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Facebook’s Revenue Growth Strategy: Ad Targeting By In-App Behavior

admin2 — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:00:39 +0000

Facebook has an answer to those wondering how it will justify its IPO price and keep revenues growing as it saturates key markets: a new behavioral ad targeting system. Facebook has been quietly rolling out the beta of “Open Graph action spec targeting” which allows advertisers to target users by what they listen to, where they travel, what they buy, and other in-app activity. These behaviors can more accurately denote conversion potential than a user’s biography or interests, That means Open Graph action spec ad targeting could turn finding a needle in a haystack into shooting fish in a barrel. The targeting options could improve the ROI of Facebook ads, and thereby attract a new class of advertisers, get existing ones to spend more, and pull in dollars from search, display, and offline channels. Since Facebook has already exhausted much of the supply of highly monetizable first world users, it will need to make more money per user to grow revenue. Higher click through and conversion rates of action spec targeted ads will allow Facebook to charge advertisers more per click and waste fewer impressions to get those clicks. It’s also expanding ad inventory by complementing its ad sidebars with Sponsored Story ads in the web news feed, and it will likely monetize its mobile user base in the same way. By serving more ads at a higher cost per click, ad revenue will grow with time. Until the launch of action spec targeting, advertisers looking to target those with purchase intent often went to search or ad networks employing cookie retargeting that scraped a user’s browsing history. Facebook only offered biographic, social, and interest targeting. These are effective for institutional brand advertising and demand generation, but aren’t as useful for reaching users in the purchase funnel. Direct response performance advertisers sometimes had to buy large volumes of clicks to drive one conversion. Open Graph action spec targeting will help these Facebook advertisers reach users who’ve stated they’ve already made a related purchase, or plan to. This could help it break out of the demand generation stage of the purchase funnel and into the more lucrative demand fulfillment stage where Google search ads currently reign. Some Facebook advertising experts tell me action spec targeting could double ad conversion rates. At f8, Facebook announced that advertisers using the Facebook Ads API for buying large campaigns could layer existing targeting parameters targeting users who’ve taken any of the 3 official launch actions : ‘listened’, ‘read’, and ‘watched’ through apps like Spotify , The Washington Post Social Reader, and Hulu. For example, ads could be targeted to anyone who ‘listened’ to ‘Lady Gaga’ or ‘The Rolling Stones’ on Spotify. This was useful for advertisers from these verticals, such a record labels, concert promoters, book publishers, and television networks. Now that 60 new partnered apps have launched and Facebook has begun approving non-partnered apps and their actions, a much wider range of advertisers will be able to make use of behavioral targeting. Airlines could target those who said they “wishlisted” Barcelona via Gogobot, a fashion retailer could target those who “bought” a specific purse via Payvment, and restaurants could target anyone who “wanted” a burger at a competitor’s restaurant via Foodspotting. Advertisers with their own Open Graph apps have the most to gain. For example, Groupon already runs huge Facebook ad campaigns, but now has an app through which users can take the action of “buying” deals. Groupon could now retarget ads at any user who has already bought a deal through its app. That audience of previous buyers likely has a much higher conversion rate than its Facebook Page fans or any biographical demographic. Open Graph action targeting is still in beta so the technical side is bit tricky. There’s no browsable database of Open Graph apps, actions, and objects to target, so advertisers need to find their Open Graph ID numbers by clicking on them in an existing activity story. Third-party developers of Facebook Ads API platforms and services like Nanigans , TBG Digital , and AdParlor are trying to make it easier by creating pre-defined audience segments that advertisers can target. It will take a few years for behavioral targeting to start boosting revenues. More Open Graph apps need to launch and gain traction so there’s something to target, Ads API platforms need to adapt, and the benefits of behavioral targeting will need to be proven before ad spend starts to shift towards the system. Some users might not be thrilled about being targeted by their app activity. However, they opt into using these apps, and might as well see relevant ads if they’re going to see them anyway. In the end Facebook, advertisers, and users will all win. Facebook will boost revenues, advertisers will be able to better reach their customers, and users will see more relevant ads based on activity in apps they voluntarily installed, rather than cookies dropped on them without permission. [Image Credit: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy , Acquisio ]

