In other words, I selfishly use them for my own purposes. Additionally, they are a one-stop shop for me to buy media across social platforms, including Facebook retargeting. I had been looking for this, so I invested.”

The Facebook ecosystem is alive and well. Optimal is cashing in on their Facebook retargeting success, as well they should. We’re still in the infancy of social ad buying so being at the forefront of it is good for Optimal (and good for marketers.)

And Then …

Announcing Moz’s 2012 Metrics, Acquisition of AudienceWise, & Opening of Our Portland Office

SocialCode Welcomes New Chief Revenue Officer Bill Masterson

Exceptional Women in Publishing Names Federated Media Publishing’s CEO Deanna Brown the 2013 EWIP Award Winner