Will Facebook acquire social traffic and navigation app Waze? TechCrunch ran an article today claiming that three Israeli papers, Calcalist, Ynet and The Marker, have reported that Facebook is in talks to acquire the company in a billion-dollar deal that would help further grow Facebook's mobile efforts. According to the article, a private source confirmed the deal along with a price range of $800 million to $1 billion, although a spokesperson from Facebook and from Waze both said they will not comment on rumors or speculation about the business. Waze uses crowdsourcing technology to let [...]

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The online battle for TV ad dollars continues to heat up. Yahoo, AOL, YouTube among others, and now Facebook are all aiming their sites on the burgeoning online video ad market and a share of TV's outsized ad budgets. As first reported in December, Facebook has been shopping new video ad units to agencies. Now, it appears Facebook will be bringing video ads to users' newsfeeds in July, according to The Financial Times. The video ads will appear in newsfeeds on desktop computers as well tablets and smartphones and will be set to autoplay on mute. If a user clicks on a video ad, it will [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Business Issues | Video

Facebook has settled its trademark-infringement litigation over the term Timeline. This was first reported by InsideFacebook based on an SEC filing: We are also party to various legal proceedings and claims which arise in the ordinary course of business. Among these legal matters, in two cases, Summit 6 LLC v. Research in Motion Corporation et al., and Timelines, Inc. v. Facebook, Inc. , we have reached agreements to settle the matters. The cost of settlement in each case, which is included in the accompanying condensed consolidated financial statements for the three months ended March 31, 20 [...]

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Facebook just announced Q1 2013 earnings. Revenue was nearly $1.46 billion, up 38 percent year over year (YoY). That beat financial analysts' estimates. Net income was $219 million, which was below estimates. Allaying fears of a decline in usage and engagement, Facebook saw 26 percent growth in daily active users (now 665 million). Monthly active users also increased 23 percent to 1.1 billion. Mobile active users were 751 million, a significant jump compared with 680 million in Q4 2012. Ad revenues were $1.25 billion (85 percent of total revenue), which represented a 43 percent increase [...]

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Entertainment software developer Electronic Arts (EA) announced it will be retiring its Facebook games The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society on June 14, 2013. While The Sims Social reportedly gained as many as 10 million daily active users (DAU) in 2011, EA reports that activity has fallen off for its once-popular titles. With social games moving from browser to mobile devices, Facebook confirmed earlier this year that it is focusing on more action games for hardcore gamers. Currently, AppData reports The Sims Social and Pet Society at 500,000+ DAUs and SimCity Social at 100,00 [...]

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'Tis the season of mobile advertising forecasts. Within the last week three have been released from eMarketer, BIA/Kelsey and now IDC. Emarketer said that US mobile advertising was worth $4.1 billion in 2012, BIA estimated $3.2 billion and IDC now asserts that US mobile ad revenues came in at $4.5 billion for the year. IDC expects mobile advertising to reach $7 billion by year end, compared with eMarketer's $7.29 billion and BIA's $5.39 billion. The IDC forecast also says the following about 2012 mobile ad revenues: Search: 61 percent of mobile ad spending  ($2.8 billion) Display: [...]

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Facebook has confirmed that Emily White, its Mobile Partnerships Director, is moving to a new role overseeing business development at Instagram. Her new title is Director of Business Operations, and White has already begun the transition to Instagram's team. The news was first reported by AllThingsD.com, which also reported this statement from Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom: I'm excited to bring Emily White onto the Instagram team. As we continue to scale our operation to support over 100 million active users, her experience with partnerships and business operations will play a majo [...]

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Facebook is announcing big news next Thursday at its Menlo Park headquarters. Invitations to attend a product announcement invited media professionals to  "Come see our new home on Android." Will it be a Facebook phone? Speculation is that this might be the long-rumored Facebook phone. 9to5Google reported that Facebook joined forces with HTC and has been working on a major marketing campaign to support the upcoming product launch. Marketing Land will be on site during the event with live blogging to cover the product announcement as it happens next Thursday, and updates here and on our [...]

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According to Glassdoor company review data, Mark Zuckerberg has the best employee-approval rating of any CEO in the US. Last year he wasn't among the top 25. By the same token, last year's top CEO, Apple's Tim Cook, has fallen from number 1 to number 18 on this year's survey. Glassdoor's company review surveys ask employees to "indicate whether they approve or disapprove of the way their CEO is leading the company." Glassdoor said that "rating and rank in the 50 Highest Rated CEOs list was determined using the average approval rating a CEO received between February 25, 2012 and Februar [...]

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Recall that there was a small photo-centric site out of Chicago run by former ShopLocal executives. That site called/calls itself Timelines (plural). It obtained federal trademark registration for its name. Then, Facebook came along and used that term for its, well, Timeline. Timelines has a number of other photo-oriented sites and apps such as Photogram. Timelines the company offered to sell itself or the trademark to Facebook but the latter declined. The smaller company felt that it was only a matter of time before it would simply go out of business because its name and brand were now [...]

