If you haven’t heard of Tech Cocktail, you probably haven’t partied much with the startup community.

Tech Cocktail‘s goal is to support emerging tech hubs through events and provide relevant news and information for entrepreneurs on its website. And today, the company raised its first $2.5 million funding round from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

As part of the funding, the team opened a new office in Las Vegas, which will serve as its headquarters. On the company blog, CEO Frank Gruber said the goal is to become the “leaders” of the local, burgeoning tech community.

Entrepreneurs are relocating to Vegas in large part due to the efforts of Hsieh’s “Downtown Project.” Hsieh and his team are on a mission to revitalize the downtown economy through a $500 million fund. Investments are already being made in urban planning and development, schools and hospitals, small businesses, and technology startups.

Last week, I travelled to Vegas with a group of entrepreneurs and investors to find out more about the Downtown Project. Most of the activities, including speaker sessions and networking events, were organized by Tech Cocktail.

“We’ve known Tony Hsieh for over five years, dating back to a party that we threw together for CES 2009,” Gruber said on the Tech Cocktail blog. “It’s great to have a strategic partner who really understands entrepreneurship and the importance of celebrating and building community around it.”

It should come as no surprise that the founders would raise a sizable round of funding (especially for a media company) from the downtown project. Gruber said the team will focus on expanding throughout the United States, and building the brand. He claims that 30,000 people attend one of Tech Cocktail’s events last year alone.

Tech Cocktail will also release a “national platform” for entrepreneurs, but hasn’t disclosed much at this point.

NowThisNews, a video-news startup from the brains of former Huddington Post execs, has just raised a healthy round of institutional funding.

The $4.8 million round (out of a total $6 million in equity the startup is attempting to raise, according to SEC documents.) comes from Oak Investment, Lerer Ventures, Bedrocket, and new investor SoftBank Capital.

A year ago, when the project was still in stealth mode, its founders managed to raise a $5 million round, as well.

NowThisNews itself is a website and iPhone app chock-full of video clips likely to be popular on the Internet — big names (Queen Elizabeth), big stories (Amanda Berry's Cleveland kidnapping escape), big novelty (cocaine smugglers dressed as nuns to avoid police).

For now, at least, the site's front page is a step up from the nip slips and cat clips you might see trending elsewhere. But all the clips are super short — even the Queen merits a mere 91 seconds — so don't expect powerful journalism with ample context. Mostly, you're just getting brief clips of official statements or from news or security cameras with no editorial or perspective.

But it's not bad for catching up on the news from your iPhone, which is all the NowThisNews team really needs.

The company was founded in 2012 and is based in New York City.

Image credit: modenadude/Flickr

It’s easy to become caught up in tweets or Facebook posts alleging a story is true when there is very little to back it up. Recent events like the Boston Marathon bombing and fertilizer plant explosion in Texas incite a swarm of incorrect information including photos, videos, and stories. It’s important as a consumer of news to be able to determine what’s fake and what actually happened.

Serge Malenkovich, writer for the Kaspersky Daily, gave readers a “Crash Course in Fact Checking,” simple ways to determine if what you see online is true. Make sure you don’t repost something false (and fall prey to the Internet trolls) by following these tips.

Whether or not a story was posted on a reliable news source is a quick way to tell if it’s true or not. Although news outlets like CNN and FoxNews sometimes report inaccurate stories, they are quick to follow up with a correction when they realize their error.

Other outlets like Bloomberg, BBC, CBS, and NBC are good go-to sites for news of the day without spin.

“Just Google it,” is another tip Malenkovich points out quickly clears up any misunderstandings. You can search topics or stories using Google News, and the search engine pulls from only journalistic sources, like those we mentioned above.

Finding a source is another way to determine factuality. Malenkovich notes it’s one of the fact-checking musts that journalists do and it should apply to readers as well. Head back to the search engine and type in your query with “official site,” and you’ll be able to find (or not) a legitimate source.

Fake quotes and images permeate the Internet. Sometimes it’s quite obvious when it’s incorrect, however it’s easy to get duped – like we saw when Photoshopped images masqueraded as photographs of Superstorm Sandy and several news reports picked them up. An image search is one way of finding out if an image is legitimate, however Malenkovich points out the (awesome and helpful) site Pskiller that determines whether photos were doctored.

When in doubt, you can always go to Snopes, one of the most comprehensive analyzers of hoaxes on the Internet. From the sniper cheerleader circulating Facebook in recent weeks to the false claim that Coke acids are bad for you, Snopes is the first to point out flaws in popular news and information being passed around the web.

Users fact checking more in-depth government information can check out FactCheck.org, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization monitoring factual accuracy of politicians and political players.

It’s vital to determine what stories are true in media. Next time you’re enthralled in a hard-to-believe story on the Internet, take a minute to check out its legitimacy. You might be surprised.

Image via Room 167

It’s been a big day for the deals beat with Marketo and Tableau filing for hotly-anticipated IPOs.

It’s also the beginning of a furious startup funding season in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs. We saw a significant uptick in funding today; almost a dozen companies closed rounds in diverse industries, such as sports, consumer-tech, and political-tech.

But as always, in this funding mayhem, VentureBeat has you covered. Check out the full list of deals here in no particular order.

Auctionata modernizes the auction house with $20M from VCs

Auctionata claims to be the first patented online producer of live auctions. And today, the company announced investors are throwing down $20.2 million to support global expansion, recruiting, and product development. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

ElectNext gets $1.3 million for its open political database

The political news media has a new weapon: ElectNext. The company gleans its information from organizations like The Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack, and Follow the Money, and it also works with open data-friendly cities like Philadelphia. Its political database can now be used by publishing partners like Hearst and The Washington Post. Read the full story on VentureBeat. 

Arkansas’ Collective Bias storms marketing scene with $10.5M in funding

This “social shopper media company” connects brands with consumers through its Social Fabric community of 1,400 influencers. These influencers tell “real-life” stories about their shopping experiences and product usage and share them on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Deep pulls in $10m in first round funding

“Big data” startup Deep Information Sciences (formerly known as CloudTree) raised $10 million from Robert Davoli and others to help its customers with a “new approach” to database architectures. The flagship product is a database appropriately called DeepDB, and it provides simultaneous transactions and analytics in the same data set in real time. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Grand St. grabs $1.3M from First Round & others for its ‘creative tech’ marketplace

There are many places you can buy cool technology products on the web — ThinkGeek, Wantful, Amazon, etc. But the next place on your list of sites to buy from might just be Grand St., an online marketplace for buying “creative technology” products that has received $1.3 million in new seed funding. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

South Asian lingerie conglomerate gets $20M for its enterprise management solution

Attune is a provider of technology solutions for the fashion and lifestyle industry. Today, the company announced a $20 million round of investment to expand its offerings “across all areas of the fashion and lifestyle value chain” to help brands to streamline and manage their operations and optimize their performance. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Sport Ngin revs up with $6M in Series C financing

Sports software provider Sport Ngin (formerly known as TST Media) closed a $6 million round led by El Dorado Ventures. Sport Ngin creates web and mobile solutions for youth, amateur, and professional sports organizations, which powers the online presence of more than 100,000 sports teams, leagues, clubs, association, tournament, facilities, and businesses around the world. This funding will support the company’s growth and accelerate product development, as well as marketing and sales efforts.

Favourit’s investors place $3.6M bet on betting

Favourit launched globally today and revealed $3.6 million in funding to expand its social sports betting platform. This Melbourne, Australia-based startup provides sports fans and bettors an online forum to wager virtual currency or real cash in regulated markets. Favourit’s “Facebook for the sports betting world” is a community that connects sports fans and their friends with licensed betting operators. The round was raised through angel investors.

