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Twitter Back Up In Pakistan After An Order From The Prime Minister

admin — Sun, 20 May 2012 22:56:59 +0000

A temporary solution to the drama that unfolded this morning when Twitter was blocked in Pakistan — some believe over representations of the Prophet Mohammed and Twitter’s refusal to block these images; and some believe while it was testing an image filtering service. Whatever it was, the site is now back up –after an order from Prime Minister. Pakistan’s Express Tribune is reporting that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani made the decision after the site was down for the day on a mandate from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. But it is still not clear why the authorities shut down access in the first place. As we reported earlier today, some reports — still unconfirmed directly by any Pakistani authorities (we have reached out on this) — said that the government was concerned about images of the Prophet that were being tweeted as part of an activist campaign in support of the freedom of expression among Muslims and in Muslim countries. A move to quash sites that facilitate Muslim activism is not unprecedented , so it is very plausible here. However, others have raised an issue about whether it might be something else: they allege that authorities were testing an image-blocking service . In other words: potentially equally restrictive, but different from the specific Prophet drawing campaign. The whole event sparked off a huge amount of negative response both within Pakistan and further afield. In the country itself, more technically savvy / better equipped users were able to continue accessing the site: it still worked on the Opera Mini browser via the mobile Internet, according to several reports. But otherwise, access across the country was denied. Since we still don’t know why access was denied in the first place, it’s hard to say whether the public outcry had a role to play here. Nevertheless, it’s a very encouraging sign when you see people coming together so quickly around an issue. We’ll continue trying to figure out what exactly happened and for those in Pakistan returning to the Twitterverse, welcome back! [Image: TakeBackPakistan , Flickr]

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Twitter Back Up In Pakistan After An Order From The Prime Minister

New Project, Roominate, Offers A Fully-Wired Dollhouse For Kids

admin2 — Sun, 20 May 2012 22:29:20 +0000

Teaching kids – especially little girls – about electronics is a hard job. First, there’s the electricity. Then there’s the sense that soldering, wiring, and lining up LEDs is considerably less fun than watching Tangled . This project, called Roominate, aims to change the way girls think about electricity. The kit consists of a set of tiny furniture with built-in wires and switches. You can wire up your dollhouse however you like, adding lamps and switches. $49 gets you one regular room and $95 gets you a “duplex.” One Roominate Kit includes: 2 wooden walls, 1 wooden floor, interchangeable wooden building pieces to construct at least 3 pieces of furniture, 1 complete circuit, and assorted decorations to get you started. A Deluxe Decoration Pack includes: tons of additional decorations so that you can adorn your creation over and over again! They’ve hit $13,000 of a $26,000 target and it it helps little girls think more clearly about science and electronics, I’m totally backing it. The project ends on June 16 so there’s still plenty of time to slowly replace the Barbie Dream House with a decidedly more DIY dollhouse. Project Page

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New Project, Roominate, Offers A Fully-Wired Dollhouse For Kids

Report: Pakistan Blocks Twitter Over Blasphemous Content, Facebook Complies?

