Tag Archive for 'Social Networking'

Klout raising new $30M round at a $200M valuation

Klout, the startup best known for its ability to measure a person’s online influence, might be raising a new, third round of investment that would significantly add to the company’s total funding and valuation.

Klout works by measuring a person’s activity on a variety of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn Google+ and others. Based on that individual’s interaction within those social networks, Klout calculates the true reach of that person’s communications and issues them a 1 to 100 Klout score.

A company spokesperson told VentureBeat it doesn’t comment on rumors. However, the new round, possibly led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from IVP, might be as high as $30 million at a $200 million valuation, according to a report from Business Insider [Source].

Google close to launching music service

Google is reportedly preparing to launch its own Mp3 store, according to the New York Times. Citing unnamed “music executives,” the report said Thursday that the company will open the store in the next several weeks [Read more].

Music is becoming a key part of Google’s drive for dominance online. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple are all locked in a race to become the one-stop shop for social, shopping, media and communication. Amazon has a cloud music player that’s hooked into its huge library of tracks. Facebook recently announced integration with Spotify, which will let users listen to music together with their friends [Read more].

Are Google and Facebook splintering the social web?

Facebook is in the process of rolling out a sweeping series of changes to the way users can control their profiles and content-sharing on the massive social network. Among other things, the changes allow users to selectively share status updates or content with certain groups of friends, just as Google+ introduced the idea of Circles, which allow users of that network to segregate the people they follow into specific groups. These kinds of features are seen by many as a positive step for privacy — but will they make people less likely to share what they are doing with the public at large? And how will that affect the social web [Source]?

New Apps Aim for Social Serendipity In Real Life

People have created a web of connections online through social networks. But a new wave of apps aim to help people create spontaneous connections when they arrive at specific locations, giving rise to temporary social networks that are built around a place and a time.

LoKast, a proximity-based media sharing service, is updating its mobile app today to enable local chatting among strangers and other social tools. Two of the start-ups at TechCrunch Disrupt this week Karizma and Sonar showed off the ability for people to connect with others right around them for video chats or live interactions. A couple of months back, Color made a splash in the photo-sharing app space with the promise of letting people share pictures with the people immediately around them.

We’ve already seen some of this momentum with apps like Yobongo, a new chatting app that brings people together in one area. Local question and community-assisted recommendations sites like LocalMind and CrowdBeacon help get answers for people from the nearby community. Gay dating app Grindr also works to bring people together locally. But many of those are targeted on a larger area, not just built around one specific location [Source].

Visa Is Making The E-Wallet Real

We’ve heard a lot about the notion of a digital wallet, but the tech itself seems slow to arrive apart from one or two regional experiments, and the promise of more exciting tech in the future. Now Visa’s changing all that with a new plan to make the e-wallet, including wireless payments, a reality–and soon, too.

Visa, which calls itself a “global leader in electronic payments” has just announced what it’s calling the “next generation of payments solutions.” It means, quite specifically, the technology and financial data infrastructure that’ll supplant the little card payment machines we’re all used to swiping our card through to pay at a checkout or restaurant–a tech that’s being swiftly overtaken by digital commerce, mobile commerce, and “burgeoning social networking commerce environments.” Basically Visa’s seen the writing on the wall for the way its credit card systems currently work, and is planning to reinvent everything into a “secure cross-channel digital wallet” and a “range of customized mobile payments services” tailored to local markets around the world. This is a good thing for us consumers, and probably a shrewd business move by Visa itself.

The new digital wallet will arrive in the U.S. and Canada in the fall of 2011, and it’ll work by storing Visa and non-Visa payments data. It will support NFC payments through Visa’s payWave system and it’ll cover all sorts of payment situations, including e-commerce, mobile commerce, micropayments, social networks, and person-to-person payments. A long list of financial institutions are already on board, including U.S. Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada–indicating this really is a thing that’s happening, rather than a far-fetched patent [Source].

Video’s Future Is Social

Google is acquiring Fflick, a startup that provides movie recommendations based upon users’ Twitter feeds in a deal that could enable the search giant to incorporate sentiment analysis and social considerations into its content discovery process.

Fflick is just one of many new socially driven recommendations engines that have emerged over the past year or so; websites and apps like Miso, Philo, GetGlue, yap.TV and Comcast’s Tunerfish have emerged as a way to get users to log their media usage and share it with friends.