Appland enter the Middle East, raises $1M

Appland has secured $ 1million for its white label app store platform. Today, the company also announced entering the Middle East through a partnership with Saudi Telecom Company. Appland’s technology supports on-click operator billing, soil marketing, virtual currency, and geo-location targeting. Appland is based in Sweden and has offerings for Androird, iOS, and Blackberry.

CreditKarma gets $30M to help flustered Americans track their credit scores

Instead of charging people $10 or so per month to monitor their scores, Credit Karma offers the service for free, supplementing it with tools for tracking other financial information like bank accounts, bills, mortgages and loans. It’s a powerful, effective, and potentially very lucrative tool — which is why it’s no surprise to see that Credit Karma has raised $30 million in a big Series B round led by Ribbit Capital and Susquehanna Growth Equity. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

KeepTree Announces $2.62 Million Investment from Japan’s Faith Inc. & Others

KeepTree, a developer of a new video messaging technology that allows people to record videos and deliver them immediately, or at a future date and time, today announced it has secured a $2.6 million investment led by Japan-based Faith, Inc, a mobile technology development firm. The Company will use the funding to expand its team and to drive the ongoing development of its business and technology.

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That might be changing sooner than you think.

Today Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt told The Verge that Netflix expects to be streaming video at the massive 3,840-by-2,160 pixel 4K resolution in the fairly near future: this year or next. If you thought Netflix was a data hog before, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Now we know why Netflix recently unveiled its speed list of the 17 fastest Internet service providers in America.

“We have work to do with the compression and decode capability,” Hunt admitted, but he noted that Netflix’ own House of Cards was shot in 4K.

Assuming a massive amount of compression would need to take place in order to be able to stream 4K video reliably and quickly, the question becomes: What kind of hardware will be necessary to run full-res Netflix in the near future? Smart TVs, and appliances like Xboxes, Wiis, and Apple TVs might need very significant upgrades to have the kind of onboard power to run real-time decompression for that much video. Not to mention much more on-board storage, even if just for buffering.

One other thing Hunt wants to see from video producers? A higher frame rate.

Hunt says we’ve now pretty much maxed out the resolution of our eyes but that 60 frames/second would make for a much better video experience than the current 24 or 30.

photo credit: pkingDesign via photopin cc

Path announced this morning that Path 3 is now available, and the focus is the the type of intimate, free-form communication that happens in person. As the private social network says, “There is so much more than words that pass between us. A smile or nod or encouraging gesture – these allow for true connection and understanding.”

To enable that in a more organic — and non-Facebook way — Path has introduced private messaging. Despite the name, it can be used for both one-on-one and one-to-many communication, but the defining characteristic is that it is very free-form. Ye good olde fashioned text or photo-based status update looks almost a little limited in comparison.

A brand new language?

In the new Path, messages can be text or photos (of course) but also voice, location, a cartoon-style sticker or badge that communications your emotions of the moment, a song, a book, a video, your location, or even a movie clip you’ve found online.

In other words, just about anything but the pat on the back.

And a brand-new monetization

One of the new communication channels Path is adding is stickers, kind of a next-gen emoticon.

“These are pieces of art to be used in messaging. They are expressive and fun, and they communicate what words can’t,” Path says.

You get two free “packs” just for being a Path member, but other packs are available as well, at extra cost. Some of my favorites are designed by Hugh McLeod of GapingVoid fame, but stickers from other artists such as David Lanham and Richard Perez are also available. Path didn’t release any pricing information yet.

The new version of Path is available immediately for iPhone, and “coming soon” for Android.

That’s just one of the questions I had for Roman Tsunder, founder and spiritual leader of the TED of the marketing world: PTTOW. Pronounced just the way it’s spelled, PTTOW brings together the people and the companies who are shaping our digitized, commercialized, and sometimes commoditized culture, for good.

Our youth culture, that is.

“Sixty percent of the world is under the age of 30,” Tsunder says. “In the Middle East, that’s up to 70 percent, hence the revolutions. What I want to do is bring together the leaders of every major industry whose customers are between 17-30 … to talk about their most inspiring projects.”

That vision has produced events where Activision and the State Department, QuikSilver and the Gates Foundation rub shoulders with music industry giants. And where beauty and fashion — Diane von Furstenberg — meet brains and technology: Google Glass.

Source: SMH

Google Glass on the runway

“Who would have thought of that kind of partnership?” Tsunder marvels. Von Furstenberg famously featured Google’s augmented reality Glass project on the fashion runway last year. “We want to inspire things that have never been done before.”

PTTOW brings together an invite-only list of corporate bigwigs — you have to be at least a VP at a major international corporation or a C-level exec at a media company to attend — with artists, athletes, and other shapers of youth culture to come together, create community, inspire each other, and win.

The conference has inspired partnerships between notables like Elon Musk of Tesla and Virgin Atlantic. Skull Candy and Spotify started working together at PTTOW. And the U.S. state department partnered with QuikSilver to send cultural attachés — aka skateboarders — to Eastern Europe. In other words: wild and wacky and wonderful partnerships that, maybe, couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

Will.i.am will be a prominent guest at the upcoming PTTOW in May, and he’ll be talking about causes, culture, and media.

“We honor certain icons,” Tsunder says,”and his passion for science and math and technology is really quite awe-inspiring.”

Four years ago, the invite-only event was 25 people. Bob McKnight, the CEO of QuikSilver, was an early believer who attended at the first conference. Today, the event brings together hundreds of Davos-level people: a few dignitaries, some artists, and the high-level corporate executives for whom this is perhaps their only professional development event of the year.

It’s professional development because each can wow others with tales of where they win. Furstenberg learns from Red Bull how they get 10 million viral views on YouTube. Google learns from Furstenberg how fashion and life mingle. Virgin Atlantic sees what Elon Musk is doing in space, and Virgin Galactic is born. Each inspires the others.

“We want to inspire the best marketers in the world,” Tsunder told me. “That’s our biggest aspiration.”

Oh, and the Dalai Lama?

Like everything else — and everything that happens at PTTOW — it’s about relationships. And, critically, about not being afraid to ask.

I talked to Tsunder how he managed to get the Dalai Lama, a foreign head of state, to attend his conference focused on youth and marketing. It’s the first and only time the Dalai Lama has ever spoken a media and marketing group.

“Well, you become friends with his emissary for peace,” Tsunder answered. “I was introduced to Lama Tenzin and we were having lunch, and he said the Dalai Lama speaks to young people all the time. I said, ‘I’m sure it’s impossible, but would he be willing to speak to the leaders of companies whose audience and fans are young people, and inspire them to be more thoughtful about peace and harmony?’”

Lama Tenzin meditated on it, and the Dalai Lama meditated on it. And Tsunder got a phone call, saying that what he was trying to do was a great thing, and the Dalai Lama would like to support it.

Which is how you get the Dalai Lama to speak at your conference.

photo credit: Akbar Sim (NO TIME TO COMMENT) via photopin, kk+ via photopin cc

Walk into any public library and, of course, you see books, reference materials, newspapers, magazines, and all types of the printed word. We might also see comic books, manga, and less traditional “literature.” These days, we encounter film, television, music, internet-connected computers, and other digital media. But video games?

Libraries lend video games, and they have been for some time. Some folks might think video games have no place in public institutions. Some articles on the web assume that readers will cringe when they hear that this is happening.  Libraries and librarians, however, seem to overwhelmingly support the practice.

The American Library Association endorses video gaming, placing these in a similar class to board games. The association is clear about whether kids should  play video games in libraries: ”Video gaming at the library encourages young patrons to interact with diverse peers, share their expertise with others, including adults, and develop new strategies for gaming and learning.”

Video games are yet another way for kids — and adults — to learn and to interact socially. “Learning a new set of rules, learning new symbols, and reading the text that comes with some video games and RPGs is just as much of an educational effort as reading a book. It’s different, mind you, but still valid. One certainly doesn’t replace another,” said Emily Reeve, a librarian based in Denver.