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Facebook’s Revenue Growth Strategy: Ad Targeting By In-App Behavior

Daily Crunch: Fine Tune

admin2 — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:00:11 +0000

Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: Peavey Builds An Auto-Tuning Guitar FlatFrog Offers Up A New Multitouch Table Self-Guided Bullet Could Strike Laser-Designated Targets From A Mile Away Years After Being Dropped, ZFS Finds Its Way Back To The Mac Apple Is Totally Serious About That Stuff They Put At The End Of Their Emails

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Daily Crunch: Fine Tune

Someone Finally Makes “Shit Silicon Valley Says”

bestcbstore — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:25:33 +0000

After an onslaught of “Shit [blank] Says” videos in my Facebook Newsfeed, I appealed to Twitter yesterday, surprised that the industry that invented YouTube hadn’t weighed in on the phenomenon. Little did I know that husband and wife team Tom Conrad and Kate Imbach were already on it, coming up with the idea on Monday morning and shooting yesterday, with no script (Imbach just said random techy things and Conrad spliced them together into this in edit). While I really like “I saw it on Techmeme ” and “Who throws a party in Palo Alto?” (Seriously though, who does that?) avid TechCrunch reader Hillel Fuld volunteered his top 13. “I don’t think you can call that a platform yet.” “I already reblogged that. I reblogged it AND RTed it. I RTed it, reblogged it, and checked into it.” “This app is so elegant.” “It’s stealth so I can’t say too too much right now.” “Ashton invested.” “I don’t really get Tumblr.” “He had his first exit when he was 9.” “He made an Instagram for hamburgers.” “Airbnb for Facebook games.” “A Netflix for Youtube.” “I check in on Path, and then I send it to Foursquare. I also send it to Tumblr, and Tumblr auto posts to Twitter and Facebook. Then you can go onTwitter, RT and share it on Facebook”. “Do they even have an API yet?” “I saw it on TechCrunch” “I heard myself explaining my Path / Instagram / Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook / FourSquare cross-posting strategy and decided it was time for someone to take us all down a peg or two,” says 8Tracks Marketing VP Imbach. Interestingly enough, Conrad also works at a music-focused tech startup — as CTO of Pandora. Sidenote:I’m currently shooting the shit with another tech reporter, making up our own versions in Skype: “It’s viral,”””Our business model *is* data,””We met at Stanford” and “We’re totally hockeysticking right now.” It’s a pretty fun game. Full list (via reader Dwight Burks) below: Are you cancelling cable? I don’t really think you can call it a platform yet… I already reblogged that. I reblogged it and retweeted it. I retweeted it, reblogged it, and I checked in to it. This app is so elegant Are you gonna get the new Kindle? I saw it on TechCrunch. I met him at LeWeb. I met him at Burning Man. Wait, no, I met him at Davos. Was it Davos, or LeWeb? I get those two confused. Or maybe it was the Lobby. I don’t know. There was a beach. It’s stealth, so I can’t say too, too much right now. Ashton invested. How is this different from Facebook? They don’t even have a Foursquare venue for their apartment. I don’t really ‘get’ Tumblr. Is the Internet down? Michelle Obama invested. Did you see this thing on Quora about product cycles? I didn’t even finish high school. He’s like 14. He had is first exit when he was 9. Think of it like an Instagram for Hamburgers. He’s a genius. It’s like Pandora for cats. Are you gonna get the new iPhone? I think Bono invested. I got an MBA from Harvard The whole Royal Family invested. It’s like AirBnb for Facebook games. I saw it on Techmeme. Who has a party in Palo Alto? Think of it as a Netflix for YouTube. How is this different from Rdio? I have such an amazing team. Do you have an iPhone charger? I miss seasons. I saw it on Laughing Squid. I check in on Path, and then I send it to Four Square. I also send it to Tumblr and then Tumblr auto-posts to Twitter and Facebook. Then you can go on Twitter or you can re-tweet it and share on Facebook. Have you seen Helvetica. Do they even have an API yet? He dropped out of middle school to start his company. Can you just call in Uber?

