July 9-10, 2013
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Was Apple the grand ring leader in a nefarious e-book price-fixing scheme with top publishers? We’re about to find out.

Monday marks the first day of the three-week long in the Southern New York District Court, in which the Justice Department aims to argue that Apple conspired with publishers to raise the prices of e-books and ultimately kill Amazon’s stranglehold on the market. The case, United States v. Apple, was originally filed in April 2012 — and, not surprisingly, there’s been plenty of drama leading up to the trial.

Ahead of the iPad’s debut in 2010, Apple allegedly worked together with five publishers — Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins — to adopt an agency model for e-books, wherein the publishers would be able to set their own prices. That’s in stark contrast to the wholesale model used by Amazon up until that point, which allowed it to control e-book pricing.

Before Apple entered the market, Amazon priced most new Kindle e-books at  $9.99. With Apple’s plan, publishers were able to price their books at $12.99 or $14.99. As publishers moved towards the new model, Amazon ended up delisting some publisher’s titles in retribution. Eventually though, it had to play ball and allow the higher prices.

The coordinated efforts of the five publishers and Apple seems to hint that something is afoot. The publishers were originally listed as defendants in the case, but they’ve all ended up settling with the U.S. government for a total of $164 million.

So now Apple is going to trial alone — and it’s outlook doesn’t look so good. The trial’s judge, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, seems to have made up her mind already about Apple’s guilt: “I believe that the government will be able to show at trial direct evidence that Apple knowingly participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to raise prices of e-books, and that the circumstantial evidence in this case, including the terms of the agreements, will confirm that,” she told Reuters a few weeks ago.

It also seems like the feds are out for blood. The government labeled Apple the “ringmaster” of the price-fixing scheme in documents filed last month, and it’s gearing up to present a significant amount of evidence to make its case. In particular, an e-mail from Steve Jobs to News Corp’s James Murdoch (which also owns HarperCollins) seems pretty damning: “Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99.”

If found guilty, Apple would be ordered to avoid similar behavior in the future. And while the company won’t face any damages from the federal government, it may end up having to cough up cash in separate trials by several states.

Opening remarks for the U.S. v. Apple trial begin at 9:30 a.m. Eastern on Monday. Check back for updates.

Photo: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
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Apple and U.S. book publishers conspired to limit e-book competition and break Amazon’s hold on the digital book market, the U.S. Department of Justice says.

The case, which was filed in April 2012, is finally coming to trial in June. And in new documents that the government filed, the attorney general paints Apple as the ringmaster. All of the other original codefendants, including Harper Collins, the Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster, have already settled with the government, leaving Apple as the sole defendant.

As the saying goes, them’s fightin’ words. And Apple is fighting back.

“Apple has not ‘conspired’ with anyone, was not aware of any alleged ‘conspiracy’ by others, and never fixed prices,” the company stated in a reply to the suit last year.

The trial is set to begin on June 3.

Source: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

Apple CEO Tim Cook and iBooks

The DOJ is pointing to an email from Steve Jobs, in which he told Rupert Murdoch of News Corp to “throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99” as evidence to the contrary.

But Apple says that it was simply establishing the currently accepted agency model of pricing, in which publishers set the price and e-book stores simply sell at that price. That contrasts with the wholesale method of publishing, in which retailers buy books from publishers at whatever price they can negotiate and then sell the books to consumers at whatever price they wish. That is, of course, the model Amazon prefers.

Legal experts such as antitrust author and University of Hartford professor emeritus Dominick Armentano have said that Apple is likely to prevail, since the seller in an agency model market does not actual set any prices. In other words, if there was price-fixing in the agency model, it would have to be undertaken by the publishers themselves.

The bigger question here for Apple and its fans is how Apple used its power in mobile apps to strong-arm publishers such as Random House into agreeing with the deal. According to the DOJ filing, Apple blocked approval of an e-book app from Random House in 2010 until the publisher signed the agency deal.

That’s clearly dirty pool, and using power in what was then an almost all-powerful Apple smartphone ecosystem to influence — or compel — partner behavior in the ebook market.

Image credit (Tim Cook): Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
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In what’s surely a win for lovers of long-form journalism (or needlessly long, rant-filled blog posts), Amazon has just rolled out a new “Send to Kindle” button for online publications to embed into their websites.

Previously, to gain this kind of functionality you needed to install a browser plug-in to send articles or links to your Kindle device, which was a bit clunky at times but got the job done. Now all you need to do is click the “send to” button on the website to transfer over those articles — both to your Kindle devices or any of the Kindle Apps. Clicking the “Kindle” button on a website will prompt you to sign in to your Amazon account and then ask you to determine which devices you want to read the article on. (As shown in the screenshot, I can choose between sending it to my iPad or Nexus 7.  Kindle Fires and Kindle Readers should also pop up in the list of options for those that own them.)

The button itself was built specifically for websites and WordPress blogs, and a handful of sites are already using it, including The Washington Post, BoingBoing, and Time. Amazon is allowing  publishers some degree of customization over how the button looks, probably so that it fits with the overall design.

While this move is wonderful for readers, I have to wonder what the long-term implications will be for allowing people to strip out all the advertising from the website in order to rip the content onto the device of their choice. Of course, there are already a ton of other “reader” features that are automatically built into browsers, devices, and applications, so this may be a moot point. (There’s also something good to be said for publications that make it easier for their audience to interact with products/content.)

Do you plan on using the “Send to Kindle” button more often? Let us know in the comment section below.

July 9-10, 2013
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Pressly, a service for turning your big, dumb website into a pretty, shiny HTML5 mobile experience, has just raised $1.5 million in funding.

The funding comes from iNovia Capital and OMERS Ventures. This is the startup’s first round.

Companies pay between $200 and $500 per month for the Pressly treatment, which takes the customer’s content and their hand-picked template and churns out an HTML app for smartphones and tablets. Current customers include Ziff Davis, The Economist, Toyota, IBM, and The Toronto Star.

The funding will be used for marketing to expand that client roster and start building up Pressly’s kingdom of HTML5 content apps.

