Hulu U.S. video streams soar by nearly 50 percent in October, Google’s YouTube flat
Video viewing habits are continuing their shift online as more than half of people in the U.S. watched video on the Internet in October, according to comScore.
Hulu is rising rapidly. The video portal for professionally produced content attracted 47 percent more views over the month, at about 850 million views in October compared to 583 million views in September. The site’s also stickier: the average user is watching about 20 videos, up from 15.
That growth… Continue Reading
5 O’Clock Roundup: Microsoft CFO out, new Google ads, an $85 million fraud?
Here’s the latest action:
Canopy Financial is accused of fraud — The health IT company, which raised $85 million in venture capital, allegedly made fraudulent financial statements, even forging some with fake KPMG letterhead. Spectrum Equity Investors may have taken the biggest loss on their recent $62.5 million investment in the company, TechCrunch reports.
Microsoft chief financial officer Chris Liddell to step down – It’s not clear why he is leaving, but he will be replaced by Peter… Continue Reading
Facebook establishes dual-class stock structure
Facebook is establishing a dual-class stock structure, a move that could help pave the way to an initial public offering in the future. The company gave no time-line for such an offering and instead said it will help give current shareholders more power to guide the long-term vision of the company.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is converting all current shareholders to Class B stock, which carries ten times the voting power of Class… Continue Reading
Facebook co-founder’s Asana raises $9M from Benchmark, Andreessen-Horowitz
Asana, the productivity management startup from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and lead engineer Justin Rosenstein, has raked in $9 million from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz.
Asana is probably one of the more anticipated startups in Silicon Valley right now. Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes founded Facebook together during college at Harvard University. Rosenstein was another early Facebook employee. The pair are trying to re-imagine productivity management in a way that’s completely native to the web… Continue Reading
HootSuite lets you schedule status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
HootSuite, which started as a way to navigate your Twitter stream, is broadening its grasp on the social web — it’s adding LinkedIn updates and letting you schedule status updates on the social networks it tracks.
The idea is to become a social media dashboard, so you can update your Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm and Twitter status and track what friends are doing on each network directly from HootSuite instead of visiting each web destination. After LinkedIn… Continue Reading
Google-backed Pixazza opens up photo tagging service to help blogs earn revenue
Pixazza, a Google Ventures-backed startup, is opening up its crowdsourced photo-tagging service, which can turn any Web site into an online store.
The Mountain View-based startup uses an army of taggers to identify products and link them to shopping sites like Amazon or Zappos. For example, you might see a photo of actress Penelope Cruz wearing a new outfit on a fashion blog. If you roll over the image, you’ll see links to similar products that… Continue Reading
Google prepares to launch Chrome extensions
Google says it’s getting close to adding extensions (which users install to add features to their web browsers) to its Chrome browser.
Specifically, Google announced today that developers can not only build extensions, but also upload them into Google’s gallery showcasing Chrome extensions. That way, “developers have time to publish their extensions ahead of [Google's] full launch.” The post doesn’t include any specifics on when that full launch will come, but it sounds pretty close.
Google also… Continue Reading
Onepageartist.com offers a one-stop place for info on music artists
Finding out about a musician or a show has always been a three-, four- or even five-site process for me. First I’ll hit pollstar.com and see what shows are in the area on a given day. Scrolling through lists of venues and artists, I’ll see something like “BattleHooch” and follow the link to their home page. This page may or may not tell me where they are playing, so it’s back to pollstar.com where I… Continue Reading
Tweetmeme launches buttons for re-tweetable advertising
Twitter said it’s planning a large-scale advertising network soon, but U.K.-based Tweetmeme beat them to the punch with a monetization effort of its own today.
The startup, which creates those green ‘Retweet’ buttons you see everywhere (including on this site), is rolling out the same feature for ads. They’re partnering with Federated Media to insert retweet buttons into their advertising two weeks from now, enabling people to share compelling ads with others.
Advertising in social streams has… Continue Reading
Hot Potato launches event streaming, storytelling in real-time
Expect big things from this location-based service.
Brooklyn-based Hot Potato launched a site and iPhone app today that lets groups of people share and create streams of content around events.
You can create an event like a concert or a football watching session and let other people check in to it. Everyone “checked in” at an event can post their thoughts, photos and videos about what’s going on, creating a stream of activity for others to see.