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Someone Finally Makes “Shit Silicon Valley Says”

Biz Stone, 500 Startups And Others Put $1M In CRM For Web Businesses Intercom

Budowniczy425 — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:00:03 +0000

CRM and 500 Startups incubated company Intercom has raised a seed round of $1 million from angel investors including twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Huddle founder Andy McLoughlin, Dan Martell, 500 Startups and Digital Garage. Intercom’s customer relationship management tool (CRM) is designed specifically for web businesses. The web-based SaaS features Google Analytics-like integration so that its database of customers is always automatically up-to-date, tracking every interaction. With its flexible filtering function, users can be segmented into groups for whom the business has different goals (i.e. converting free users into paying customers). Here’s how the startup differs from the standard CRMs. Intercom get its data from a JavaScript snippet that users add to the applications, similar to Google Analytics. As a result of this, the platform automatically learns a businesses’ customer base, and how they use a product. Intercom includes the ability to contact customers directly from the product itself, so if you see a high-profile user signing up, greeting him with a personal message in the app is super simple. You can also create messages based on rules within the app. For example “show users this message when they have spent more than $100″ , or “show all users with more than 1,000 twitter followers this message”. In order to figure out who a businesses’ users are, Intercom will track activity data of how often customers use an app, business data pertaining to what plan are they on and/or how much money have they spent, social network profile data and communications and contact data. All of this data, combined with the features mentioned above, will help online businesses convert trial users to paid accounts, and to grow a long-term relationship with customers, explains CEO and co-founder Eoghan McCabe. For example, beta customers like GitHub are using Intercom’s messaging features to learn about and engage with their customers—individually and automatically, at scale. The Intercom product, which has been in private beta, currently has 1,500 active users from 500 companies, tracking and communicating with over 1 million customers. “Intercom brings real human relationships back into the picture for web businesses and their customers,” says McCabe. “As ‘software eats the world,’ in the words of Marc Andreessen, and all businesses become web businesses, genuinely personal and personalized customer service is the most effective, long-lasting way for companies to differentiate their offering and fight commodification.” McCabe and his co-founders Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett all hail from Ireland and previously founders created error tracking service Exceptional, which was acquired in 2011. Today, Intercom will be available to the public and will be free until the first full version of the product launches this summer.

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Biz Stone, 500 Startups And Others Put $1M In CRM For Web Businesses Intercom

Timehop, A Time Machine For Your Social Media Updates, Gets $1.1M From Foursquare Founders And Others

admin2 — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 01:11:57 +0000

Timehop, a startup that humbly began as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, has just bagged a $1.1 million round of seed funding by OATV (Bryce Roberts) and followed on by Spark Capital (Andrew Parker) and a pretty worth list of angels including Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai and Alex Rainert, Groupme’s Steve Martocci and Jared Hecht, Rick Webb and Kevin Slavin. Timehop was part of the TechStars NYC winter class. The startup started out aggregating user Foursquare checkins from a year ago in a daily email and recently broadened to included Facebook status updates, photos, Twitter updates and Instagram posts. It’s actually pretty amazing that Crowley and Sevadurai have gone in, as the startup was created at a Foursquare hackathon about a year ago. “I love what those guys are doing and I love that it’s one of the first breakout apps using our API,” Crowley said on why he invested. He also tweeted out this pretty humorous explanation about why he likes the service yesterday (before the funding was announced). My @ timehop daily email just made me literally LOL. (on a checkin from 12 months ago, "smells like cats in here")— Dennis Crowley (@dens) January 23, 2012 “We’re building Timehop into the best way of recording, remembering, and reconnecting around our digital histories,” co-founder Jonathan Wegener told me, “The data exhaust of today’s services can tell your life story, but so far this data remains disaggregated and silo’d across devices and services. The ‘history’ sections of most websites leave a lot to be desired and represent an opportunity to build a service that helps you celebrate the past and reconnect with others around it.” Sure some have pointed out that Timehop really doesn’t solve a problem (there’s a whole Quora thread on it here ). To that Wegener responds, “Asking what ‘problem’ Timehop solves may be asking the wrong question. That’s the equivalent of asking “what problem do photographs solve?” Clearly taking photos is a mainstream and frequent activity, but it doesn’t really solve a ‘problem’ but rather scratches a deeply human itch. Timehop scratches that same itch.” Wegener plans on using the funding to add another two or three engineers to the Timehop team and further integrating the product with other services.

