Tag Archive for 'Social Networking'

Facebook is Pushing a Platform Strategy

Facebook is going to go beyond rolling out standalone applications for iPhones, Google Android devices or feature phones and start considering itself a platform for developers to distribute mobile apps with.

“Where we’re going from here is a platform strategy. We’re going away from a one-off app strategy,” said Erick Tseng in his first public appearance since joining Facebook as head of mobile products. Speaking at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference today, he said the company will start building out this effort over the next several months [Source].

Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2010

Software upstarts such as Playdom, Posterous, and Foursquare capitalize on Web users’ desire to make social networks more useful and fun.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s have surveyed the tech sector to identify a fresh crop of the most promising technology startups and the young people, age 30 and under, who are steering them. Seven of the 13 startups on this year’s list are building Web and mobile-device software that extend the capabilities of social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

It’s not surprising that many startups want to ride the coattails of popular social networks. The rapid ascent of traffic to social networking sites can draw lots of attention for startups that offer new tools or diversions to their members. “Facebook and Twitter have become platforms in the same way Microsoft’s Windows became a platform 20 years ago. The complete special report can be found here.

News Browsing by Network Analysis

Intuitively, we all know that big news topics relate to other big news topics–when you read about Google, you’re likely also reading about Microsoft. This new tool from Slate makes those connections a bit more concrete.

News Dots automatically scans all of the articles from major publications, and then tags them using Calais, an automated tagging engine created by Thompson Reuters. When two stories share a tag, it records the results:

The hope, of course, is that as the tool develops, “social networks” will develop in clusters, the same way that Facebook friends tend to cluster around college acquaintance.

The interface is currently hideous. But you wonder if something like this isn’t the future of news browsing. Can you imagine what happens when tagging technology gets truly semantic–when stories can be linked not just with keywords, but ideas? [Source: Flowing Data]

A Global Melting Pot of Ideas

Follow live coverage of the DLD in Munich, Germany, a gathering of 800 entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, scientists, artists and creative minds from around the world.

With global diversity in attendees and an interdisciplinary perspective of digital, media, design, art, science, brands, consumers and society, the conference is known as the European forum for the “creative class”. Follow live coverage here.

America’s Most Promising Startups

entering-startupWant to be the first to know what companies will be the next household name? BusinessWeek has started a section on its webpage that will keep track of promising start-ups that might see the limelight. Flip through the slide show for a look at all the profiles. You can also make a suggestion of a new company worth profiling and send it in to BusinessWeek.

Welcome to America’s Most Promising Startups, an ongoing series profiling new companies from across the country that embody the creativity and resiliency common among today’s entrepreneurs. Based on suggestions from our readers and staffers, we’ll be adding more profiles on a regular basis, so check back often. Our goal is to showcase promising companies before they become household names.

Searching Social Media

seearch-sociallAlready wrote about the real-time web at this post. Now Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s search service are preparing real-time searches of Twitter and Facebook posts. Targeted ads could follow.

Naver (The popular Korean search engine) already incorporated this functionality a long time ago. Naver displays its search results in various categories, such as results found on blogs.

Nonetheless, in a bid to stay relevant in the face of these shifts, Google and Microsoft said on 21 October that they will incorporate information culled from social media sites into search pages. Microsoft said its Bing search engine will let users search for Twitter posts known as tweets and, later, for status updates posted to Facebook pages. The same day, Google said it too will include Twitter updates in search results and that it will begin offering a social search tool that delivers information posted by a searcher’s friends on social sites [Source]. We live in again in exciting times: Real-Time web. =)

Facebook Turns Into Profitability

FB_missionThe world’s largest social networking site just got bigger with the announcement it has 300 million active monthly users from around the globe [Source] and [Source].

The Real-Time Web

real_time_webNo one knows how the microblogging site and similar online social networks will make money, but investors see a new Web revolution: (the real-time Web).

When entrepreneurs and investors get excited about what they’re calling the real-time Web, they’re talking about services that combine immediacy and social connections in a way that makes them easy and even addictive (amongst others are twitter and facebook).

Real-time Web startups are providing everything from basic utilities and business applications to search and e-commerce. Here’s a look at this new generation. And at this webpage you can find an introduction to the real-time web.

Age of collaboration

collaborative_technologyOne-to-one concepts are looking increasingly dated. Smart companies are now striving to enable many-to-many technology, tools and services.

Smart companies are looking at ways to enable many-to-many relationships between employees. This comes under the umbrella of collaborative technology, tools and services that are designed to be shared by groups of people. Those people may be employees within the organisation but also employees of suppliers and even clients. For an overview of collaborative technology forms click here.

Elevating Social Media

elevating_social_mediaWhen most company bosses think about Facebook, Twitter and all those other oh-so-fashionable darlings of the social world, it is usually about how they stop their employees wasting their valuable time on those sites.

Yet a small but growing number of chief executives are coming to realise that social networks offer significant opportunities for marketing and selling their products, for engaging with their customers at a deep level and for using them to guide new product development. Read more.