Through all of these launches, one thing is clear: Increasingly, content discovery will come through personalised recommendations that incorporate social networks. By purchasing Fflick, Google is buying into this idea, which could help it improve video discovery, recommendations and targeting on YouTube, Google TV products and even through its traditional search engine.

At another front, former Facebook executive backs BlipSnips social video service. Despite the hoopla about how everything on the Web is becoming increasingly social, BlipSnips chief executive John Bliss said that online video remains a remarkably un-social experience — and that’ s a problem BlipSnips is trying to solve [Source].

A related article can be found on MIT Technology Review Searching for the Future of Television and Google’s Video Play.

Facebook Credits: Virtual Goods Are Just the Beginning

Facebook is ready to go big with its Facebook Credits virtual currency: the company announced that all developers will have to use the credits in their apps starting July 1st. The move takes Facebook Credits out of beta and will make it the main payment system for all apps, with Facebook getting a 30 percent cut of the action [Source].

But the transition to Facebook Credits is not just about Facebook getting a cut of Farmville virtual transactions. This is about Facebook ultimately starting its own online payment system that could be used to buy a lot of different goods and stretch beyond the boundaries of the social network [Source].

Facebook has the opportunity to drive a lot of payments through its Credits, not just virtual currencies. As businesses set-up shop on Facebook, the social network could use its payment system as the preferred system for buying goods, movie tickets or digital content. In addition to advertising, this could be the big play for Facebook as it looks to grow its revenues.

Gearing Up for the Coming Tech Boom


Amongst others, VC firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is gearing up for the coming tech boom. That’s one of the reasons they hired famous Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as a new partner on Monday [Source].

Meeker said: “We’re at the beginning of another great wave of tech innovation and I am incredibly excited by the opportunity to help the next generation of Internet technologies and leaders.” [Source]

Gordon (partner @ Kleiner) said he sees a big boom coming, not a bubble, much like Kleiner’s managing partner John Doerr, who said that we’re in the midst of yet another boom for internet investments at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. The reason is that he sees a lot of technologies that are changing the way we live.

“The world of digital media is being transformed,” Gordon said. “A bunch of new businesses can be reinvented, thanks to social graphs, the mobile internet, and the new shopping habits of the young. Those are going to create a whole generation of cool new companies.” [Source]

Read related articles:
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The Web Is Reborn (HTML 5)
Web Browsing is turning into Social Browsing
US$250 Million sFund
The Future of the Internet
Google Gets Semantic
Facebook is Pushing a Platform Strategy

Web Browsing is turning into Social Browsing

In a recent study of 21-29 year old females, there was a surprising number spending as many as five hours per day on Facebook, with much of that activity being what the respondents nearly all called “nosing around” (called “social browsing”).

This largely consists of seeing what your friends are or were up to: Reading status updates, clicking and watching video links, shuffling through photos of friends’ nights out and comparing those nights to ones own.

To people familiar with Facebook, this behaviour, of course, is not unexpected. But what there can be found most interesting about it was that, for this group, social browsing had largely replaced all other forms of web browsing.

What’s most important about this behaviour, from a brand marketing perspective at least, is that when many of these women needed to look something up—information on a venue, or a band, or a consumer brand—they were more likely to look first for information on the site where they were already spending all their time: Facebook.

What does this kind of behavior mean for online marketers? Well, for starters, brands primarily interested in targeting a younger, female demographic should focus on building brand Facebook pages at least as comprehensive as their brand websites [Source].

Real-Time Measurement of Public Opinion

Harvard-Developed Tool Measures Real-Time Public Opinion on Social Media.

Crimson Hexagon analyses online conversations about a given subject using its unique “statistical human-assisted approach.” Developed at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the technology originally began as the “hyper-accurate estimation, classification, and quantification of unstructured data,” says company CEO Scott Centurino, which, in non-science speak, just means the measurement of public opinion from unsolicited data.

The company uses sophisticated algorithms and dynamic dashboards to dig through and track massive amounts of information in real-time [Source].

“There’s a real value in tapping into these millions or billions of conversations online, where people are talking openly and honestly about what’s important to them,” says Centurino. “Our real kick comes from being able to understand the underlying themes from those conversations, so you can actually act on them. If all I know is that negative things are being said, what can I possibly do with that information?”