Auteur: Anthony Ha

Dynamic Signal Launches VoiceStorm To Manage Employees’ Social Media Promotion Efforts

Dynamic Signal, Enterprise, Russ Fradin, social, Startups, TC, VoiceStorm

voicestorm logoDynamic Signal, the social marketing company led by Adify co-founder Russ Fradin, is launching a new product today called VoiceStorm that encourages, manages, and measures employees’ efforts to promote a company on social networks.

Fradin told me that VoiceStorm is functionally similar to Dynamic Signal’s existing platform, which helps companies run word-of-mouth marketing campaigns — it’s just built for employees rather than customers or fans. Basically, Fradin aims to replace all those team emails and in-person encounters where someone is nudging everyone else into tweeting something, posting it on Facebook, and so on.

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Marshall Kirkpatrick’s ‘Hey Big Fish’ Project Highlights Influential People And Tweets At SXSWi

little bird, social, TC, Waggener Edstrom

BigFishSouth by Southwest Interactive is coming up this weekend, and that usually means a flood of content on Twitter — some of it interesting and relevant to you, much of it not. If you’re starting to feel overwhelmed by all the social media noise, one new tool to try out is Hey Big Fish, a website created by startup Little Bird, design firm Tater Tot Designs, and PR agency Waggener Edstrom Worldwide.

The goal, according to Little Bird founder Marshall Kirkpatrick (a former editor at ReadWriteWeb and an early writer at TechCrunch), is to give people a place where they can “just go and see the hottest conversation by the most influential people at South by Southwest.”

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Marshall Kirkpatrick’s ‘Hey Big Fish’ Project Highlights Influential People And Tweets At SXSWi

Hey Big Fish, little bird, social, TC, Waggener Edstrom

BigFishSouth by Southwest Interactive is coming up this weekend, and that usually means a flood of content on Twitter — some of it interesting and relevant to you, much of it not. If you’re starting to feel overwhelmed by all the social media noise, one new tool to try out is Hey Big Fish, a website created by startup Little Bird, design firm Tater Tot Designs, and PR agency Waggener Edstrom Worldwide.

The goal, according to Little Bird founder Marshall Kirkpatrick (a former editor at ReadWriteWeb and an early writer at TechCrunch), is to give people a place where they can “just go and see the hottest conversation by the most influential people at South by Southwest.”

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Let’s Date Adds A ‘Wingman’ Feature For People Who Just Want To Recommend Dates For Friends

let's date, mobile, sean suhl, social, Startups, TC

Lets Date Wingman SharingLet’s Date, the iPhone dating app founded by Suicide Girls co-creator Sean Suhl and backed by Los Angeles incubator Science, Inc., is releasing its first significant update since the app’s national launch a month ago. The big focus — allowing friends to recommend potential dates to each other.

First of all, regular users will now be able to make these recommendations. If you find someone who might interest a friend, you can share that person’s dater card (that’s Let’s Date’s distilled version of a user profile) as a link via SMS or email.

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With 200K Stories Shared, Storylane Launches An iPhone Reading App

mobile, social, Startups, storylane, TC

storylaneLast year, Storylane launched a site for users to share stories that are a little more thoughtful or serious than what you’d find on other social media properties. And thanks to a recently launched iPhone app, you can now browse those stories when you’re on-the-go.

The concept behind Storylane is pretty straightforward  — founder Jonathan Gheller wants it to be the home for personal thoughts and stories that go deeper than a quick Facebook or Twitter update. The site prompts users to answer questions like “What have you learned from your failed relationships?” and “What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in life?” You can follow individual users to see their stories, and there are also pages to browse trending content across the whole site and within individual topics. You can’t post full comments, but you can hit buttons to say that you liked a story, or that it inspired you, and so on.

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Koozoo Aims To Build A Live Video Network With 24-Hour Footage From Old Phones

kooozoo, mobile, social, Startups, TC

koozoo home screenKoozoo is launching today in San Francisco and Austin with a new twist on social video.

The emphasis here is on utility, rather than performance and entertainment (though it can be entertaining too). Wouldn’t it be useful to know if the weather is nice at a nearby park? (Hmm, maybe that example is mostly effective in San Francisco, thanks to its microclimates?) Or whether a nearby store or restaurant is particularly crowded? Koozoo founder and CEO Drew Sechrist is trying to build up a network of live video streams that can give you that information.

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Sharethrough Launches A Native Ad Leaderboard To Highlight The Sponsored Content That’s Most Shared

advertising, sharethrough, SimpleReach, social, Startups, TC

native advertising leaderboard logoSharethrough, a startup that’s focused on native advertising (a topic that CEO Dan Greenberg has discussed in several TechCrunch guest columns), is launching a new way to browse the most popular native ads.

The Native Advertising Leaderboard is based on information that’s publicly available through the APIs of various social platforms, Greenberg said — it turns that data into “a daily news feed for anyone (brands/agencies/pubs/editors) who wants to keep their finger on the pulse of the native advertising and brand content movement.” Basically, it looks at the feeds of sponsored content from sites like BuzzFeed, Mashable, and Forbes, and ranks that content based on how much it has been shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks.

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Navigation App Waze Adds Road Closure Reporting Feature, Says It Now Has 40M Users

mobile, social, TC, waze

waze road closureWaze, the app that uses crowdsourced data to build its maps and provide real-time traffic information, is introducing a new feature today allowing users to report road closures.

This seems like a pretty natural extension of what Waze does — drivers could already report things like accidents, so this is just giving them another way to get important information into the system. In fact, spokesperson Michal Habdank-Kolaczkowski told me that users were already doing in an ad hoc way, where the names of roads would be edited so they said (for example), “Capitol Ave CLOSED FOR CONSTRUCTION.”

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Ad-free Social Platform App.net Goes Freemium With Free, Invite-Only Plan

App.net, Dalton Caldwell, social, Startups, TC

app net logoApp.net, the project that emerged from founder Dalton Caldwell’s desire to build a social platform that wasn’t driven by advertising, is adding its first free option today.

Given Caldwell’s emphasis on creating a product that people are actually willing to pay for, this might seem like a step backwards, or one of those infamous startup “pivots.” However, Caldwell told me that this actually isn’t a change of plans, and to back that up he pointed to his initial blog post announcing the project back in July. The post didn’t explicitly say that that there are going to be both paid and free tiers, but the two positive examples of non-advertising companies that Caldwell cited are Dropbox and particularly Github, which both offer free services and then charge for additional features.

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AdRoll Warns Against Betting Too Heavily On Facebook’s Ad Exchange

Adroll, advertising, facebook, social, TC

adroll infographicRetargeting company AdRoll has released some data today intended to suggest that advertisers shouldn’t rush too quickly to embrace Facebook Exchange (the ad retargeting service that the social network launched last year) — at least not at the expense of other forms of retargeting.

That’s probably what you’d expect to hear from a company with a profitable business in web retargeting (where ads are targeted based on your previous online behavior). However, AdRoll was also an early Facebook Exchange partner, and it says that it has run Exchange campaigns for more than 700 advertisers. (Facebook said last month that there are more than 1,300 total advertisers on Exchange.) So the data it’s releasing today is based on 468 campaigns from the past six months that ran simultaneously on Facebook and the web.

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