It pays to time your tweets: SocialFlow debuts self-serve platform and eyes new funding

SocialFlow, which helps brands and publishers optimize their performance across Facebook and Twitter, is launching its self-service platform today. The company has had a banner year, growing from just 2 employees to more than 30 and graduating from the betaworks building to their own office on the east side of Manhattan.

To get a sense of how the company works, let's take the example from one of their clients, The Economist. With SocialFlow, which guides which messages The Economist puts out to its followers and when, the venerable publishers has grown its social media fanbase five times faster than average and increased engagement with its audience at a rate eight times greater than before it used Social Flow.

How schools are reacting to Apple’s entry into education

When Apple announced its textbook initiative on Thursday, there was a rush of excitement among educators. Textbooks from major publishers, which can cost $40 to $75 dollars in print, would be available as interactive e-books for $15 or less. The new iBooks Author application could turn anyone into a publisher, with its simple interactive e-book creation tools.

But then there was the small print: In order to buy and read these textbooks, each student will … Continue Reading

Apple to revolutionize textbooks with “GarageBand for e-books,” says report

For its big education-related announcement in New York City this Thursday, January 19, Apple may be planning to unveil new tools that would make it easy for publishers and authors to create interactive textbooks.

That’s according to Ars Technica, which points to sources that describe Apple’s plans for a “GarageBand for e-books” — in other words, software for interactive e-books that would be as easy to use as the company’s renowned music software.

Apple was … Continue Reading

Apple planning iBooks and publishing NYC event for January (updated)

Apple apparently has a big event in store for New York City this month — though it’s not the announcement of the iPad 3, or the rumored Apple television set.

Most likely, the event will center on a media-related announcement since Apple SVP of Internet Software and Interactive Services Eddy Cue is said to be involved, reports All Things D’s Kara Swisher. Cue, who was Apple CEO Tim Cook’s first major appointment as SVP, spearheads … Continue Reading

So long childhood: GamePro magazine has been shut down

After 22 years of publication, popular gaming magazine GamePro‘s U.S. operations have been shut down by its parent company IDG, VentureBeat has learned.

Multiple sources within the magazine confirmed that GamePro employees, including executives, received phone calls first-thing this morning with the dreaded news. GamePro’s U.S. website, which has been online for 13 years, will be incorporated into a gaming channel at sister site PCWorld on December 5. The majority of GamePro staff will be … Continue Reading

New publisher of computer books embraces e-books and authors, not DRM

For technical books, publishing has a nearly fatal lack of speed. E-books are increasingly popular, but they’re usually not produced until after the print edition is already complete. That makes about as much sense as posting Instagram photos of yesterday’s paper, and the results are often just about as usable.

A new company, Fair Trade Digital Exchange, aims to fix the problem by going straight to digital and publishing e-books on technical topics, like what’s … Continue Reading

Dylan’s Desk: How the Internet is dividing publishers into two camps

Glam Media founder Samir Arora thinks he knows the future of media.

The secret, he is betting, is brand advertising displayed against high-quality, premium content.

That stands in stark contrast to the advertising model that’s worked best for the past decade online, in which increasingly specific text advertising is targeted at potential customers’ immediate desires, largely via search engines.

Glam Media aggregates content from a large network of vertical publishers. And Arora paints an alluring … Continue Reading

Demo: DHE Media’s dInk platform makes creating tablet kiosks easy

DHE Media is taking a different approach to tablet publishing with its dINK platform. Instead of focusing on the design aspect of publishing for tablets, dINK lets companies approach publishing as an information workflow problem, allowing them to easily deliver relevant information to customers and their employees.

The platform also allows companies to easily turn tablets into kiosks, with all of the user permission controls and administrative features that go along with kiosks. Ultimately, dINK … Continue Reading

Demo: ClrTouch lets you build tablet Web sites on the iPad

ClrTouch, a Brooklyn-based startup with a love for touchscreen interfaces, makes it dead simple to create a webpage for tablets right on the iPad.

There are plenty of companies, like OnSwipe, focused on making it easy to create tablet sites, but ClrTouch appears to be the first to let you do so right on an actual tablet.