“We love that Pressly gives content publishers a low-risk, low-friction way to take their business to the mobile world and experiment. The times are changing, and that’s what’s needed to succeed,” said Pressly CEO Jeff Brenner in a statement on the news.

Pressly first launched in 2011 and is based in Toronto.

Elvis Presley 1956 publicity still from “Love Me Tender”/RCA Records.

July 9-10, 2013
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Boundless is trying to get rid of traditional textbooks while traditional textbooks publishers are trying to get rid of Boundless.

This ed-tech startup is fighting back against the three major textbook publishers that are suing it. Today, Boundless filed answers and counterclaims with the court, denying all allegations of wrongdoing.

“They are using litigation to try and stifle innovation,” said founder and CEO Ariel Diaz in an interview with VentureBeat. “They are trying to protect their stagnant product and wielding them as a legal offense.”

Boundless provides free digital textbooks and study resources to make educational content more accessible to students. Drawing from Open Educational Resources and a team of experts, Boundless offers an alternative to bulky and expensive textbooks that weigh most college students down on a daily basis. Thousands of students are responding well to the product, and Boundless raised $8 million last year to accelerate product development (aka the process of making physical textbooks obsolete).

The fact that students preferred more lightweight, cheaper, interactive content caused a few of the old-school textbook publishers to sweat. Last March, Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, and Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group sued Boundless with five claims. Since then, Boundless has made significant updates to the product, including SmartNotes summaries, flash cards, quizzes, tools to create collaborative study guides, social features as well as expanding into 18 academic subjects. Diaz said that the claims have no grounds, and furthermore, are based on Boundless’ 1.0 version, which has since evolved significantly, making them even more illegitimate.

“Three of the major publishers ganged up and sued us for a beta product that is no longer even available,” Diaz said. “We will continue to defend the original product while also highlighting that the product as it is today is fundamentally different. The content they are trying to protect is not copyrightable. The content in introductory textbooks are facts and ideas, and the order in which they are presented is pretty common for each subject area. These things are not copyrightable.”

Of the five claims, three are for copyright violation, one is for false advertising, and one for unfair competition. The complaint is that while Boundless takes its content from open resources, the “sequencing of the concepts” was wrongly taken. Lead counselor for the publishers Matt Oppenheim sent the following reply in an email:

July 9-10, 2013
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Google won. Publishers won. No one won.

Google won’t have to pay German news publishers to show short snippets of news, thanks to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s parliamentary coalition. But the law doesn’t specify how long those snippets can be. And the publishers association is also claiming victory, saying that the new legislation allows them to decide how Google — and others — can use their content.

In other words, Germany has replaced a complete mess with an entirely new complete mess. Which is perfectly reflected in the news coverage:

Bloomberg reports that “Google defeats publishers over web copyright in German vote.” GigaOm reports that “German parliament passes ‘Google tax’ law, forcing royalty payments for news snippets.

Which means no one has a clue.

The good part for Google is that the new law says aggregators can display “single words or very small text excerpts” without paying royalties. The good part for German publishers — according to the publishers — is that they get to choose whether and how aggregators use their content:

An automatic right of use is not associated with the approved scheme. Rather, it is open to publishers to make the business decision that they agree with search engines and aggregators who wish to use the content for commercial publishing.

[This] gives the publishers a fair policy instrument with which to make decisions on the commercial use of their content by search engines and aggregators themselves. This is a real signal of parliament, which underscores the value of a free press and journalistic content.

The worst part of the new law would seem to be the fact that the bill does not define what “very small text excerpts” are. Is that five words? Ten? The first paragraph? The phrase is completely open to interpretation, and putting “single words” just before it only makes them trend to really, really, really small. A quick check of Google News reveals that an average snippet on the site right now seems to be in the 20-  to 30-word range.

Does that count? Will a judge in a new case brought a few months from now agree that 20-30 words is “very small?”

All of which means that the short version of this article is: Google and news publishers in Germany are going to have more problems before this all gets figured out, and this recent legislation was a complete waste of time.

photo credit: dullhunk via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
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Even the swiftest ships go faster when pushed by tail winds. True to its name, data startup Sailthru is applying this wisdom of the seas to its own progress.

Sailthru announced today that it has raised $19 million led by Benchmark Capital. The financing will support the company’s growth as it expands its roster of Fortune 500 clients.

Sailthru’s flagship product is the Smart Data platform. Smart Data collects data about users and generates specific profiles for each individual. Marketers can use this information to personalize communication through targeted emails, onsite and in-app recommendations, and text messages.

“Our goal is to provide brands with the opportunities to connect with each individual in a way, unique to them,” said VP of marketing Aubrey Sabala in an interview. “My experience of a brand should be different than your experience, and this should be cross channel- the experience should be unified across every touch point. Individuals don’t want to be one of the masses. We can send a million different emails to a million different people. If everyone is different, we should start to treat them as the individuals that they are.”

Sabala described Sailthur’s approach as resembling the recycling symbol. The first arrow is data, which Smart Data aggregates, compiles, and displays for each user. The second arrow is automation. Marketers cannot analyze and act on the profiles of each and every user, so Sailthru has built a system that does it for them.

For example, if a user looks at a wedding dress one time, but never again, she may not want to receive customized emails filled with white gowns. However, a user that repeatedly shops for wedding dresses would probably react positively to bride-themed content. The third arrow is customer insights and analytics, which lets brands look at their customers’ behavior over time and apply the fundings to business strategy.

This approach is evidently successful. Sailthru claims that its technology causes an 8x extension in customer lifetime value, a 90% reduction in campaign setup time, 3 -5x increase in open and lick rates, and 200% increase in page views for publishers. Revenue increased by 270% last year and Sailthru has clients on five continents, consisting mainly of publishers and e-commerce vendors like AOL, Fab, The Huffington Post, and Refinery29.

High demand for the product and the need to scale accordingly led Sailthru to seek institutional funding. In addition to Benchmark, RRE, DFJ Gotham, and AOL Ventures contributed to this round. This brings the total capital raised to $28 million, following an $8 million Series A in 2011.

