Categorie: social

Foursquare And Glancee Are Cool, But Here’s Why I’m So Excited About Using Highlight At SXSW

apps, mobile, social, Startups, TC

Austin SunriseThe crowds and hype of South By Southwest make the massive Austin tech and media conference the perfect place for launching, well, any sort of app that needs crowds and hype to break out of tech circles and into the mainstream. So what can we expect to blow up next week, like Twitter, Foursquare, GroupMe and Beluga have in past years?

Highlight is what I’m placing my bets on — and not for what it is today, but for what it could become. That is, the long-sought replacement for business cards.

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Foursquare And Glancee Are Cool, But Here’s Why I’m So Excited About Using Highlight At SXSW

apps, mobile, social, Startups, TC

Austin SunriseThe crowds and hype of South By Southwest make the massive Austin tech and media conference the perfect place for launching, well, any sort of app that needs crowds and hype to break out of tech circles and into the mainstream. So what can we expect to blow up next week, like Twitter, Foursquare, GroupMe and Beluga have in past years?

Highlight is what I’m placing my bets on — and not for what it is today, but for what it could become. That is, the long-sought replacement for business cards.

Lees meer

Playdom Says Marvel Superheroes Are Super Viral (Among Men)

Gaming, social, TC

marvel avengers allianceSocial game-maker Playdom officially launched Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Thursday, and executive producer Chia Chin Lee says the title is already disproving some of the common assumptions about social games.

The big assumption: that men don’t like to share their activity in social games the way that women do. That could be a problem for Avengers Alliance, since a game about superheroes would probably skew male. But during the beta test period, when the game was played by tens of thousands of users, it actually saw 45 percent more viral installs compared to most Playdom titles, and in fact men were four to six times more likely to send in-game messages.

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Playdom Says Marvel Superheroes Are Super Viral (Among Men)

Gaming, social, TC

marvel avengers allianceSocial game-maker Playdom officially launched Marvel: Avengers Alliance on Thursday, and executive producer Chia Chin Lee says the title is already disproving some of the common assumptions about social games.

The big assumption: that men don’t like to share their activity in social games the way that women do. That could be a problem for Avengers Alliance, since a game about superheroes would probably skew male. But during the beta test period, when the game was played by tens of thousands of users, it actually saw 45 percent more viral installs compared to most Playdom titles, and in fact men were four to six times more likely to send in-game messages.

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How BranchOut Hit The Tipping Point and Grew From 1M to 5.5M Actives In 2 Months

apps, branchout, mobile, social, TC

BranchOut GrowthAt the start of 2012 BranchOut had just 1 million monthly active users. Then the professional networking app hired a dedicated growth team, launched a mobile web app, and hit the network effect tipping point. According to AppData, by February it had 2.7 million MAU. Now the Facebook-based BranchOut is blowing up, riding the employment needs of blue-collar workers past the 10 million registration mark to reach 5.5 million MAU, half from overseas.

Take heed entrepreneurs, this is how you concoct a startup growth formula…

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How BranchOut Hit The Tipping Point and Grew From 1M to 5.5M Actives In 2 Months

apps, mobile, social, TC

BranchOut GrowthAt the start of 2012 BranchOut had just 1 million monthly active users. Then the professional networking app hired a dedicated growth team, launched a mobile web app, and hit the network effect tipping point. According to AppData, by February it had 2.7 million MAU. Now the Facebook-based BranchOut is blowing up, riding the employment needs of blue-collar workers past the 10 million registration mark to reach 5.5 million MAU, half from overseas.

Take heed entrepreneurs, this is how you concoct a startup growth formula…

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How The Cult Of Zuck Will Survive Sheryl’s IPO

facebook, facebook marketing conference, Opinion, social, TC

Facebook F fmc printA tug of war between innovation and monetization as Facebook grows could dilute The Hacker Way, says a paywalled piece from CNN Fortune. But a plan hatched since it filed its S-1 to IPO. Rather than sacrifice the user experience for revenue or vice versa, Facebook is merging the two. Content is being transformed into ads, and those ads are being blended into blank spaces and feeds where they’re less obtrusive.

Scaling a company from 200 20-somethings to 3,000 30-year olds is no cakewalk. If the plan works, though, Facebook could bridge the gap between engineering and advertising, make the company feel a whole lot smaller, and let The Hacker Way live on.

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News.me Is Building A News Social Network Within Its New iPhone App

mobile, social, Startups, TC

news meNews.me, the news service developed in The New York Times’ R&D labs and incubated at betaworks, is launching its iPhone app today.

A bit unusually, the part of the app that you’ll use first may actually be the least interesting. In some ways, the new app is just a redesign of what News.me was already offering through its iPad and email products — a list of news stories, pulled from your Facebook and Twitter streams, then curated based on signals from Twitter and bit.ly, and presented with the context of the initial tweet or Facebook comment.

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Armed With New Funding & A Global Mission, ResearchGate Adds PayPal Co-founder To Board

Matt Cohler, ResearchGATE, science, social, Social Networking, Startups, TC, venture capital

Screen shot 2012-03-01 at 5.54.28 AMAt the 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Benchmark Capital Partner Matt Cohler took to the stage to talk about the state of the venture capital industry. In so doing, Cohler said that he thought too many investors were becoming focused on risk mitigation, which can often deter investors from going after companies that may be building something really big, trying to change the world — but will be slower to monetize and offer the requisite immediate ROI.

He then mentioned that he had recently led an investment in a company called ResearchGate, because when he asked the company’s founder, Ijad Madisch, what would constitute success in his mind, Madish replied, simply, “winning the Nobel Prize.”

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Hot Background Location App Highlight Gets Funding As It Plans SXSW Update

apps, mobile, social, Startups, TC

highlight22122A new generation of location apps is here, just in time for the world’s best event for using them: the South By Southwest music, film and tech extravaganza starting next week in Austin, Texas. Ahead of it, my favorite of the bunch, Highlight, is announcing that it’s pushing out a new version for the event, and bringing in funding.

But before I get into the news, what’s special about Highlight, and competitors like Glancee? Instead of asking you to check in, they simply run in the background, sending notifications to you when interesting people are physically near. For SXSW, these apps can help you sort out the most relevant folks from the crowd.

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