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Timehop, A Time Machine For Your Social Media Updates, Gets $1.1M From Foursquare Founders And Others

Fitness Tracker Fitbit Raises $12M To Market New Wi-Fi Enabled Smart Scale, Aria

Administrator — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:59:30 +0000

Fitness technology startup and TechCrunch 50 finalist Fitbit has raised $12 Million in Series C funding from existing investors Foundry Group, True Ventures, SoftTech VC and Felicis Ventures. The company offers a device called the Fitbit Tracker and a companion web-based fitness data aggregation technology that tracks weight, nutrition, exercise, sleeping schedules and other health related data for users (you can read more about how Fitbit works here. ) The Fitbit Tracker is a compact wearable device that clips onto clothing or slips into a pocket and captures, through accelerometer technology, information about daily health activities, such as steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, exercise intensity levels and sleep quality. The activity data collected by the Fitbit Tracker can then be wirelessly uploaded to the Fitbit website where users access all of the data and track progress toward personal and group goals. Users can also log nutrition, weight and other health information on the site in order to gain a complete picture of their health. The Fitbit API, which was released last year , allows third-party developers to integrate Fitbit data in their own applications, products and services and also to read and write data for users’ Fitbit activities, food logs and other data in real time. Last Fall, Fitbit debuted a new version of its tracking device, called the Ultra . The device’s successor is slightly more accurate than the old version and also measures exercises better including more aerobic activities like floor workouts and running. And at CES a few weeks ago, Fitbit debuted a new contraption —a wi-fi enabled scale called the Aria. The Aria, which costs $129.99, will transmit both weight and body fat measurements wirelessly to your FitBit account. In terms of measuring body fat, the scale has four transparent electrodes which shoot a safe low current through body and measures resistance to current, determining how much body fat you have. You simply open up the Fitbit iOS or Android app via your mobile phone when close to the scale and the Aria will transmit the data to your FitBit account. So you no longer need to manually input this data on the web (or mobile) and the platform can get a more accurate view of your fitness. As founder James Park explains, consumers were asking for the ability to close the feedback loop and the scale allows for that. The Aria will ship in April, and will most probably also be included in a set package with the tracker. Currently, the FitBit is available in over 5,000 locations including Target, Best Buy, Brookstone and REI and Park says we can expect the Aria to be on sale in those locations. He adds that the FitBit Ultra is also now sold in Canada and the UK. “We’ve moved beyond being a single product company and are creating incredible digital health products and experiences. This funding will help us accelerate the hiring of the best hardware and software engineers, designers, product managers and marketers,” Park explains. The new capital will be used scale the Aria, and for additional hiring. Check out our TechCrunchTV video with TechCrunch’s John Biggs and Park from CES below.

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Fitness Tracker Fitbit Raises $12M To Market New Wi-Fi Enabled Smart Scale, Aria

BigCommerce Establishes $2 Million Fund For Developers

vertical8 — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:42:48 +0000

Exclusive – E-commerce platform company BigCommerce has set up a $2 million fund for developers. With the launch of the fund, the Sydney, Australia-based company aims to sway third-party developers into submitting their integration and application ideas for Web, mobile or desktop apps that make use of the BigCommerce API . Caveat: investments in successful entries are capped at $20,000 per project. According to BigCommerce, applications will be assessed on “their ability to drive more traffic to stores running on BigCommerce as well as their ability to integrate BigCommerce with existing systems and applications already used by business owners”. BigCommerce currently integrates with more than 100 applications , including Facebook, eBay, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, SurveyMonkey and more.