Sailthru is based in New York, but recently opened up an office in San Francisco and will expand into Europe in the coming months.

July 9-10, 2013
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Gravity is inescapable, especially if we’re talking about the content personalization startup that goes by that name.

Three-year-old Gravity has secured $10.6 million in new funding to expand more rapidly and bring its so-cool-it’s-creepy personalization technology to even more publishers.

Founded in 2009, Gravity performs semantic analysis on social updates and trending topics in aggregate to automatically identify a person’s interests. That data is then used in tools that help publishers make content recommendations, customize homepages, display viral stories, or serve ads.

“We’ve always believed that digital experiences shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all,” CEO and co-founder Amit Kapur said. “The next major shift beyond the social web will be the personal web. Gravity’s platform helps drive that evolution by helping every website and application tune itself for you and deliver you content you’ll love.”

Gravity, which competes with Facebook in some respects, currently serves up more than 25 million content recommendations to more than 200 million people. Partner publishers include CNNMoney, The Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch.

The Series B round was led by GRP Partners; existing investors Redpoint Ventures and August Capital re-upped in the round. Gravity has raised more than $20 million in funding to date.

Gravity image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
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Native advertising is what Facebook is doing when it shows sponsored posts, or what Twitter is doing with promoted tweets. It’s commercial content created by users that’s shown in the regular, normal stream of the site.

More traditional publishers, however, have not been able to jump on the native ads bandwagon, in spite of clear benefits to both advertisers and publishers. That’s why ShareThrough created its new Sponsored Videos service, says chief executive Dan Greenberg.

“This is the first native video product built for the rest of the web,” he told me. “We know [native video ads are] performing well on Facebook, Youtube, Tumble, and Spotify … but this is the first time it’s available for the rest of the web.”

The new product, already on pace for $40 million in revenue this year despite just coming out of beta, consists of video content created by agencies, distributed by ShareThrough’s platform, and displayed on publishers’ sites.

Source: ShareThrough

Sample content distributed via ShareThrough

The video ad units, Greenberg says, need to be both visually integrated into the site, and integrated into the publisher’s user experience. Publishers can control the types of content that appear on their sites, and advertisers can control the context: the type of publisher, audience, gender, and kinds of surrounding content.

Launch partners include Forbes and WordPress.com, which will be using Sponsored Videos on all its millions of blogs, and the results have been impressive so far, according to Greenberg, who pointed out that ShareThrough videos are driving brand memorability 18 times better than traditional video ads.

“We work with Nielsen and they do third-party research. The performance from native video out-performs anything else they’re seeing.”

One question:

If the video ad units are created by ad agencies, in what sense are they native? The tone and topics are definitely native, but the authors are not exactly users.

Still native ads is a young category, and definitions are still evolving.

photo credit: budcaddell via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
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Startup Qwiki wants to change the way we experience information, and today it’s releasing a news reporting tool that brings its technology to publishers.

Qwiki Creator, launched today in partnership with ABC News, merges web video and content for interactive presentations that offer audiences something between a broadcast and print experience. To mark the launch, ABC News is releasing 25 of its own custom Qwikis, which are embedded in on-site news stories and also running on Qwiki.com.

“Since launch, thousands of content creators — amateurs, professionals, even many large media companies like ABC — have contacted Qwiki and asked to turn their content into our format. The Qwiki Creator is the culmination of that desire,” Qwiki co-founder and CEO Doug Imbruce told VentureBeat.

Qwiki is a New York-based startup that weaves together web data sources in near real-time to create interactive, animated presentations on reference topics. The company first launched its web product in January 2011, and followed up with an iPad application a few months later. Qwiki has received $10.5 million in funding from investors (including Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin), but has also been criticized for doing little more than creating a talking version of Wikipedia.

Qwiki’s new goal is to help media companies create more engaging news stories. With Qwiki Creator, reporters can self-narrate interactive stories and pull in web content in the form of URLs, Flickr images, YouTube and Vimeo videos, Google maps, tweets, and the like. Qwiki plans to add mobile and tablet playback by the summer, and the Creator tool will support additional animations and content sources in future updates.

“The Creator is designed to let content creators produce multimedia, interactive content quickly — without the aid of a video production unit or rich media programmers,” Imbruce said.

Wednesday’s Creator release is the start of a private testing phase, but additional launch partners include StyleCaster, Cheyenne Meets Chanel, and Beauty Sweet Spot. The new tool even brings with it the promise of revenue.

“From a business strategy perspective, the partnership with ABC News — and more media companies in the future — is an exciting next step, especially where monetization is concerned,” Imbruce said. “We’re able to help democratize content creation inside organizations, and make it more efficient to create higher quality content, and thus higher quality advertising inventory, which we will participate in via a revenue share.”

The publisher tool, as I see it, represents a shift in direction for Qwiki and suggests the startup’s original consumer web and mobile reference play was about as stimulating as a forced trip to the library. But Imbruce insists otherwise. There’s no strategy overhaul here, he said. “It is the culmination of our strategy. The vision for the company has always been to create a human method for information consumption.”

So why haven’t we heard from Qwiki in a year? “We prefer to show our products, not just talk about them,” Imbruce said. “Creating a robust yet easy-to-use publishing platform was always our highest priority.”

Next up, Qwiki plans to release an API so that large scale content producers can mass produce Qwikis, Imbruce said.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
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Who says e-mail is dead? Advertising startup isocket has forged an agreement with MailChimp that lets publishers sell ads directly on e-mail newsletters, potentially turning old-school e-mail into a money maker.

Isocket simplifies the advertising process for publishers with its self-serve ad platform, which increases the number of direct ads that run on a website. For example, if Microsoft wants to buy an ad across a tech news website, they’d start with isocket’s self-serve platform, which would give them all the ad specs and rates.

Direct ads, of course, are more lucrative for publishers than ones that run through an ad network, and ultimately make them more money. Isocket’s platform also helps those publishers manage a larger number of ad clients, which enables them to spend less time keeping track of deals and more time making deals.