“Gaming in libraries, whether it’s sitting at a computer playing a video game online or playing a board game with friends, is a sociable experience, especially for kids,” she said in an e-mail conversation with GamesBeat.

Libraries are public spaces

Modern libraries, she said, are becoming more about public space than just about books. The concept of what a library is continues to evolve, with in-library coffee shops, teen spaces, early literacy programs, and new media collections all a part of this conceptual idea of public space at the library. Video games are a logical extension of this, with parents interacting with their children to choose the right games for their children and then connecting with library staff to get help. “It’s definitely in the interest of libraries to meet the needs of the community and engage and create relationships with community members,” Reeve said.

“Libraries hit a turning point when they made the decision to start including popular media in their collections,” writes Brian Mayer at Library Gamer. “By doing so, they shifted their collection development practices to be more inclusive of what their patrons want, embracing the desires of the community.”

As with many new media, beginning efforts are often met with concern — or outright fear, leading some libraries to hold off on offering video games.

“Games deserve their place among the other significant cultural media of our time, on par with television and graphic novels,” said Dr. Guy Berthiaume, the CEO of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ). In a post on CultMontreal, he says that providing video games can help teens understand that the library is a place for them as well.

Reeve agrees and takes this a step further, saying that public libraries exist to serve the needs of their communities. “Just like providing Internet access allows patrons free access to more information, providing access to media allows patrons access to additional material to improve overall literacy skills,” she said. “It’s just another format, another way of engaging people whether it’s viewed as pure entertainment or not.”

Budgets, not copyright, the real issue

But what about copyright issues? Lending games to one patron at a time doesn’t seem to violate any end-user license agreements (EULA), says Reeve. “As I understand it, libraries can circulate video games like other media items under the assumption that the games are legally purchased and are used by one person at a time. Libraries, and librarians, are not responsible if items are illegally reproduced no more than an individual lending an item would be.”

Public exhibitions of multiplayer games, like the Guitar Hero (Activision) or Madden (Electronic Arts) series of games, however, may need special licensing or added agreements with publishers, according to an older article in the School Library Journal.

“A library looking to host an event like you’re describing for a licensed game would need to contact EA for a separate agreement,” said  John Reseberg, the senior director for EA Corporate Communications.  ”However, it is something of a nonissue – we look at each request individually, but an event of this type, as long as money is not changing hands, would typically be approved.”

Guitar Hero publisher Activision didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

Ultimately, providing video game lending is no different from collecting movies, board games, or other recreational items other than books. It could even bring in new patrons who might not otherwise visit a public library or apply for a library card. “Publishers have picked up on the trend of gaming and provide gaming guides and some have even developed fiction based on particular gaming universes,” said Reeve. “If libraries are willing to collect these items, people will check them out. Of course, simply getting people within the walls of the library can remind them of books or movies and other items or services they might be interested in.”

Whether your library has video games to check out may come down to its budget. It seems, then, that while most librarians and academics don’t have a problem with libraries lending video games as a general rule, the budgets for public libraries are still shrinking. Adding a comprehensive gaming collection to an already overstressed library budget could be a hard sell. “With public library budgets being unstable in recent years,” said Reeve, “it’s irresponsible to start developing a collection without secured and continued funding.” Collections must include current games, and they need to work on systems that patrons have in their homes; collections must have working copies, with the inevitable replacement costs well in hand.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Knight Foundation supports “transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities, and foster the arts.” In 2007, the foundation launched the Knight News Challenge to promote the next generation of media innovation. The challenge occurred three times in 2012, with the first two challenges themed around networks and data.

Winners receive a share of $5 million and support from the Knight Foundation’s extensive network of influential people and advisors. Today, it awarded eight mobile media ventures a total of $2.4 million.

“In 2013 the number of Internet-enabled mobile devices is expected to be greater than the number of computers for the first time,” said Michael Maness, VP for journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation.  “These eight Knight News Challenge projects, and the innovators behind them, are helping to stretch the ways people around the world are engaging with information and using it to shape their communities.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is one of the recipients, nabbing $600,000 to make it easier for people in developing counties to access its content. In addition to Wikipedia, the winners include:

• Witness: Helping newsrooms authenticate the deluge of photos and videos emerging from news events by creating an app that automatically stamps the content with identifying information, including the location where it was taken. The project is lead by the human rights organization Witness in partnership with The Guardian Project.

• Digital Democracy: Enabling residents of the Peruvian Amazon to document the effects of mining and oil drilling by creating a mobile tool kit they can use to collect and share data.

• RootIO: Piloting software that will connect basic mobile phones with a transmitter to turn them into micro community radio stations. The effort is being tested in Uganda.

• Abayima: Creating an app that turns a SIM card into a storage device for news and information. The app will be particularly useful in crisis situations, enabling journalists and others to safely transfer information when communication networks are compromised or disabled.

• Textizen: Expanding the ways governments can collect citizen input by enabling it through text. Piloted through Code for America, Textizen works by placing survey questions in physical places like parks and bus stops where residents will encounter them and can text in their opinion.

• TKOH: Creating a more natural tool for recording oral histories with an app that prompts people to tell stories when they see pre-selected photos or videos.

• Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation: Connecting small farmers in developing countries with advice and feedback via a platform through which they can ask questions and have them quickly answered by farmers in other communities. In the pilot, a Kenyan farmer received advice on frost control and tips on raising rabbits.

Over the course of the past six years, the Knight Foundation has put more than $32 million into funding 88 projects. In December, it partnered with San Francisco’s public media station KQED and the Public Radio Exchange to launch media accelerator program Matter Ventures.

In my final year at Florida State University, I was lucky enough to be able to conduct a bit of research on religious identity and violence in the U.S. I focused primarily on video games since they have and always will be a great passion of mine. The day I turned in my final research paper, something awful happened. At the beginning of our last class meeting, my professor informed us about the Sandy Hook tragedy. He told us that he hoped everything we learned in his class about religious violence would help us to consider the circumstances that led to this tragic incident. And the truth is, it did.

Following the events of December 14, 2012, many reporters were quick to point out that the gunman, Adam Lanza, was an avid video game player. Some would even refer to him as an “addict.”

Blaming video games for violence is nothing new; however, many scholars have recently begun applying serious research to the connections between real-life violence and violent media. Their work is what provided a framework for me to conduct my own study.

In his book, Violence and the Sacred, French philosopher and historian René Girard posits that violence is a form of sacrifice, a “social function” that “serves to protect the entire community from its own violence.” In his model, sacrifice quells internal communal conflicts, desires, and discord, restoring “harmony to the community” and “reinforcing the social fabric.” This sacrificial violence is not static, and, unless placated, “seeks and always finds a surrogate victim,” according to Girard. This seeking out has been occurred throughout American history time and again in the way of intolerance and violence toward Native Americans, Catholics, Mormons, and Muslims.

Girard later poses the question, “What will happen when we share the same desires?” He answers, “Two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash.” Regina M. Schwartz raises a similar concern in the introduction to her book The Curse of Cain when she asks, “What kind of God is this who chooses one sacrifice over the other?” Her answer points a finger directly at monotheism. Schwartz states, “This God who excludes some and prefers others, who casts some out, is a monotheistic God — monotheistic not only because he demands allegiance to himself alone but because he confers his favor on one alone.” Here, Schwartz is making a claim that monotheism’s legacy of violence is directly linked to the language of scarcity that is prevalent in its scripture. This scarcity is what leads to the construction of the “Other,” an act that — according to Schwartz — is not only the antecedent of violence but violence itself. Both Girard and Schwartz emphasize that the construction and subsequent sacrifice of the Other are necessary in identity formation. Their theories create a framework that can be used to examine religious intolerance and violence in the U.S. as perpetuated by popular culture and media.