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BigCommerce Establishes $2 Million Fund For Developers

With SimpleGeo’s Shutdown Imminent, Parse Swoops In With A Life Preserver

Budowniczy425 — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 01:17:14 +0000

Yesterday Urban Airship announced that it would be shutting down SimpleGeo on March 31 2012, only a few months after acquiring the company for around $3.5 million. The news irked plenty of developers — you can find a thread on Hacker News here where some SimpleGeo customers are voicing their frustration. So what are developers supposed to do now? Urban Airship’s blog post outlines a few options, including a partnership with Factual to port over any Places data developers might have stored on SimpleGeo. But SimpleGeo also has a handful of other classes of data, like Storage, that Factual can’t be used for. Now Parse is stepping in to try to help out (and snag) any customers looking to figure out where to move next. Parse is a well-funded , developer-facing service that’s designed to help build applications efficiently. It aims to handle the back-end tasks associated with creating mobile applications (things like user accounts and, in this case, server-side storage), which allows mobile devs to focus on the app itself. In their FAQ announcing SimpleGeo’s shutdown, Urban Airship suggested other tools to handle Storage, including Google Fusion Tables, GeoCommons, Oracle Spatial, and Esri ArcGIS. But Parse cofounder Tikhon Bernstam says that the tools on the list ”are all bad”. He explains that in the case of the aforementioned services, developers will be responsible for migrating their data off of SimpleGeo. He adds that none of these services offer a mobile SDK, and in some cases developers are expected to host the data themselves, or pay for pricey database storage. Parse’s tool, which they whipped up yesterday afternoon, is a lot easier than that: you just have to enter your SimpleGeo API keys, and it’ll transfer all of your data over in one step. Obviously this isn’t a purely benevolent move — Parse sees an opportunity to get a bunch of new users — but it could help reduce a few headaches nonetheless. You can see a video of the tool in action below.

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With SimpleGeo’s Shutdown Imminent, Parse Swoops In With A Life Preserver

Keen On….The Three Winners Of The AT&T Hackathon: Innovation, Innovation and Innovation

jos — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:43:07 +0000

As Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute noted in a recent report about “scale and innovation”, today’s digital economy favors large companies because growth depends to the establishment of ecosystems built around operating systems like Android or iPhone. But it’s not just large new media companies like Google and Apple that can benefit from these large ecosystems; older, more established media and technology companies like Verizon, Pearson, Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T also have this same advantage over smaller start-ups to radically innovate through their extensive ecosystems. The innovative strength of AT&T ecosystem was demonstrated earlier this week at CES during their Hackathon – an event that attracted over 150 developers to create apps built on the AT&T mobile network. The three Hackathon finalists, who I interviewed after the results were announced, including the ultimate winner Active X-Ray which deployed the mobile network’s mHealth API to create an injury evaluation mobile app, off AT&T’s mHealth platform . But AT&T’s ecosystem goes beyond the security and richness of their APIs. Not only did the two San Diego based developers behind Active X-Ray win $20,000, but they also won the opportunity to build out their app at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto, one of the new innovation centers that they have opened to enable developers and entrepreneurs to partner in the AT&T ecosystem. Tomorrow, we will broadcast my interview with the Palo Alto based People Power , the very impressive winner of AT&T’s $20,000 Power The Future mobility app competition.

iHeartRadio Launches Developer API

kram412 — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:05:19 +0000

Clear Channel’s streaming radio service, iHeartRadio , is launching its developer program today, which includes an API that allows third parties to integrate iHeartRadio’s content and services into their own products, websites and applications. iHeartRadio now offers over 850 radio stations across the U.S. from 150 cities. With the new API, developers can access several of the service’s features, including its live broadcast and digital-only stations, its “custom stations” feature and social media integration. With the custom radio option, users can make their own stations in a similar fashion to Pandora. In iHeartRadio’s case, stations are customized based on favorite songs, artists or genres. 11 million songs are available on the service along with a “discovery slider,” which lets users opt for more discovery or more familiar tunes, depending on their mood. In the brand showcase, now live on the iHeartRadio developer site , the company lists big names like Xbox 360, Toyota Entune, Yahoo TV and Grace Digital as partners who are already using the iHeartRadio API in their own products and services. iHeartRadio isn’t the only streaming service attempting to build a music platform – everyone is. MOG’s API is now allowing auto and consumer electronics makers to integrate the service into their products, Pandora is notably found everywhere from cars to refrigerators , Spotify has a newly-launched app platform , and Rdio has an API, just to name a few.

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iHeartRadio Launches Developer API