Now isocket’s self-serve ad functionality is available for email newsletters, as powered by email marketing client MailChimp. And while email may not seem like a powerful force in the age of social media, there are still roughly 188 billion messages sent each day from nearly 3 billion accounts.

“For us, offering publishers a way to sell direct ad through their email newsletters was a no brainer,” isocket founder and CEO John Ramey told VentureBeat.

Ramey said the email functionality will be available through all email marketing platforms, but those that use MailChimp will have a more simplified experience. That’s something that attracted lots of publishers to start using isocket in the first place.

The startup has a rather impressive list of clients already using its platform, including VentureBeat, AOL (as well as TechCrunch), Gawker, Mashable, Springwise, Break media, and the Cheezburger Network of sites. Ramey told me his company denies about 90 percent of publishers that apply to use the platform, with about 700 to 800 requests to join per month.

Founded in 2009, the Burlingame, Calif-based startup has previously raised an undisclosed round of funding from Jeff Clavier / SoftTech, Dave McClure / Founders Fund, Mike Hirshland of Resolute, Tim Draper, Blumberg Capital, David Cohen of TechStars, Quest VP, Accelerator Ventures, and Metamorphic Ventures.

Screenshot via isocket

Sixteen states have piled lawsuits on top of Apple, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon and Schuster, four companies which were served with an antitrust lawsuit this morning by the Department of Justice.

The suit is led by Texas and Connecticut, which, unlike the DOJ, are demanding financial damages be paid. Other states include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont and West Virginia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

The Department of Justice sued Apple and publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster, and Penguin this morning for its new “agency pricing” model. Apple previously had a flat rate for e-books in iTunes, similar to how it charges a flat $1.29 for most songs in the marketplace. With this new model, publishers are allowed to set their own prices on e-books in iTunes, and give Apple a 30 percent cut of the revenue. In general, this is actually positive for the publishers, but it went a step further. The publishers have been accused of conspiring with Apple to agree to not sell their e-books at a lower price anywhere else. That is to say, if the e-book is listed on iTunes as $13, it can’t be sold on Amazon for $10.

This lowers competition between online marketplaces, and it’s competition that drives prices down for consumers.

Thus far Hachette, Harper Collins and Simon and Schuster are said to have agreed to settle the case with the Department of Justice. Hachette and Harper Collins are the only two to have settled with the states thus far, offering a restitution to consumers. Macmillian, however, says it will follow the cases to court.

“The terms the DOJ demanded were too onerous. After careful consideration, we came to the conclusion that the terms could have allowed Amazon to recover the monopoly position it had been building before our switch to the agency model,” said Macmillan chief executive John Sargent in a letter today, “We made the change to support an open and competitive market for the future, and it worked.”

Court Documents from the Department of Justice

hat tip PaidContent; Justice image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
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Brands interested in doing market research and publishers trying to make money on content have a new friend in Google, as the search giant is acting as go-between with a new tool that gives both audiences exactly what they want.

On Thursday, Google launched Google Consumer Surveys, a new product businesses can use to survey online audiences and publishers can host in place of paywalls or ads to generate revenue from site visitors.

The quid-pro-quo system works as follows: Brands, small businesses, and marketers use Google consumer surveys to conduct online market research. Google then places the questions in front of targeted web denizens when they land on a premium content page in Google’s publisher network. The brand pays per response ($0.10 to $0.50 each, depending on targeting preferences), and Google and participating publishers pocket the money made from each response. Even the would-be content viewer benefits, as she doesn’t have to pay or sign in to access news articles or videos that might otherwise be locked behind a paywall.

Here’s why this strikes us as a crafty idea: Google isn’t selling a full-service market research service, but instead a hybrid of the cheap, do-it-yourself online survey products and the expensive, hands-on approach offered by a traditional firm.

On the do-it-yourself side of things, the brand or marketer is responsible for creating the microsurvey questionnaire, determining the type of audience (U.S. only) it wants to target, and identifying the total number of responses it’s seeking. Then, the customer takes a backseat as Google drives the sampling, weighting, and analysis pieces of the process.

In so doing, Google is offering the best of both worlds — convenience, affordability, sample balancing, and analysis — and monetizing publisher content in a way that doesn’t discourage readership and traffic.

Of course, one has to wonder if Google’s controversial new privacy policies are allowing the company to pull from cross-product data to better identify folks to complete microsurveys. Google said this is not the case. The product allows for specific targeting by gender, age group, and geographic regions based on inferred demographics, and custom audience targeting through screening questions. All responses are anonymous, Google said, so they’re not tied to a user’s identity or used for future ad targeting.

At launch, publisher partners include Pandora, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Daily News. Initial brand testers include Lucky Brand Jeans, Tumbk2, and King Arthur (baking products). A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat that it’s too soon to speculate on the long-term status of the product. “Right now, our focus is on rolling this out and seeing how it can help companies and publishers meet their business objectives,” the spokesperson said.

Steal from the best, but make it your own, as the saying goes. Facebook has done just that by co-opting two concepts made popular by others in an effort to make its social network the first place people go to consume the news they care about.

Facebook introduced a new feature called Interest Lists on Thursday as a way for members to turn the site into their own personalized newspaper, featuring only the sections of their choosing. The lists are an intelligent hybrid of Twitter’s list feature and the social news movement, popularized by Flipboard and others.

Interest Lists, created and named by people for people, are topic-themed collections of Pages and public figures on Facebook, and are akin to specialized news feeds for your favorite topics. The company has categorized lists in mostly traditional sections such as News, Music, Business, Sports, Politics, Lifestyle, and Entertainment, with the idea being that they will comprise the sections of your Facebook newspaper.

Interest Lists are yet another extension of Facebook’s Subscribe feature, introduced last September. They live on the left-hand side of the page for easy one-click access. If a story within a particular Interest List you subscribe to is seeing a lot of engagement, however, Facebook will push that story to your News Feed. Recent stories from Interest Lists may be also highlighted in the News Feed on occasion.