All… Continue Reading
Google search marketing gets all touchy-feely
Google hasn’t traditionally engaged in large-scale advertising campaigns. Instead, it has relied mainly on word of mouth to become the $180 billion company it is today. However in the last year, the company has rolled out bigger and bigger paid advertising efforts (as many mature brands start to do). That includes the Go Google campaign back in August, promoting Google apps as a reliable alternative to Microsoft Office for businesses.
Yesterday, Google rolled out a series… Continue Reading
Twitter COO Dick Costolo: Revenue is on and advertising is coming soon
Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on-stage at the Real-Time CrunchUp in San Francisco. I’m taking some notes as we go.
The big takeaways are that Twitter is making more than $4 million a year, but won’t specify how much and that’s through the recent data-sharing deals with Microsoft and Google.
Next, Twitter is going to roll out advertising soon. Costolo says, “You’ll see an advertising strategy from us in the near future. It will be fascinating and… Continue Reading
Infoaxe — a real-time search engine that doesn’t rely on Twitter
Infoaxe, which records your web history and make it searchable, just launched a public facing real-time search engine tapping the behavior of its more than 2 million users.
Infoaxe is a fairly unique entrant into the real-time search space. It doesn’t rely on Twitter’s data stream the way that competitors TweetMeme, OneRiot and Scoopler do. Instead, its results are based off the data it has collected through a browser toolbar it launched last year that has about… Continue Reading
Seesmic jumps on Twitter’s new location feature with map previews
Seesmic, the Twitter client that was the first to incorporate lists, has now jumped on the social network’s new location-tagged tweets. You can roll over tweets that have a special marker to show a map of where they are, without ever leaving the client.
Twitter finally rolled out its location application programming interface earlier today. It lets you pair a tweet with data about where you are. It could be extremely valuable for real-time data about… Continue Reading
Twitter finally enables geotagged tweets with new location API
Twitter finally rolled out its new application programming interface for tagging tweets with your location.
It won’t appear on Twitter.com, but it will be enabled for location-based services like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Twittelator Pro. Tweetie already switched on some geotagging functionality earlier this year, so you can see nearby tweets.
This is probably the most significant update Twitter has released in the last half-year and it’s hard to say what outside developers will… Continue Reading
GreenBeat: Locust, CPower tie for grand prize in Innovation Competition
The winners of the inaugural GreenBeat Innovation Competition — a survey of the most promising technologies and companies working toward a cleaner, more efficient grid — were just announced following four-minute presentations from the top eleven finalists (”eleven is the new ten”). Locust Storage, while launched its innovative storage system today, and demand response provider CPower declared victory, winning a slot at the DEMO Spring conference in 2010.
The winner were selected by a panel of… Continue Reading
New targeting on Pages gives Facebook leg up over Twitter for marketers
Facebook unveiled what could become a pretty powerful marketing tool for large multinationals and brands last night. You can now target specific locations and languages when you send out updates on a Facebook page. A brand like McDonald’s could use the new feature to send out coupons to Japanese followers, for example.
Why is this important? “Drip marketing”, or social media marketing — whatever term you want to use for it — has become increasingly essential… Continue Reading
Twitter retools prompt, asks “What’s happening?”
Twitter unveiled a small marketing tweak today.
The company’s changed its main question from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” It’s more of a cosmetic change to make it clearer to outsiders what Twitter is all about. Status updates have come to encompass a broad range of behavior, not just the much-mocked example of “I’m drinking a latte right now.” People use it share links, videos, images and small, provocative thoughts.
Co-founder Biz Stone writes:
“…a birds-eye… Continue Reading
Yahoo juices up its news search with Twitter
Yahoo is using Twitter to surface timely and relevant news stories, images and videos starting today.
As news organizations pile into the microblogging service and as shared links and retweets become a decent metric of what’s interesting, the web’s biggest search destinations are incorporating Twitter. (Microsoft and Google both signed data-sharing deals with Twitter last month.)
What’s unique about Yahoo’s approach is that they haven’t built a separate real-time search engine outside of their primary search as… Continue Reading
GreenBeat: Doerr wants to see more U.S. leadership in smart grid, cleantech
“Ten years out we want lamps that use 2 of percent the energy [they're usually using now] and put out the same amount of light,” Doerr said at the beginning of his talk at GreenBeat 2009 today — indicative of his interest and that of his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in the newest, boldest investments when it comes to cleantech and the grid.
He began the conversation with VentureBeat editor Matt Marshall by comparing… Continue Reading