Girardian themes can also be found in Rachel Wagner’s Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality. Wagner argues that in the same way “Girard sees Mass as the perfect example of substitutionary violence functioning as a salve for societal anxiety” in which “violence is not denied” but “diverted to another object, something it can sink its teeth into,” video games can also serve a similar function. “If Girard is right,” she writes, “virtual (mimetic) violence is substitutionary.” Here, Wagner is suggesting that violence in video games can be considered a kind of ritual where violence is redirected, and digital beings become the scapegoats. Although Wagner does question whether or not video games can “functionally do the same kind of symbolic work as the Christian Mass” in a Girardian context, she also points out that video games create a liminal space in which the actions of players are excusable because they don’t really hurt anyone. Games such as Second Life allow players to “blow up virtual churches,” “sit naked on the Koran,” and “paint swastikas on synagogues.” One player, Roger Junchke, calls himself a “Second Life terrorist” and says his actions within the game are just “his benign and petty way of expressing my dislike of Christian fundamentalists.” Although players who participate in this kind of behavior may consider it “benign,” their actions within the game are fueled by same construction of the Other that Regina Schwartz would refer to as a form of nonphysical violence in and of itself.

Godwired also takes a close look at the violence in the controversial video game Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a companion game to Tim Lahaye’s Left Behind series of novels. In the game, the player controls “tanks, helicopters, and infantry with the primary goal of converting the uncommitted (neutral units) to the Christian cause while killing non-Christians when necessary.” The game, like the series of novels it is based on, caused disputes and led one member of the Anti-Defamation League to state, “This theology portrays itself as the only path to salvation. And Jews, people of any other faith, or those of no faith who do not convert before it’s too late are destined to suffer horrible deaths.” Not only does this game echo Schwartz’ notion of scarcity, but it also creates the same “dualistic construct of reality in which every entity in the game is identified as with the forces of good or the forces of evil” that was seen in the war-themed games released in the wake of September 11, 2001.

However, this does not mean that video games and the Internet should be viewed as harmful tools. On the contrary, even a living Buddhist Lama can see the benefits of video games. Rachel Wagner explains how 24-year-old Karmapa Lama Trinley Dorje finds that “if I’m having some negative thoughts or feelings, video games are one way in which I can release that energy in the context of the illusion of the game. I feel better afterwards. The aggression that comes out in the video game satiates whatever desire I might have to express that feeling. To me, that is very skillful because when I do that I don’t have to go and hit anyone over the head.” For Lama Dorje, video games then become the scapegoat, and the violence, or “negative thought,” is slaked. Here, we can see that video games can further be viewed in a Girardian context by providing a liminal space for sacrificial violence.

World of Warcraft has the alliance and the horde. Final Fantasy XI Online has its national conquest. And even Dark Souls has its covenants. All of these create division among players as well as instill a sense of identity.

So where does that leave us? Are video games a tool that allow us a kind of “liminal stage” to perform violent acts? Are they substitutionary in that we can take out our anger on avatars rather than real people? Or do they inform group identity while condoning intolerance and violence to others? Is it neither? What do you think?

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For one, the Associated Press reached one billion views this year. That sounds impressive — and it is — but in a very web 2.0, social, and modern media way one single individual, Philip DeFranco, also reached a billion views. The AP getting huge exposure, that’s kind of normal, almost. One person with a YouTube audience as big as that 150-year-old organization with 243 news bureaus in 120 countries?

That’s impressive.

Another story that impacted a lot of us here at VentureBeat who live and work in New York was Hurricane Sandy, during which The Weather Channel live-streamed 70 hours of coverage. That led to the Weather Channel having just as many online viewers as traditional cable viewers — a historic event — and a 1000 percent traffic spike during the storm.

But it wasn’t just video from earth that captured our attention on YouTube — it was also video from space, as the Mars Descent Imager captured and transmitted Curiosity’s landing on Mars. 3.8 million people watched that. And videos by, about, and for either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney were viewed more than 2.7 billion times.

YouTube recapped the year in visual form. Here it is:

photo credit: Yutaka Tsutano via photopin cc

Matter Ventures launched an accelerator program today for entrepreneurs that are making society more informed, connected, and empowered. The program is run in conjunction with founding partners KQED, the public television and radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area, the journalism nonprofit the Knight Foundation, and the Public Radio Exchange, in an effort to revolutionize the media industry.

It is a “media accelerator,” but media is a multiheaded beast encompassing communication, art, news, advertising, social networking, and the technology that delivers all of this content to an audience. Rather than attempting to tame or define the beast, Matter Ventures is taking a “blank slate approach.” It will support startups that align with its core values while also leveraging existing technology and sustainable business models.

“Media has been called the connective tissue of society,” said CEO Corey Ford in an interview. “It is hard to define these days, and we are need-focused and solution-agnostic. We are interested in startups that take emerging behaviors of how people connect and consume media, and design products specifically for them. There is a wide possibility for what these ventures could be.”

Before spearheading Matter Ventures, Ford ran Runway, the “venture creation” program within Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Runway provided a supportive environment for entrepreneurs to take an idea from scratch, explore the possibilities, and build a successful company. Ford started out in journalism as a producer for PBS’s Frontline and then attended Stanford Business School where he became interested in the intersection between media, technology, and entrepreneurship.

“I realized that the world was changing dramatically and we weren’t changing with it,” he said. “Entrepreneurs have a big opportunity right now to define the future, and the next generation of meaningful media institutions. The best ideas are going to be the ones we couldn’t have predicted.”

Participating companies can offer any product within the media vertical, whether it be a participatory platform, content production engine, or business-to-business service. The most important consideration is whether the team will have a positive impact on the media industry and be responsive to the market. Ford said it is important for entrepreneurs to acknowledge the importance of mobile, as well as the widespread popularity of social-local platforms, crowd funding, and online communities.

Matter Ventures is backed by a $2.5 million fund, pooled together by KQED and the Knight Foundation, each investing $1.25 million. The fund will support four classes of five startups over the course of two years. Applications for the first class are due on Jan. 6, and entrants into the program will receive $50,000, workspace, and go through an intensive, four-month “design thinking and entrepreneurship bootcamp” consisting of workshops, mentorship sessions, and reviews.

Information sessions for interested applicants will be held at 6 p.m. on Dec. 13, Dec. 20, and Jan. 3 at Matter Ventures’ headquarters at 421 Bryant Street in San Francisco.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Today, Polyvore has launched its first ever iPhone app, with an Android and tablet offering on the way.

On the website and the new iOs app, taste-makers and budding fashionistas can mix and match outfit ideas, browse items by theme or clothing type (for instance, “yellow sweaters” or “winter hues”) and purchase items from mainstream brands like H&M or Tory Burch. The site doesn’t scrape the Internet for content — users are in control. They import over 2 million items per month.

The most prolific users are creating “sets” of up to 50 items, and sharing them with the site’s community. For these super users, there are meetup events all over the country (Jess Lee, Polyvore’s cofounder, told me that they frequently form fast friendships) and cool contests to win prizes like a trip to New York for Fashion’s Night Out.

“This is our opportunity to democratize fashion,” said Lee, a fashionista and former Google employee who joined Polyvore after playing around with the beta, and getting totally hooked.

The secret sauce is the back-end where algorithms can quickly determine the sets and individual products that are trending, and will push them to the top of the search rankings. Dedicated users will find that the experience is tailored to them — over time, the algorithm gets smarter about users’ taste.

On the new iPhone app, users can create and publish fashion-sets on the go, and search for specific items. Pasha Sadri said that in the long-term, they may even include image recognition — theoretically, a user could snap a photo of a stranger’s boots on the subway, and the site would scan its database to pull up the exact item or its closest match.