The feature is pure genius — even if it does take inspiration from Twitter. Here’s why: Facebook users can either package up the celebrities or things they care about into convenient little buckets, or they can let friends, strangers, and media organizations do the dirty work for them and just happily consume the curated content as it rolls out. And because Facebook appears to have recruited partners to seed lists for its new toy, there’s already a smattering of top-notch lists across a variety of categories just itching to be subscribed to on day-one.

Then there’s the journalist and media crowd. Both groups will love Interest Lists because they promise more exposure for their stories, more subscribers, more traffic, and new audiences that could become regular readers. I’ve previously called Subscribe a gift for publishers and journalists because it’s the ultimate in self-promotion tools. Following that logic, Interest Lists is the gift that keeps on giving. The lists are cyclical in nature. Facebookers ad you or your publication to a list, your personalities and stories net larger audiences, those audiences subscribe to the lists in question, and the cycle repeats itself. There’s also the opportunity for publications to play curator for their readers.

As for Facebook, the Interest Lists are absolutely a home run. Interest Lists have the promise of better distributing Facebook content to the social network’s 845 million monthly active users. More content, that people have an expressed interest in, means users will spend even more time on Facebook, and share, “like,” comment, and engage more, activities that will distribute content farther and wider. Engagement and time spent on site are bottom-line metrics that will eventually translate into more advertising dollars as businesses pump money into Facebook’s enhanced ad-products to draw the attention of these captive eyeballs.

The real kicker is that Facebook’s social newspaper experience, unlike the myriad of apps toying with the same notion, works independently of a person’s platform. On web, mobile, PC, or tablet? No matter. It’s just Facebook, so the experience stays the same and you can continue to get your news sections uninterrupted wherever you are. And because Facebook has made the lists an integrated part of the standard experience, users who forget about visiting sections will still be exposed to list content. The same can’t be said of Twitter’s lists.

Kudos, Facebook.

Photo credit: arvindgrover/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
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As a struggling Chartbeat addict, I can tell you that watching the number of people flooding onto your site or story can be a rush. But like any great high, it fades too fast, especially when you can’t figure out how to keep them coming back.

I got a look at the new version of Chartbeat yesterday, the popular realtime analytics tool, and was encouraged to see a new suite of tools that focused on ways to engage and respond to readers so they return again and again.

“We know the pageview sucks,” said Chartbeat’s Alex Carusillo. “Sure everyone likes to see big numbers, but you can’t predict a pickup by Drudge Report that will send a huge wave of one time readers. We think it makes more sense to focus on the readers who are deeply engaged and driving other readers to your site.”

The big change is a new field in the dashboard that tracks the average amount of time readers are spending with each story. You can take a look at an example from investor Fred Wilson’s blog AVC below (he doesn’t mind sharing his numbers).

Watching the numbers from VentureBeat yesterday, I saw certain stories that weren’t getting the most traffic, but were keeping readers on the site for two or three times VentureBeat’s average.

“This is very different from the engagement you see in Google Analytics,” Lauryn Bennett, Chartbeat’s head of brand. “They are looking at when someone enters a page and when they exit. But is that person actually paying attention to your site, or did they just forget and leave open a tab in their browser.” Chartbeat looks every few seconds to see if the visitor is clicking around to measure engagement.

Chartbeat has already released a specialized product, Newsbeat, for publishers. Right now the team is testing out similar products for e-commerce and gaming companies. And the new version of Chartbeat is going to break out analytics for visitors arriving through mobile sites and apps as well. “You need to understand how your audience is engaging with you, no matter what platform they are using,” Carusillo said.

And, as if Chartbeat didn’t already monkey with my ego on a daily basis, the team has built-in a new tool that tracks the performance of your site against its peer group, in our case other tech blogs. You can see the average for direct traffic, search and social across similar sites and where you rank by comparison.

“We want to help companies do more than just track their performance minute to minute. We’re trying to real-time expose data in a new way so companies can make informed decisions about where it makes the most sense to invest for the long-term,” Bennett said.

Image via Flickr user rosmary

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Like a match made in social data heaven, social ad targeting startup 33Across announced today that it has snapped up Tynt Multimedia, a company that helps publishers track reader engagement through the age old technique of copy and paste.

Combined with its own extensive data on brands, 33Across says that the acquisition gives it “the largest social and brand graph in the world,” thanks to the 500,000 publishers using Tynt’s technology. Tynt alone reaches 1.25 billion people worldwide — or about three-quarters of the global online audience — more than Google or Facebook’s reach. (If you’ve ever copied text from a website and found a URL with your pasted result, that’s all Tynt.)

“The reason why we bought Tynt is that we think publishers are struggling, and we think we can help,” 33Across CEO Eric Wheeler told VentureBeat in an interview. “Social is transforming the world, publishers need to understand the data, actions, and graph around their readers… to understand how all of the data is being shared,” he later added.

Tynt’s publishers will now be able to take advantage of 33Across’s Brand Graph, letting them track their social influence across the web, while 33Across will be able to use Tynt’s reach in future ad solutions.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Wheeler mentioned that the deal was a private stock transaction. 33Across will be acquiring all of Tynt’s assets, patents, and employees. Tynt will continue to function independently as a 33Across company.

“The overwhelming majority of this is an offensive move,” Wheeler said. “We think the future is about big data and big social , real-time all around a brand.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Online publishing is about to get a lot smoother for publishers. Whether that’s a good thing for readers is another question, however.

New York-based startup Parse.ly is releasing its flagship product, Dash, into general availability Tuesday. It’s meant to help publishers and media companies optimize their content and grow their readership by giving them better insights into what people are reading, how they get there (social media or search), and what topics are trending.

The product is akin to your run-of-the-mill web traffic dashboard (think Google Analytics or Chartbeat) — except Dash is more tied in to the content and topics behind all those page views. It strives to quench publishers’ thirst for more page view juice.

Dash runs on top of Parse.ly’s optimization platform, developed over a two year period, which crawls a publisher’s website. The tool indexes every piece of text on the site and parses it all to identify topics, people, places and events. The product then allows for realtime article performance analysis around a variety of variables and seeks to predict the topics that will produce the most successful stories.