“Our product is made to evolve the web from a click- to a touch-based environment with consumer as … Continue Reading

Strong New Yorker iPad app sales promising for digital publishing

Publishers have struggled with trying to make money off digital publishing since the dawn of the Internet. But The New Yorker’s iPad app, which has had strong sales compared to its peers, might be a model to look to when it comes to successfully selling a magazine in digital form.

The New Yorker on Sunday revealed that it had 100,000 iPad readers, including nearly 20,000 who purchased subscriptions for $59.99 a year. On top of … Continue Reading

Scribd’s Float app will replace your news apps

Online document sharing site Scribd announced today that it is releasing Float, a mobile application that pulls content from news and content websites and lays it out in a homogenous reading format.

“The things online that you read aren’t just your PDFs or slide shows, [they include] news content and everything else — we want to bring those in with the content you publish and make it a consistent reading experience,” Matt Riley, Scribd’s director … Continue Reading

Percolate aims to filter the flood of social media information

As social networks multiply, merely staying on top of all the updates is turning into a full-time job. Now a startup, Percolate, aims to distill your personal information flood into a more concentrated brew.

New York-based Percolate aggregates your Google Reader and Twitter feeds, highlighting the links that are most likely to be relevant to you. Its interface makes it easy to add short comments or tags to articles as they appear. In addition, Percolate … Continue Reading

Google confirms acquisition of Admeld

Google confirmed it has signed an agreement to acquire advertising optimization company Admeld.

The revelation came in a blog post written Monday about helping publishers get the most from display advertising.

Admeld’s service allows publishers to pull data about advertising from hundreds of ad networks, ad exchanges, and other sources to see the most- and least-effective ads, which is an area Google’s own services are lacking in despite efforts to improve them.

“The Admeld team … Continue Reading

A milestone for e-books: Amazon sells more Kindle books than print

It was bound to happen eventually. Amazon announced today that it’s now selling more Kindle e-books than both hardcover and paperback books combined.

That’s a major shift for Amazon, which has been selling physical books for more than 15 years but has only been offering e-books for less than four years. Amazon also made it clear that it wasn’t counting free Kindle book sales.

Now for the first time ever, the term “book store” can … Continue Reading

E-book sales triple in February to surpass paper

Sales of e-books in the U.S. tripled over last year to $90.3 million in February — surpassing paper to be the most popular book format among all major trade categories — the Association of American Publishers announced on Thursday.

That’s an impressive amount of growth for e-books — as a point of comparison, e-book sales totaled roughly the same amount ($91 million) for the entire first quarter of 2010, according to the International Digital … Continue Reading

Glam hits $100M revenue, plans to file IPO as early as fall

Glam Media, the media and advertising company focused on women, has hit a run rate of $100 million in annual revenue and plans to file to go public as early as this fall, according to a well-placed source who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Glam is said to be in the early process of hiring bankers to help it with the IPO, but won’t file to go public until after the … Continue Reading

Demand Media buys CoveritLive: content farm meets liveblogging

Notorious content farm Demand Media announced today that it has purchased CoveritLive, a popular “liveblogging” tool used to cover events as they happen. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

CoveritLive events reach over 60 million people monthly, the company said. The tool is used by companies like News Corp, BBC and ESPN to add live commentary and other interactive features to stories. Last week it powered Oscar ceremony content for over 2 million readers … Continue Reading

Vid.ly lets one video work on any device with a short link

Tired of the endless incompatibilities between video files and multimedia devices? Consider Vid.ly, a new service launching today in private beta testing that aims to make distributing your video to a wide variety of devices dead simple.

With Vid.ly, you only need to upload your video once (you can also provide a link to FTP, HTTP, Amazon S3 cloud storage, and Cloud Files). The service then transcodes it to 14 popular web and mobile formats, … Continue Reading

FastPencil's new publishing effort targets big-name authors

Campbell, Calif.-based FastPencil tries to democratize the book world with Web-based book creation and publishing tools. Now it’s trying to go up-market with a new publishing initiative called FastPencil Premiere.

The new service is based on FastPencil’s basic technology, but it’s aimed at established authors and at successful FastPencil users who are ready for a bigger spotlight. Authors can use FastPencil’s collaborative writing tools, or they can just import their manuscript. The books can be … Continue Reading