The company makes money through advertising and by taking a cut of the sale when a user purchases an item they discovered on the site. The average basket-size is high at $220. In future, they plan to explore ways to mine their backlog of user-generated data to offer advanced analytics, and highly-targeted advertising.

Polyvore is sticking with ladies’ apparel for now, but will cater to men and kids, and expand its database to include home-ware.

YouTube has become a massive news destination, YouTube chief executive Salar Kamangar said in his acceptance speech, with 7,000 hours of news-related footage uploaded every single day. Fully a third of searches on YouTube are news-related, and after the March earthquake in Japan this year, the top 20 YouTube videos of the disaster were watched almost 100 million times.

Appropriately or not, the award comes just a day before Israel published a video on YouTube showing the killing of Ahmed Jabari, a Hamas military leader, by missile.

That’s news at its most raw, and given that it was presented by one of the participants in the event not by a theoretically neutral party, it might showcase better than anything else the changing face of news in a connected digital world.

YouTube is also moving into live-streaming more than ever before, live-streaming the recent U.S. elections, for example, to 24 million people in 215 countries around the globe.

Here’s Kamangar’s acceptance speech.

Note to YouTube PR: Drop the silly cat and dog puppets next time.

photo credit: Viktor Hertz via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

At 12 years old, Nick D’Aloisio began his career as a mobile programmer when he downloaded the Apple Developer Kit. By 15, one of his hacks, an app known as “Trimit,” caught the eye of an investor in Asia offering to fund “the company’s” next project.

What company? D’Aloisio, a school boy from South London, admitted to this venture capitalist that it was merely an after-school creation.

A whizz at the programming language C, D’Aloisio had created the app to test his skills in machine-learning technology, a branch of artificial intelligence that yields trends and patterns in a mass of data, and makes smarter predictions over time.

Summly’s founder demoes the app in San Francisco

Less than a year later, the “Internet boy wonder,” as he was dubbed by the European tech media after an appearance at Le Web’s conference, had developed a keen interest in web summarization technology. It’s a simple enough problem, but the execution is tricky. How do we take a meaty piece of content and whittle it down to its bare bones?

Today, D’Aloisio is ready to take his iPhone app public. Summly, available to download for free, reduces full-blown articles into snippets, making it easier to skim the news on a mobile device.

From ESPN to VentureBeat, the app includes almost all of the major news outlets. You lightly tap the screen to browse news, and if a summarized story piques your interest, you can share it with your friends via SMS, email, Twitter, or Facebook, or click a link the bottom of the screen to access the original, full-length story.

The founder told me he hit on the idea for the novel way to scan the news while studying for his History “GCSE” (an exam that all British school kids sit before their junior year). He quickly became frustrated by thousands of web search results that were slow to load and sometimes impossible to access on mobile.

“There has to be a way to summarize this information into bite-size,” he said. Trimit, the app he developed, summarized content into 140, 500 or 1,000 character summaries. With a little finessing, he moved on to Summly, which can automatically break down full pages of text into bullet-points. 

Most summarization experts have yet to apply their knowledge to a mainstream market. In a highly strategic move, D’Aloisio is applying the technology to the news, since, as he said, “No one had figured out how to perfect the news-reading experience on mobile.” In many cases, it’s relatively simple: Most journalists still write in the Associated Press (AP) style, so the first paragraph contains the crux of the news.

It’s not nearly as straight-forward as cropping the first few sentences, however. In the background, the technology works by scraping content, pulling out the most important bits, categorizing each story by topic, and displaying the news in a highly visual way. The summarized stories fit comfortably on your screen (tailored to both the iPhone 4 and 5).

At a coffee shop in San Francisco, D’Aloisio led me through a demo of the app: It’s a highly intuitive with the algorithm working to recommend news stories to you based on your pre-existing set of interests. As you shift location (from the UK to the U.S., for instance), the stories will change as well.

In person, D’Aloisio is wise beyond his years. It’s hard to believe this media-savvy, sharp-talking business executive is a teenager taking a leave of absence from school. He is both a high-school student and an employer. No longer a solo coder, he now has a team of seven people working for him. In addition, half a dozen researchers at SRI, the non-profit technology research institute based in Silicon Valley, are working with D’Aloisio to perfect the algorithm.

Some major technical hurdles  remain: Magazine-style features are tougher to summarize, and are often thrown out by the algorithm. The team is currently working on auto-translation (notoriously problematic and obvious to anyone who has ever used Google Translate, BabelFish and the like), and they have plans to integrate French and Spanish into the app. If they get it right, it could be a neat language-learning tool.

The team will also butt heads with Pulse, Flipboard, and a host of other beautifully-designed news-reading apps, especially since it is in the process of designing an interface for tablet devices. To succeed, it will need to win over voracious news consumers who routinely use web-based aggregators like Google Reader. The competition for these users is heating up: Circa is experimenting with ways to re-frame the news on mobile, and NewsBlur, a Y Combinator alum, recently launched its iPad app.

Summly is backed by several investors, including Horizons Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Betaworks, Brian Chesky, Hosain Rahman, Joanna Shields, Josh Kushner, Mark Pincus, Matt Mullenweg, Stephen Fry, Troy Carter, Yoko Ono and many more.

Top image: Wired UK

It all began at Stanford University when grad students (Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta) set their sights on improving the news-reading experience.

After interviewing hundreds of people about their digital media consumption, Kothari and Gupta built a quick and dirty iPhone app, launched it in a few months, and succeeded in catching the attention of investors and the press. With a small infusion of funds, the founders rented space in a converted garage in Silicon Valley.

They recently relocated to a fancy office in San Francisco, but have remained loyal to Eric Ries’ “lean startup” ethos: rapid product cycles, emphasis on customer feedback, and scientific experimentation.

As a result, they have vast stores of data about how people read the news. Today, the company announced that users have read four billion stories on one of the mobile or tablet apps since the 2010 launch.

With readers consuming an average of ten million stories a day, the founders see an opportunity to help publishers and derive relevant insights from the data. I caught up with Kothari for a chat about the host of new features, the company’s stellar growth, and where Pulse fits into the rapidly-evolving digital media landscape.

VentureBeat: Four billion stories! That’s insane growth in just two years. 
Akshay Kothari: It’s a bit surreal. I still remember the first day we launched the app, when we were still in school (graduate students at Stanford). 123 people bought the app on the first day, and around 1,000 stories were read. Today, we see 40,000 new users join the service, and 10 million stories read every single day, and that’s growing really fast.

VentureBeat: Readers are voraciously consuming news — and yet publishers are still in trouble. Why the disconnect?
Kothari: Well, not all publishers are “in trouble”.  Many established publishers that have been willing to experiment with new distribution and monetization models have been successful. Publishers who are struggling are those that don’t see the writing on the wall with declining print circulation and cheap web banner CPM rates. A lot of publishers haven’t figured out how to adapt to a digital, increasingly mobile world.

VentureBeat: Tell me a little bit about Pulse Insights, launching today. Where did the idea come from?
Kothari: Over the last two and a half years, we have witnessed a pretty interesting shift in how people consume news. Gone are the days when we would only read the morning newspaper or watch the evening news. Today, people check news every few hours. They are always connected. In the last year, wes started to convert this data into information. Every time we launch a new feature, we can look at data to figure out how we did. Every time a new publisher joins us, they get a dashboard of all their activity. Slowly, but steadily, we learned more and more about our users. With Pulse insights, we are sharing this with the world, hoping that this project will benefit the entire ecosystem of news publishing.

VentureBeat: Does Pulse want to help publishers and digital media sites connect with readers? Or vice versa? 
Kothari: Pulse is user-centric at its core – we’re striving to elevate media consumption to foster informed discussions in the world.  Helping users find relevant content and then facilitating their engagement with this content is our top priority.