“Dash is the evolution of spending a couple of years working with publishers to understand their pain points,” Parse.ly CEO Sachin Kamdar told VentureBeat. “We thought we had the opportunity to create an amazing tool because the web is interactive, and because current systems are not capturing data in a way that is meaningful.”

The dashboard tool, already used by Atlantic Media Group, U.S. News and The Press-Enterprise as well as VentureBeat, offers publishers and editors a means to slice and dice past and present content by topics, authors, sections and referrers. The tool takes the standard analytics capabilities of a Google Analytics-type product and throws in a few additional layers for an (ideally) more comprehensive view of site and author performance and potential.

Dash tracks authors’ top posts, velocity and page view trends, susses out the topics on your site that are on fire or fading, allows for comparative site section analysis, measures social media impact, and identifies top influencers on social networks.

The dashboard’s most unique feature is the Webwide Trends component, which rolls up data from across Parse.ly’s widespread publisher network to find topical traffic trends (during its year-long private beta period, Parse.ly crawled 4 million URLs and tracked 4 billion page views). Here Dash looks at what’s bubbling up on the web and determines the best opportunities for coverage. Users can also search for particular topics to gauge whether they’re trending or flatlining, and look at the performance of multiple topics in a comparison chart.

VentureBeat executive editor Dylan Tweney is hooked on Dash, referring to it as “catnip for editors.” “The ways that Dash lets you slice and dice page view data, posts, authors and topics is incredibly powerful,” he said. “It’s given me much better insight into what our readers like (and where they’re coming from) as well as what my writers are up to and how effective they’re being.” (VentureBeat is a non-paying beta customer of Dash.)

Dash could be a powerful tool with profound consequences. The publisher gains insight into how best to write for more traffic, but at what cost to the reader and the writer? Understanding hot topics, broader trends and historical data are important pieces of the digital publishing process, but the unfortunate side effect is that this could correlate to an influx of more cheap, low quality, search and social media-optimized content. Hip hip, hooray?

The fact is the predictive side to the product can’t possibly understand what readers actually want to read or will fully appreciate, and instead looks at data to determine what type of content has the highest potential to bring in the most page views. Content optimization does not equate to optimal content. And any writer, blogger or journalist with a true passion for story-telling knows how unfulfilling it is to frame or chase stories based on their page view potential.

Parse.ly’s Dash won’t be to blame for perpetuating the problem, per se — it’s just the catch-22 of the industry — but don’t be surprised to see media sites flock to this type of tool.

Dash doesn’t come cheap. The product starts at $499 per month for the most basic plan.

Parse.ly was incubated at DreamIT Ventures. The start has seven full-time employees and has raised $1.8 million in funding to date.

The social network pushed out an update today that makes its Comments Box third-party commenting plugin work on mobile devices.

Facebook’s Comments Box has undergone many revisions over time, but its purpose remains the same: “To make commenting more social and authentic.”

The plugin first appeared in 2009, but was dramatically improved in early 2011. It then finally became a viable alternative to Disqus and other commenting platforms for publisher’s looking to stimulate more intellectual conversations on their websites. People who comment from their Facebook profiles are more accountable for what they say, and (in theory) the resulting comments are of a higher caliber than usual.

“More than 400,000 sites have integrated with the Comments plugin,” a Facebook representative told VentureBeat.

Those same 400,000 publishers have been gifted with the Facebook Comments Box on the mobile version of their sites. The mobile version, as expected, automatically appears when accessed by a mobile device visitor.

The mobile comments box replicates the web experience, and allows commenters to post their missives back to the social network or “like” comments others have posted. And for the consumers of the world, the upgrade makes commenting more of any anywhere, anytime social behavior.

The addition of mobile support to the Comments Box is a necessary update should Facebook wish to convince more media sites to switch to its commenting solution — and it desperately does. It’s not all about cleaner, better conversations (as you’ve probably figured out by now). The more publishers that switch to Facebook’s Comments Box, the more Facebook comments and “likes” flood the web and get passed around its social network.

[Mobile phone image via Shutterstock]

The button is an off-Facebook extension of the Subscribe feature the social network first introduced in September. The social plugin can be installed on any site, just like the “Like” button, to let visitors subscribe to contributors (a.k.a. your writers, journalists, bloggers and reporters) with a single click.

The Subscribe button is already live on author pages on the WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, Forbes.com and Newsweek.

This button is a big deal. When Facebook introduced the Subscribe feature several months ago, it gave individual journalists, reporters and bloggers the power to promote themselves and their stories to larger audiences on Facebook and, in essence, drive traffic back to their articles.

I’ve managed to attract an extremely large and powerful base of subscribers who do, in fact, click on the stories I post to Facebook — in droves, I might add. (Thanks, subscribers!).

So, here’s a little note to my lovely editor and the powers that be at VentureBeat: Please install the Subscribe button as soon as possible. I’ve got 60,000 subscribers and counting on Facebook, and I could really use more. More subscribers for me, means more traffic for you, and I promise not to let the new subscribers go to my head. Okay? Thanks. Love, Jenn.

And if you want more Facebook traffic, too, you’ll want to get the buttons on your site immediately. To ignore the traffic potential that Facebook and its 800 million members can send your way would be like passing up Apple stock when it was less than a $100 a share (guilty as charged).

It’s the Facebook gift that will keep on giving — as long as the social network remains on top, of course.

[Image via bookgrl/Flickr]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple is once again in hot water with the European Commission, this time over its pricing strategies with e-book publishers.

The EC announced today that it has begun formal antitrust investigations into Apple and five major book publishers —  Hachette Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Macmillan owner Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck — to determine how they arranged e-book prices.

“The Commission will in particular investigate whether these publishing groups and Apple have engaged in illegal agreements or practices that would have the object or the effect of restricting competition in the EU or in the EEA,” the EC wrote in a statement today. “The Commission is also examining the character and terms of the agency agreements entered into by the above named five publishers and retailers for the sale of e-books. The Commission has concerns, that these practices may breach EU antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and restrictive business practices.”