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While most people don't think of Facebook as the equivalent of a "personalized newspaper," that's how many inside Facebook think about News Feed. And that was the metaphor repeatedly used throughout the presentation today. But more on that later. Here's our related coverage from today: How To Get The New Facebook News Feed Power To Separate Feeds: A Look At The Filtering Inside The New Facebook News Feed Facebook’s New News Feed: The Before & After Look And now, an overview of what Facebook announced today. In a nutshell, here are the changes: Less clutter on the homepa [...]

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Facebook confirmed its long-rumored acquisition of Atlas from Microsoft. Rumors of the acquisition first surfaced in December. And yesterday, AdAge reported the acquisition would be announced today. No price was mentioned, but TechCrunch speculated that the figure was considerably less than $100 million. Microsoft acquired Atlas when it bought aQuantive in 2007 for more than $6 billion, which was Microsoft's largest acquisition at the time. Redmond essentially wrote off the full value of the acquisition a year ago. The primary value of Atlas for Facebook is in proving ROI and attri [...]

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Last year, Facebook introduced Custom Audiences, which enables companies to upload customer or prospect databases and target those individuals on Facebook by matching customer IDs with Facebook IDs, phone numbers or email addresses (subject to privacy protections). That capability was recently expanded with "Lookalike Audiences," which enable marketers to find segments that generally match specific Custom Audiences on Facebook. Today, Facebook further extended the functionality of Custom Audiences by announcing that information from third-party data vendors Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom and [...]

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If you're a privacy advocate you might find it creepy or worrisome. But if you're a marketer, you might be thrilled by the moves that Facebook is making to bring the online and offline worlds together. AdAge highlights a number of initiatives that Facebook has undertaken to both show the offline sales impact of its ads as well as to bring offline consumer data to online targeting. Both involve the two-way flow of consumer data between online and traditional offline databases. Facebook isn't the first company to try any of this, but its scale puts it in a better position than others to su [...]

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Facebook is the latest major Internet company to admit that it's been victimized by hackers, but says it's found no evidence that user information was compromised. In a blog post this afternoon, Facebook says it discovered the hack last month after "a handful of employees" had visited a compromised website. The website hosted an exploit that installed malware on its employees' computers. "We have found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised," the post says in bold lettering. Facebook says the episode was the result of a "sophisticated attack," one that involved a zero-day [...]

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The AP is reporting that a German court has invalidated a decision of the German privacy regulator, which opposes Facebook's real names/identities policy. Privacy regulators oppose the Facebook policy on the grounds that German and European privacy and free-speech rules prohibit a ban on fake names. However the court's decision is not based on German law. According to the AP report, "The administrative court in northern German Schleswig argued in its ruling Thursday that German privacy laws weren't applicable because Facebook has its European headquarters in Ireland - which has less far-rea [...]

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[caption id="attachment_32500" align="alignright" width="300"] image from Stock.XCHNG[/caption] This month marks the nine year anniversary of when Facebook (then known as TheFacebook.com) was first conceived and created by Mark Zuckerberg. Since then, Facebook has grown by leaps and bounds, currently supporting over one billion active users (as of December 2012) and over 618 million active daily users. Facebook's capabilities and layouts have undergone the most obvious changes over the last nine years, and the way that marketers have learned to connect with users has grown, as well. [...]

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A new Pew survey on Facebook usage patterns leads me to want to coin a new term: "Facay" -- for "Facebook vacation." According to survey data collected in December, "61 percent of current Facebook users say that at one time or another in the past they have voluntarily taken a break from using Facebook for a period of several weeks or more." Pew says that its data, based on a survey of 1,006 US adults, "indicate there is considerable fluidity in the Facebook user population." In addition to the above finding, 20 percent of survey respondents say they no longer use Facebook, while 8 percent [...]

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While it appeared to me that she was still lip-syncing yesterday, Beyonce Knowles was one of the big winners of yesterday's social media buzz bowl. The not-so-single lady's celebrated halftime performance generated more than 250,000 tweets per minute (TPMs). Overall, according to Twitter, her performance drove 5.5 million tweets -- and perhaps shut down power at the stadium for a half hour thereafter. Other top TPM winners were the following: Power outage: 231,500 TPM 108-yard kickoff return for Ravens TD by Jones: 185,000 TPM Clock expires; Ravens win: 183,000 TPM Jones catch [...]

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Facebook released Q4 and full year results for 2012. The company posted $1.585 billion in quarterly revenue, representing an increase of 40 percent YoY. Full year revenues were $5.09 billion. Ad revenues were $1.33 billion or 84 percent of total quarterly revenue, which was a 41 percent increase over 2011. Mobile revenue represented 23 percent of total ad revenue, up from 14 percent in the previous quarter. Facebook said that Mobile daily users exceeded Web daily users in Q4 for the first time. The following are additional user-numbers highlights: Monthly active users were 1.06 [...]

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