VentureBeat: Will Pulse Insights be available for free? Do you plan to make money from it in the future? 
Kothari: Yes, Pulse Insights is free and will always be free. We use data to guide pretty most of our product and content development. We think that democratizing access to this same data will help others (publishers, start-ups, advertisers) take advantage of shifts in consumption behavior and emerging patterns. We’re seeing great monetization traction with our brand content solutions for advertisers and our premium subscriptions offering – we will remain focused on these efforts to drive revenue for Pulse.

VentureBeat: With Pulse Insights, are you guys riding the ‘big data” trend?
Kothari: We’re big believers in data. The broader emancipation of data that’s happening across industries is super exciting and we’re excited to be a small part of it.

VentureBeat: How can startups like Pulse help traditional publishers stay relevant?
Kothari: We position ourselves as a resourceful technology and design partner for publishers.  We help them understand how their content is being consumed and who is consuming it.  We’re also a powerful distribution driver for publishers.  Last but certainly not least, both our brand content solutions and our premium subscription product is driving real revenue for publishers today.

VentureBeat: Your founding story is classic….
Kothari: Pulse was started off as a class project in the Launchpad class in the d.school (Stanford’s famous design school). The only requirement of the class was to launch your product publicly. No business plan, no pitches, no proposals – just focus on the product and launch it! We pushed Pulse out in 5 weeks. The first version of the app was really barebones – there was no backend, there was no catalog (of thousands of publishers) – Pulse only allowed you to add 10 tech websites. But, we got a ton of feedback – and we made daily tweaks to the product.

The turning point was the WWDC conference when Steve Jobs highlighted it as the first of a few iPad apps he liked. That literally changed us from a class project to a company.

As mentioned above, our relationship with publishers is quite strong – except for the NYTimes misfire very early on, there hasn’t been a single publisher who has backed off. (At 22 and 23 years old, the founders found themselves at the center of a legal dispute with the New York Times. Read more on the legal snafu here.) Most publishers are excited to integrate even more deeply with us.

We’ve grown from working in a cafe to a garage to a shared office to a stunning headquarters in the financial district of SF. To be able to work on all aspects of product, culture, hiring, marketing and revenues along the way – has been a dream run. I’m looking forward to taking Pulse to even bigger heights!

Akshay Kothari Photo: David Paul Morris, Bloomberg / SF

Content marketing company Compendium ran a study with more than 200 companies, checking on how social media marketers can get optimum engagement in business-to-business and business-to-consumer conversations. The study looked at factors such as word count, punctuation, time of posting, and day of the week of posting to determine success factors.

It turns out that who you’re marketing to makes a massive difference.

For instance, if you’re talking to consumers, Monday and Wednesday are best on Twitter, and LinkedIn is better on Monday. But if your company is marketing to other businesses, post to LinkedIn on Sunday, and to Twitter on Wednesday. And while hashtags are great for consumer-focused posts, they really don’t work at all for B2B marketers.

The one great commonality?

Question marks significantly reduce clickthrough on posts aimed at both consumers and business clients. Posts with question marks get between 25 and 52 percent fewer clicks than other posts.

Here’s the full infographic:

photo credit: paurian via photopin cc

RAMP is hungry and has filled its belly with $15 million in new funding.

The company helps online publishers get the most out of their content, just like tossing a little olive oil on tomatoes amplifies your absorption of lycopene. RAMP is the olive oil to content’s tomato.

Its patented MediaCloud platform ingests audio, video, images and text and digests it with natural language processing technology. The result? Search engine optimization, enhanced advertising capabilities, and greater returns. And reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, if you continue with the tomato-olive oil analogy.

RAMP works with major media customers like CNBC, FOX, Comcast, Thomson Reuters, the Hearst Corporation, and PBS. With its latest meal, the company will focus on enhancing its solutions for digital video.

This is its third round of institutional financing, bringing its total capital raised to $40 million. StarVest Partners, Hearst Interactive Media, and EDBI were added to the investor roster, with existing venture firms Fairhaven Capital, Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, and Comcast Ventures throwing in again.

Read the press release.

Twitter is stepping up its ties with the entertainment industry by eying some high-profile media executives for spots on its board of directors, reports AllThingsD.

Over the last year, Twitter has realized its usefulness to media properties — both as a tool to help them interact more with their audiences and as a new metric for determining audience reaction — sort of like a more social version of traditional Nielsen television ratings. The company is even trying to alter which metrics people focus on by de-emphasizing a user’s follow count in favor of how often an individual’s tweet is viewed. Not only that, but Twitter founder Biz Stone is working with director Ron Howard on a new movie that’s inspired by tweets.

One of the people Twitter is allegedly targeting for its board is Hollywood executive Peter Chernin, who was previously a top News Corp. exec. Chernin would be a good choice because he has experience working for a major media company, has produced recent successes in both film and television, and as AllThingsD notes, was essential to getting Hulu up and running. He would also be a good candidate to replace Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, who left Twitter’s board of directors back in May.

It’s nice to see that Twitter is pursuing a strategy that’s very different from what Facebook is doing, focusing on the long-form, produced media partnerships rather than simply enhancing its platform to attract other social media partners. Whether this move will prove financially successful for Twitter is another story altogether, but stacking its board of directors with media execs improves the odds that it will be.

Film image via Allies Interactive Services Pvt. Ltd. /Shutterstock

The Bay Area-based startup has a long road ahead if it plans to topple Google’s popular web-based news aggregator, and with this iPad release, to compete with Pulse, Flipboard and the like. But the timing may be just right.

Founder and chief executive, Samuel Clay, who recently graduated from accelerator program, Y Combinator, saw a golden opportunity when Google announced a somewhat flawed strategy to remove all the “social” features from Google Reader, including friending, following and shared link blogs, to support the expansion of Google+.

Clay figured people still wanted those social features, and he had a way to provide them.

Newsblur’s founder, Samuel Clay

“You can subscribe to friends and people you admire on NewsBlur,” said Clay. “It’s all about sharing the news you read.”

On NewsBlur’s iPhone and iPad apps, you’re prompted to import your feed from Google Reader and then to subscribe to your extended friend network on Twitter and Facebook. For Clay, these social features are the basis of how we consume the news.

The service also lets you curate good reads for your “blurblog,” another strong social component. Friends can peruse your favorite stories on your blurblog and gauge your reactions to hot stories.

The core features of the new iPad app will also be available on the iPhone app. They include:

• Easy browsing of your favorite news sites, folders, and friend’s blurblogs
• Near-instant downloading of news stories
• Visible comments on stories via your blurblog
• Integration with Google Reader
• Blurblogs are now incorporated in your feed list

The web-based service and apps would benefit from a designer, but this is impressive considering that it’s been a one or two-man operation from the outset (Clay had a friend come on board this summer to assist with the development of the iPad app).

Clay told me he developed the first iteration of the product back in 2009 during the morning and evening train ride from Brooklyn to New York. During the 90-minute commute, he hacked a feed reader for his personal consumption. ”I was working in the news space and was dissatisfied,” he told me. “Like any good hacker, I built my own.”

After quitting his day job to work on the product full-time, he was selected as a solo founder for Y Combinator — a rare feat. But no man is an island — Clay plans to raise a first round of funding in the coming months, which he’ll use to build a core team of developers and designers.

NewsBlur is available as a freemium product. Free users can read up to 64 feeds. Paying subscribers can add an unlimited number of feeds. For developers, NewsBlur offers an API and the source code is also available on Github.

The first users of Minit, an iPhone app to record and screen short videos, may have found themselves revealing intimate life stories to Noa Tishby, a model, producer, actress, and in a recent development, a tech entrepreneur.