The investigation likely sparks from a coordinated effort years ago between Apple and publishers to abolish Amazon’s then-typical $9.99 e-book pricing, Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes. Now, new e-books are often priced between $12 and $15 — with high-demand titles, like the recent Steve Jobs biography, selling for around $17 at launch (very close to its hardcover price).

Apple and the five publishers are already facing a class action lawsuit in California over the pricing change, which claims that they were “terrified” by Amazon’s low e-book pricing. Apple was a particularly useful co-conspirator because it was launching its iBooks store at the time. According to the suit, the publishers agreed to an “agency model” deal with Apple, which let them determine e-book pricing while Apple took a small cut. They also allegedly agreed not to sell e-books at prices lower than what Apple offered.

I’m not a legal expert, but it seems clear that something fishy went down with the launch of the iBooks store and the sudden emergence of more expensive e-books. If the EC’s investigation is successful, there’s hope that further exploration will occur in the U.S. and that someday we may finally see the return of cheap e-books.

For example, Skimlinks converts every mention of “Modern Warfare 3” in a review of that game into a link to a site like Amazon where the game can be bought. The blog earns a cut of every sale driven from the review. That commission can range from 4 to 15 percent of the price of the product, and Skimlinks takes 25 percent of the blogger’s fee.

New investor Bertelsmann AG owns the RTL Group, Europe’s biggest broadcaster, and Random House, the world’s largest trade book publisher, as well as numerous magazines. Another investor in this round is Dave McClure of startup accelerator 500 Startups, in a departure from his normal focus on very early stage companies.

Skimlinks’ main competitor is Google-backed VigLink. Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro doesn’t seem worried. “VigLink does much of what we do, although we innovate faster,” said Navarro. “We launched our link-insertion product, SkimWords, over a year ago, and they launched a soft version of it a month ago, but it isn’t commercially as ready or as lucrative for publishers as ours is. We also differ in that, as we are London-based, with offices in New York and San Francisco, we have a very international mindset.” Gaining the backing of a media behemoth like Bertelsmann, which has revenues of over 22 billion and employs 100,000 people, certainly helps counter the Google threat.

Skimlinks was founded in 2008 and has 30 employees.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

After years of turning the traditional brick-and-mortar bookstore business on its head, online retail giant Amazon is now taking aim at the publishing business by getting writers to ditch their publishers in favor of Amazon.

The company is scheduled to publish 122 books this fall in print and e-book form, according to a report from the New York Times. The move puts Amazon in more direct competition with some of its largest suppliers, like Penguin, Random House and MacMillan.

Amazon’s publishing arm isn’t just a side project either. The company hired publishing veteran Laurence Kirshbaum in May, and it paid actress/director Penny Marshall (of Laverne & Shirley fame) $800,000 for her memoir, according to the NYT report. Last week, the company even signed a book deal with self-help book guru Tim Ferris.

However, it’s unknown just how many editors the company employs or how many books it has under contract.

Amazon is able to sway authors to its cause because it’s becoming increasingly good at offering them the kinds of services typically offered by publishers, like access to fans, sales data, analytics and more.

Photo via Michael Coté

There are many different devices and mobile apps for electronic reading, such as the Kindle, the Nook and Apple’s iBookstore. As we move toward digital reading, our children will as well. MeMeTales gives children their own app to not only read from, but also write in and interact with. Kids can unlock reading-related games and activities or publish their own stories.

It’s also simple to publish a story on MeMeTales. You create a PDF of your story, upload it to MeMeTales, format it for the iPad, add any audio and submit it to MeMeTales, which publishes it “automagically.” Adult publishers who want to get their stories in front of kids can use the publishing system as well.

A 2010 Scholastic study on reading in the digital age says, “The power of choice is a key factor in raising a reader. Nine out of 10 children say that they are more likely to finish a book they choose themselves.”

According to founder Maya Bisineer, MeMeTales wants to create a community — a place that children can feel is their own reading space. When they use the app on their parent’s mobile device, it will feel like their own spot to create and imagine.

Since its private launch for the iPhone 12 weeks ago, MeMeTales has had 25,000 downloads and its stories have been read over 100,000 times. The iPad app will launch with 50 stories available.

MeMeTales was founded this past July and is headquartered in Cupertino, Calif. The company has raised a friends and family round of funding under $100,000.

MeMeTales is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

“The idea is that whenever you download any Inkling title, you have the collective wisdom of anyone else who has been in that book,” Matt MacInnis, Inkling founder and chief executive told VentureBeat in an interview.

Inkling takes textbook content licensed from publishers and turns the otherwise static material into an interactive app. In the app you can still read the same traditional textbook content, but you can also view 3D images such as a molecules or monuments, test your knowledge, access definitions, listen to a speech or symphony while you learn, highlight content and save highlights and notes in a sidebar notebook for later. Book costs vary, but to lower the cost, students can even purchase one chapter at a time.

But learning is a social activity and students oftentimes benefit from collaboration. That is why Inkling has integrated social capabilities directly into the app. Now, students can leave a public note in the margin of their Inkling book, and save others’ notes and highlights to their notebooks. The comments of professors or other experts are distinguished from peer commentary through color coding: Student contributions are denoted in blue in line with the text, while professors’ posts show up in purple. Your own highlights and notes appear blue.

Students have the choice to follow specific people and watch their edits as they simultaneous move through the same downloaded book.

In the upper right hand corner of the app, shared comments and highlights, or posts, are aggregated. Post notifications are separated into notes from followed users, your own posts, and “suggested” posts. The app suggests posts based on a scoring system, which ranks user “intelligence.” This rank is most heavily based on how often a person puts your posts into their notebooks and how well you do on practice tests.  A post will only show up in your notebook if you find it valuable and manually choose to save it there.

Students can opt out of the social features entirely or make specific posts private.

In essence, the app becomes a study group. MacInnis used the example of a stuck student. He can write a note next to the content that confuses him, go to sleep and wake up with a crowdsourced explanation in the next morning.

