Categorie: social

MeARKET Lets You Peek At Your Friends’ Stock Portfolios

social, Startups, TC

mearketA new startup called MeARKET wants you to play the stock market with a little help from your friends.

According to CEO Colton Daines, MeARKET is one of those startups that was built in response to a real need in its founders’ lives. Nadav Gur (currently the company’s chairman) had moved to the United States to serve as an entrepreneur in residence at incubator SRI International. He wanted to start investing in the US market, but wasn’t sure where to put his money. So he thought: I’ve got some smart friends. Wouldn’t it be great if I could see their investments?

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Like Vanity Searches? Mention Launches Social Media Monitoring For The Rest Of Us

@mention, apps, social, Social Media, social media monitoring, Startups, TC, Twitter

mention-appStock photo site Fotolia’s founder, Thibaud Elziere, has just invested a small amount into a new company called mention, a social media monitoring service launching today. Elziere is also a co-founder at mention, which was developed by a European team of five, based in Paris and Brussels.

While clearly a crowded space, mention is somewhat different in that it’s targeting individual users and small businesses, as opposed to the enterprise. The business model is a freemium offering, with a certain number of “mentions” free per month, then low rates ranging from $5-$9/month for additional tracking.

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Wildfire Is Huge: First Stats In Years Reveal Social Marketer’s 300 Employees, 13K Customers

social, TC, wildfire

Wildfire LogoThrough the hard-fought battle to represent the world’s brands, social marketing platform Wildfire has stayed quiet. But today, it revealed to TechCrunch that it has 13,000 paying customers, more than any company in the space, and has grown from 7 to 300 employees since the start of 2010, making it as big as industry giant Buddy Media. It’s now ranked in the top 1% on the Glass Door chart of best places to work, and we estimate its 2011 revenues were between $35 and $45 million.

While 13,000 customers sounds impressive, many of those are low-paying monthly campaign clients, not big SaaS deals like other platforms close. To shift more to its lucrative full social media marketing suite, Wildfire has just hired a new CMO Doug Laird, formerly of QlikTech, SAP, Siebel, and Oracle. [Update: I’ve just discovered that Wildfire secretly closed a $10 million Series B round late last year. The round came from existing investors, so it could have included Summit Partners, 500 Startups, Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, or Gary Vaynerchuk. This is the first time this funding has been written about.]

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Social Marketing Platform PromoJam Raises $1.2M From Golden Seeds, Band Of Angels

Enterprise, marketing, promojam, social, Social Media, Startups, TC

pj-logoPromoJam, a social marketing platform for the enterprise that allows businesses to create campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Myspace, has raised $1.2 million in Series A funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by NYC-based Golden Seeds, and included participation from Band of Angels.

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Blurtt Wants You To Express Yourself With Mobile Memes

mobile, social, Startups, TC

Media Image 6A new iPhone app called Blurtt makes it easy to combine words and text — it may not sound like a big deal, but co-founder Jeanette Cajide is pitching it as a new way to express yourself.

After all, she says there are some things that just can’t be communicated in text. (Think of a time when you sent a text message or tweeted, then someone misunderstood and you had to explain, “I was being sarcastic.”) If words aren’t going to do the trick, you can look for an image on Blurtt, which searches Flickr and Bing, or upload a picture of your own. Then you overlay a text message (of up to 100 characters) in the font and location of your choosing.

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Adobe Expands Its Social Analytics Lineup With Adobe Social

social, social analytics, TC

adobe logoMust be something in the air. Less than a day after Google announced that it’s adding social media reports to Google Analytics, Adobe is unveiling its own social analytics tools.

Even though the company is best known for design software like Photoshop and development technologies like Flash, Adobe also pitches itself as a digital marketing company — a point that the company emphasized in its most recent earnings announcement. This week Adobe is hosting its Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City (near the headquarters of Adobe-acquired analytics company Omniture), where it’s announcing the new product, called Adobe Social.

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Balloonduck Is A Much Prettier Twitter For Questions, Looking For 1,500 Beta Users

balloonduck, social, Startups, TC

balloonducklogoI’m notoriously cynical when it comes to new social services and apps. I’m already drowning in the madness of Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and the list goes on and on and on. But every once in a while a service pops up that fills a gap. No, it may not be the next Facebook or Twitter (or maybe it will), but it will make for a fun time when you feel like interacting with others on the interwebs.

This is how I feel about Balloonduck. It’s a brand new service that basically works as a Twitter for questions, with curiosity being the special of the day.

So why not just ask questions on Twitter? That’s the question on your mind and I might as well answer it. Well, I think the fundamental difference is user interface. Balloonduck is a sort of mix between the beauty of Pinterest (albeit horizontally) and the information of Twitter.

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With 4 Million Videos Viewed, Social Video App Vodio Rolls Out Major Update

apps, mobile, social, Startups, TC, Video, vodio

vodio-homeVodio, the social video viewing app for iPad which competes with ShowYou, Shelby.tv, and others, is out with a major update this morning, which brings a number of new features, including a history section, “Watch Later” functionality, a dedicated channel for viewing mobile app videos and even App Store integration that allows you to purchase the apps from the videos you watch.

The company also issued a progress report on its adoption since the iPad app’s January launch. Over 200,000 users have downloaded Vodio to date, and have viewed over 100,000 hours of video across 4 million videos.

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Google Analytics Update Connects Social Marketing With The Bottom Line

social, TC

01 - Social OverviewIf you’ve ever been to an online marketing conference in the past year or so, or even read an article on the subject, you’ve probably heard someone ask, “What’s the ROI on social marketing?” (Alternate version: “What’s the value of a Like or a retweet?”) That’s what the new version of Google Analytics is trying to answer.

Given the increasing importance of social marketing and social network traffic, it was probably inevitable that the Google Analytics team would add social-focused reports. However, Group Product Manger Phil Mui says the new reports take a different approach than most social analytics products, which are more focused on “listening” (i.e., counting mentions, retweets, analyzing sentiment, and so on).

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