“Minit is a platform for personal stories,” Tishby explained. “It is in a way like having your own reality show.” The Israeli starlet recently joined the Tel Aviv-based startup to head up business development.

Got a minute and a story to share? The recently launched app is available for free on the App Store. Sign up, and you’ll be led through a wizard to help you get started. The app is integrated with Facebook and Twitter to help users quickly discover which friends are registered. (Unless you happen to be Israeli, you’ll probably be the first in your extended network.)

Like Twitter, you can follow users whether you know them or not — unsurprisingly, Tishby has the most followers.

Once you fill out a profile, a video stream will appear with 60-second clips. Minit users are chatting about relationships, style, and a variety of light-hearted topics — if you’re incentivized to do so, you can issue a video comment in response. Videos can be intimately shared between friends, or publicly broadcast to the world.

The team describes Minit as “100% video. No filters. No text. No photos. No bull.” Tishby prefers the snappy term, “voicemail for video”, and told me that she routinely uses the app to send messages to friends while boarding international flights.

It sounds promising, but the user interface is still a bit raw. I’m told its doable (it takes a long thumbnail tap) but I couldn’t find an easy way to delete clips once they’re posted. I had a few technical issues with the sound quality, and the videos are slow to load. To be fair, the app is still in the nascent stages of development.

The company may have landed a supermodel, but it faces strong competition from headline-grabbing social video startups, like Airtime and Socialcam. However, with all the recent press about celebrity investors, this may be one of the few cases where one has come on board as a cofounder.

When the three Israeli developers behind Minit approached her, Tishby told me she was intrigued by the nexus between entertainment and technology. “I have been approached by tech companies in the U.S. and Israel that wanted me to partner with them,” said Tishby, adding that she was “floored” by the concept for Minit.

The app is self-funded, but Tishby told me they are in the process of reaching out to potential investors to secure a first round.

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While it only invests in films with budgets of under $5 million, Chenal Media took $7 million to develop, coproduce, and distribute them.

The company will use this second round of investment to shift its focus from all media to motion pictures. Chenal Media finances feature projects in the horror, thriller, science fiction, and action genres. It backs completed screenplays with at least one director attachment, completed films that need assistance with distribution, or films seeking a boost to be brought to completion.

Chenal Media is the LA-based media division of the German company Chenal Brands. It expanded into film entertainment in 2011 and puts in up to half of a film’s total cost. After seeing strong traction, the company recently began developing its own content as well.

This funding came from iHaniel and private investors.

Amazon and NBC have been getting down to business, and the fruits of their labors are more instant video offerings for Amazon Prime customers.

In case you’ve still got cable or something (hah! you oldster), Amazon Prime’s Instant Video service is the company’s Hulu/Netflix competitor. It serves slews of movies and TV shows to paying customers, who also get e-book and free shipping perks along with discounts on many products.

As of today, NBC shows such as like Parks and Recreation, Parenthood, Friday Night Lights, Heroes, and Battlestar Galactica become part of the Prime Instant Video lineup.

“We continue to invest heavily in our content selection for Prime members and have now reached over 22,000 movies and TV episodes available instantly with unlimited streaming,” said Amazon digital video content acquisition director Brad Beale in a statement on the news.

“We are excited to be working with NBCUniversal to add their award-winning lineup of TV shows such as Parks and Recreation and Friday Night Lights to Prime Instant Video.”

Amazon’s total Instant Video library includes 120,000 titles available for rental or purchase. Prime members, who pay a flat $80 annual fee for Prime membership, are able to view more than 22,000 movies and TV episodes from the overall Instant Video library at no additional charge.

Amazon has been doing hella deals to bring more videos to Prime in particular. Back in February, the company signed on with MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, and a few others to get their popular shows onto the online video service. Discovery Channel and Animal Planet got on board the following month, with MGM and Warner Bros. following suit in June and July, respectively.

And earlier this month, Amazon launched a new iPad app for Instant Video gratification that media correspondent Tom Cheredar said would “eat [Netflix's] lunch.”

The online music-service MOG has sold its ad network to huge media holding company Townsend Media for an undisclosed amount.

The music service itself was bought by Beats Electronics just last month. The amount of the sale remains unclear, with initial rumors pegging the deal at $14 million and later rumors giving the sale a much higher price.

This last asset from the startup was called the MOG Music Network, a music-focused online advertising platform. It will now take the name of its new parent company, Townsquare Media.

The ad network itself sees more than 62 million unique visitors from the U.S. each month; around the world, that figure rises to 170 million monthly unique visitors. The companies claim these stats make the property the largest music-focused ad network on the web.

The acquisition was a relatively bloodless, pink slip-free affair. MOG Music Network employees around the U.S. (in offices located in Santa Monica, Calif.; Chicago, Ill.; Berkeley, Calif.; and New York) will now be working for Townsquare Media.

In addition to holding a handful of digital music and entertainment properties, the Townsquare group operates 244 radio stations in 51 small to mid-sized markets and more than 300 live events.

What this acquisition means for current MOG users is — well, nothing. “MOG is here to stay,” we read on the service’s site. “Enjoy the ride, weblings, and stay tuned.”

MOG was founded in 2005 and raised a total of $24.9 million in five rounds of institutional funding as well as a couple small angel rounds in 2007. MOG HQ is in Berkeley, and MOG also has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock

New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been attempting to recruit Twitter VP Katie Jacobs Stanton to boost the company’s media products, AllThingsD reports.

Mayer is reportedly pushing Yahoo to focus more on its products and users, a dramatic shift that could help revive the company. She’s even removed Yahoo’s stock ticker from its internal company website to get employees thinking more about products and less about the company’s finances.

Stanton seems an ideal choice to help revive Yahoo because she has worked for Yahoo, Google, and now Twitter. At Yahoo, she helped launch Yahoo Finance, and at Google — working under Mayer — she helped launch Google Finance. Stanton then had a brief stint working for the Obama Administration on citizen participation. Now she’s shaping Twitter’s international experience. She knows popular products that people rely on and ideally could help oversee more big launches.

If Mayer successfully peels off Stanton from Twitter, she’d need to offer her a big role. Since Stanton is a VP, ideally she’d become a high-powered Yahoo VP with some major responsibilities. Since former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, who was previously in charge of all media efforts, has left, there is a vacancy there. Stanton could also be put in charge of revamping Yahoo’s popular but outdated home page.

Check out a video of Stanton speaking below at the Re:publica 2012 conference in May:

Stanton photo: republica2010/YouTube

What does their awesomeness consist of? Creating original video content for teens and tweens. It is like regular TV, but on the Internet. Which makes it awesomer.

The YouTube channel broadcasts comedy, fashion, sports, music, and reality programming. It’s geared toward “breakers,” otherwise known as adolescents looking to break out of the mainstream media bubble.

“Our core fan base are teens and tweens who are not only consuming pop culture but influencing future trends,” said producer/director Brian Robbins.

Currently, the listings include a sketch comedy series that mocks pop culture, a daily talk show for teen girls (think The Viewbut with more pink), a documentary style series featuring popular musicians, and a sports highlight show. Interactivity is highly encouraged and engaged viewers may find themselves on the channel.

In the pipeline is the network’s first scripted drama series. Chances are this drama will be jam-packed with tear-jerking goodness, considering the producer and director heading this whole endeavor is Brian Robbins, the creator of Smallville and One Tree Hill.

Since launching less than two months ago, over 75,000 subscribers have viewed 10 million videos. That is a lot of time spent not doing homework.

Hedging an investment on teen media consumption is usually a safe bet. But according to a study called “Why the Internet Won’t Kill TV” by Sanford C. Bernstein & Co, teens only watch there minutes of video a day on a computer or cellphone, as compared to four hours in front of actual televisions. Apparently, the old fashioned boob tube is still the preferred method of viewing entertainment of today’s youngsters.