But these textbooks can be very heavy on an iPad. A full Inkling textbook can fill up 2 gigabytes of space, and for someone has a 16GB iPad, that’s a lot of precious space. The only way to combat this is to delete Inkling titles to download new ones. But what happens to all that data that will now be even more extensive with the social features function? According to MacInnis, this data is synced in the cloud and repopulates itself when a title is re-downloaded.

Still, you have to re-download a book if you want to add it back to your iPad.

Competitors like Kno and Chegg offer slightly less robust digital textbook options, MacInnis said.

“From our perspective, we’re solving for a very specific problem. There’s no scalable way to publish digital content for learning. They [Kno] know how to dump a PDF on a screen, but we have a whole infrastructure to publish this stuff at scale,” said MacInnis. He continued, adding Chegg to the conversation, “They’re taking a PDF and they’re putting it on an iPad or computer screen. That’s fine for now, but it’s not the future of publishing.”

To MacInnis, Inkling isn’t creating an eBook, it’s looking toward a new way of experiencing educational content through apps. What once was a still and mute book, now uses technology to move, speak out loud and glean intelligence from others outside your comfortable campus study group, all from one device.

“On a basic level, this social stuff is what it is,” MacInnis explained, understanding that social is everywhere and the ability to interact with the world is much easier than it once was. “But we think the implications are huge.”

There are two different types of social networks, private and public — each defined by its default privacy setting. Facebook is by default private and meant to connect actual friends. Twitter by default is public and anyone can follow anyone else. Google+ is decidedly in the Twitter camp — meaning you can follow anyone, including Google CEO Larry Page. Google+ lets you see Page’s posts and “like” his photos of kite surfing in Alaska. When posting on Google+, it forces users to select specific social circles they are posting to, which includes “everyone” as an option that mimics a Twitter-style broadcast. If not for the lawsuits and FTC settlement about Google Buzz automatically broadcasting posts, it is likely that Google+’s default setting would be public posts.

Although Twitter is growing (having just hit 200 million tweets a day), Twitter has left itself open to be displaced with a slow pace of adding features. Even newly returned founder Jack Dorsey has said that it was too difficult for “normal” people to use Twitter.

So, how can Google go after the 21 million people who are actively publishing on Twitter, and, more importantly, the few thousands that own the majority of Twitter followers? These types of posters are generally publishers, and Google’s core competence is serving publishers. Publishers pay a lot of attention to Google, from search engine optimization to increase the ranking on Google searches, search engine marketing keyword ads to drive traffic, and on-site advertising solutions ranging from AdSense to DoubleClick.

Publishers are interested in increasing their search rankings and improving their reach. Posting content to Google+1 increases search rankings. The black toolbar across the top of all Google services (other than YouTube), which integrates both Google+ and Google+ notifications, definitely provides reach and is now in front of as many user minutes as Facebook commands. Users commenting or liking on items from publishers will show up in their friends’ toolbars. Even if they only have a few friends, the overall traffic bump will be significant. The Google+ bar has not yet been activated on YouTube, a key publisher and celebrity channel, and likely will broadcast YouTube likes, comments and shares.

While Facebook is not sweating about Google+, the threat to Twitter is significant. Google has the opportunity to displace Twitter if it gets publishers and celebrities to encourage Google+ follows on their websites as well as pushing posts to the legions of Google users while they are in Search, Gmail and YouTube. Google was turned down when it tried to buy Twitter for $10 billion, and now it is going to try to replicate it. With Google+, the company actually has a shot.

Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. You can  follow him on Twitter.

Persson did so without any kind of support from publishers and used PayPal for a large chunk of his sales. Having that kind of success without a publisher isn’t entirely unheard of — the Humble Indie Bundle racked up a decent chunk of change for its developers — but it’s still quite rare.

Instead of using publishers, Persson relied on viral communities to spread word about the game. It spawned a number of online communities, such as one on news aggregation site Reddit (which, coincidentally, is one of the leading candidates for best new community of 2010). The game even has its own Wiki, because of just how many things players can do in the world.

Here’s the story of Minecraft: Players wake up on a deserted island and start punching trees. That creates wood, which they can turn into mining picks and other types of tools. From there, the sky is the limit. Players can chip away at anything in the world and use it as a resource to build whatever they can think up. They can craft specific items, like swords and tools, or simply use the blocks to build up giant and complicated structures.

Projects range from a scale representation of the U.S.S. Enterprise featured in the Star Trek series, to a giant cannon powered by 73 blocks of TNT with the sole purpose of launching a cow in a mining cart to the moon, to a recreation of the Earth itself. There are even a few shots at using Minecraft to create artistic videos that have become pretty popular on video-sharing sites like YouTube.

The game has some hilariously silly graphics, with the player’s character represented by a very blocky person running around with a mining pick or sword. But that’s part of the charm of the game, and it’s charming enough to rack up at least 15 million euros in sales, based on the game’s €14.95 price point. But it hasn’t been all easy. PayPal at one point froze Persson’s account when it held more than $750,000 because it observed what it called “suspicious deposits and withdrawals.”

The original version of the game launched in May in 2009 and picked up the pace quickly throughout the next year, adding multiplayer and a number of other game modes.

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Image Space Media, formerly Picad Media, has raised an additional $1 million from existing investors, according to an SEC filing.

The startup overlays text ads on Web images, similar to those seen on Google’s YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Publishers can integrate a snippet of JavaScript and start monetizing their images, while advertisers can choose from a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) model to serve their text-based ad. Image Space offers an analytics tool for publishers and ad-creation tools for advertisers.

Founder Kevin Tung later confirmed the funding to TechCrunch, a tech blog.

While the idea of serving ads over images is far from ubiquitous, it’s not entirely new. The most popular player in the space is GumGum. GumGum started in 2006 as a service to help content owners track and monetize their photos, but eventually morphed into what is essentially an ad network for images. It has signed up popular publishers TMZ, Internet Brands, AskMen, and Glam.

Back in January, Image Space Media raised $2.9 million from New Atlantic Ventures, Ridgeline Capital, and Michael Gordon, having launched at the TechCrunch50 conference earlier in the year. Tung has stated the startup is planning to raise a complete Series B round in 2011.