The investors obviously believe this endeavor will see returns. This round of funding was led by MK Capital, a firm with a strong portfolio of digital media companies. Greycroft Venture Partners and New World Ventures, as well as a slew of media and technology executives also participated.

Will teens change their behavior and begin viewing more video content (and advertising) online? Only time will tell. Until then, AwesomenessTV will use the money to expand the network’s offering and hope to grab the attention of teenagers everywhere, which as all parents know, is no easy feat.

AwesomenessTV is based in Los Angeles. It faces competition from other YouTube channels like Teen.com and mainstream media programming as well as streaming sites likes Hulu and Netflix.

Big deal, the social network is featuring some of the cutest and warmest and heart-tuggingest status updates. Pink puppies and other people’s achingly poignant memories?

I have enough, thanks.

And it’s not even new. Mark Zuckerberg announced basically the same thing way back in July 2010.

But today I think I completely missed the point. And maybe most of us haven’t realized the true power and full potential of Facebook Stories. Frankly, it’s possible that Facebook itself doesn’t know what kind of a tiger it has created.

This morning, in the fresh light of a new dawn, I think it’s nothing less than the future of news.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook Stories: imagine many, many more dots. At much higher resolution

OK, maybe more People than Time. But still. Work with me.

Today, Facebook has just picked a few stories to highlight. Not at random, but just a few — seven to be exact. But, in true you-are-the-product modern social network style, Facebook is asking you to Add Your Story. And get a chance to Be Famous.

Hurry up.

The first 10 minutes of this social experience will make some people famous. But anything after that … you’ll have to settle for world-famous in your home town.

Because this is a perfect platform for local social news.

Imagine the best stories, from everyone not just in your limited social circle, but everyone in your community. The high school football team. The concerts at the state fair. The new road city council is pushing through the former playground.

Let’s define community widely, of course. It is your local regional physical space, yes. But, as Facebook and Flipboard and Twitter have already taught us, it’s our interest community as much if not more.

So it’s also any political or technology or global news, if it’s in your interest category. But that’s not the focus, because Facebook is ultimately about people, and Facebook Stories is about how they use … well … Facebook … to share.

And share, and share, and share we will.

There’s a reason that Facebook has pushed hard, year after year, to decrease privacy. When Mark Zuckerberg says social by default, he means public by default. And when your status updates are set to public, Facebook will be able to someday take them and populate them into a billion different Facebook Stories. Seven billion in fact: a personalized slice of social local news for every one of us.

The transformation from social utility to global publisher will be complete.

Book deal to follow … or book deals, one for every geographical social political sexual religious ethnic age interest slice of humanity.

Amazing, wonderful, and scary. It’s the future.

Image credit: Brian A. Jackson/ShutterStock

Yahoo has just launched the newest version of IntoNow, its TV companion app, and it’s bringing a boatload of new features to tablet and smartphone devices.

IntoNow is the media-centric company’s television sidekick “experience.” It brings avid TV fans a comprehensive offering of news headlines, statistics, and even social media updates from popular actors. IntoNow 3.0 is specifically tailored for iOS devices (the old IntoNow is also available in the Google Play store; we anticipate an Android-friendly version of IntoNow 3.0 will be available shortly).

The app update aims to give fans more and better ways to engage with and around television shows. The TV portion of the app will continue to deliver relevant stats, tweets, and trivia in real time. Music Sync is an IntoNow feature that can automatically identify a song playing in a show and take you to iTunes for instant gratification, should you choose to own said tune.

One hilarious new feature is mashing up TV moments with meme-making. Called CapIt, it allows viewers to screen-capture and caption anything they see on their TV. Angelina Jolie’s gonna love that.

Another new feature is group chat, which is what it sounds like. You can instantly set up private conversations with friends, start a chat around a specific show, or set up a recurring chat event to coincide with a show’s air time. It’s like a book club, but without all that annoying reading.

“iOS devices are pervasive in our living rooms, and second screen behavior is now commonplace. IntoNow wanted to up the ante and give people a whole new experience,” said Yahoo product VP Adam Cahan in a release on the update.

“We’re the first to offer some major technological innovations – like the ability to capture and share moments that happened seconds ago on TV or automatically identify songs playing in the background – all of which gives people watching TV with IntoNow 3.0 a unique, interactive experience.”

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the new features:

As a footnote, do let’s refrain from placing any praise or blame for this product on Marissa Mayer, the company’s new CEO. Girl’s only been there two weeks.

Top image courtesy of Goodluz, Shutterstock

In fact, the top five companies doubled the revenue growth of the average company in the index. For the 500 companies in the index, the average revenue growth since 2010 was 20.4 percent. But the top five companies averaged a blistering 45 percent revenue growth.

And companies that increased their Echo Rank most over just the past two months saw year-over-year revenue growth of almost 30 percent.

“Our rankings show that the companies investing in social and particularly social commerce are seeing the largest gains in revenues,” says Echo System chief executive Lance Neuhauser.

According to the Echo Rank index, the top five companies turning social into sales are:

1. FansEdge (sports fan branded products)
2. Barney’s New York (designer clothing)
3. Turn5 (runs AmericanMuscle.com, a car parts site)
4. GameStop (world’s largest gamer store)
5. Fossil (watches, handbags, fashion accessories)

Echo Rank tracks 500 e-commerce companies across various social indicators such as user engagement, social integration, and site performance. Those include factors as diverse as follower/fan count, likes and retweeets, integration of social into a company’s site and services, and how effective a website is at converting shoppers into buyers.

Source: The Echo System

A sample ranking for Barney’s New York

It appears that tight social integration can even trump site conversion performance, since Turn5, coming in at number three, has a site performance score of only seven. But its social score, which is a measure of how well it engages fans online, is a perfect 100.

Bass Pro fishing and sporting good retailer, 1-800-Flowers, and lingerie legend Frederick’s of Hollywood round out the top ten.

Notable fails in the top 500 include Aeropostale at #491, NASCAR.com at 428, and Best Buy at #215.

And the full top 10:

Image credit: Allies Interactive Services Pvt. Ltd./ShutterStock

VEVO just provided its answer by giving 50 million music lovers in the U.S. and Canada access to the videos they love anywhere, anytime, on any device. That means iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry Playbook (!), and now…the mobile web.

Native apps are designed for a specific mobile platform, such as iOS or Android, and are distributed via app store downloads. While they can be richer, more customized experiences, mobile-friendly websites or web apps are automatically available to anyone on any device with a modern web browser…without a download.

VEVO’s new announcement means you can have this desktop experience:

On your iPad or any other mobile device with a modern browser:

…all without downloading an app.

VEVO has more than 50,000 music videos in high definition and is seeing 45 billion views a year on a global basis. The service is a sort of Pandora for music videos: Users sign up, VEVO scans both their music libraries and Facebook likes for music they love, and then VEVO creates a playlist of their favorite artists with maybe a few new recommendations thrown in.

Adding the mobile web allows VEVO to be platform-agnostic, letting its millions of users watch music videos however they want.

Another major benefit? Users who click (or tap) on Twitter or Facebook links to VEVO videos have a seamless experience, seeing the video in a browser, instead of being forced to enter (or even download) an application.

VEVO serves videos in over 200 countries via a partnership with YouTube, and over 200 million people use VEVO to watch music videos. However, it’s not clear whether this new announcement means that video will be available on vevo.com for users outside of the U.S. and Canada. VEVO has typically distributed internationally via YouTube. (VentureBeat has inquired, and we’ll update this post as we learn more.)

VEVO is a partnership between Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Abu Dhabi Media Company and has offices in New York, L.A., Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco.

Image credit: Regien Paassen/ShutterStock