vertical8 — Sun, 20 May 2012 15:58:26 +0000

Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its people to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication. There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has become the latest country to ban the use of Twitter. According to the blog Dawn , the chairman of Pakistan’s telecommunications authority has today imposed the restriction because of blasphemous content: it reports that Chairman Mohammad Yaseen blocked the site today “because Twitter refused to remove material related to a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.” Facebook, apparently, has complied with the request, says the blog. Others are now starting to report the same circumstances, and below the break we have a screenshot of how accessing the site looks from one of our readers in Lahore who says he “cannot access the site at all.” Getting blocked in Pakistan is particularly ironic because the two, paired up, played a major role in one of the most important news events to be broken in recent history: the raid and demise of Osama bin Laden, which was tweeted by at least two people watching the raids as they happened in the mountains of the country. This is a developing (and slightly confusing) story: just yesterday, about 12 hours ago, Senator Rehman Malik, of Pakistan’s People Party, tweeted that nothing was getting blocked: “Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors,” he wrote. We have contacted Twitter and Facebook for their responses to this story. Update : more details coming in from Pakistan’s Express Tribune : The request to block the site was made by the Ministry of Information and Technology, it says, citing the competition on Facebook. The ministry, apparently, made several requests to Twitter, which responded that it “cannot stop any individual doing anything of this nature on the website.” Directives to block the site were sent to ISPs in several parts of the country, including PTCL Broadband and Wi-Tribe. It also reports that Twitter is still accessible by mobile using secure browsers like Opera, as well as proxies and VPNs like Vtunnel. [original report continues] This is not the first time that Twitter has been blocked in the country: a similar ban took place in 2010 for the same reason. That lasted for two weeks. The move underscores how susceptible social networks remain to higher powers in government. And Pakistan is not the only country to pull something like this. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are still officially forbidden in China (although millions use it anyway using VPNs — virtual private networks), with the bans often having strong political overtones around people expressing contary opinions. Developing countries with big populations represent some of the biggest potential growth opportunities for scale-oriented social networks — when they can get used. Even developed countries like the UK have floated ideas about how to restrict the flow of information on social networks — this was something that came up last summer during the London riots and the role that some believed services like BlackBerry Messenger played in gangs getting organized to loot. Update 2 : One of our awesome readers in Lahore, Waqas Ali , sent us this screenshot: Ali also played a role in a campaign in the country to keep Facebook from getting banned. He says that he cannot access Twitter at all right now but that a friend is able to use the Opera Mini browser to access the site. [Image: Farooq on Flickr]

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Report: Pakistan Blocks Twitter Over Blasphemous Content, Facebook Complies?

Hyperlinks Are Dumb And Bleeding Money; How To Ensure Yours Aren’t

user — Sat, 19 May 2012 14:00:39 +0000

Editor’s note: Oliver Roup is the founder and CEO of VigLink, a service that makes it easier to use affiliate programs on your blog or website. When an email hits our inbox, we know not only who it’s from but their entire web imprint . LinkedIn can point out the profile of the woman you interviewed for a sales role last week and the gentleman you spoke with earlier in the year at a conference. And rest assured that the dining room set you checked out over the weekend at CrateAndBarrel.com will haunt your online experience for the forseeable future. Data — its collection and manipulation at scale — has revolutionized how we interact online. Homepages, banner advertisements and what we see in our Facebook timeline are all tailored-to-fit the reader, and we don’t give it a second thought. But the hyperlink, the key feature that distinguishes hypertext from text has remained largely unchanged since Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web. Websites generally, and search and online advertising specifically, would be barely recognizable today by their younger selves. But hyperlinks — their structure, how they’re authored and how we use and track them — have barely changed in 20 years. Consider: Inserting links by hand is a labor intensive process and has few tools. How about a recommendation engine to augment our own efforts? (Note: companies like Zemanta are a first step in this direction.) If a link is never clicked (i.e. 0% of the world finds it useful), why does it remain in content, distracting from meaningful / useful links indefinitely? Keywords in referrer logs have been mined to great effect by companies like BlueKai . (Although Google is slowly but surely taking that information away .) Isn’t where a user clicked out to just as informative? Why are we almost always ignoring it? Why do website visitors in Asia see links to online merchants in North America they are unable to purchase from, let alone access? Hyperlinks, in many ways, are dumb. And as a result, harming your user experience and potentially bleeding money from your company — when they could be a tool for better engagement, increased revenue, and deeper analytics. Now, there are a cluster of companies innovating by recognizing the power of the link — Omniture , Vibrant Media and Yieldbot , to name a few. But, this isn’t a problem companies can hold off on thinking about until the perfect tech pops up to solve it. There was a time when SEO was considered a “pro-tip” — a way for startups to get ahead of the game. Today, it’s standard best practice — and companies that don’t think strategically about the way search engines view their sites are at a strong disadvantage. Hyperlink optimization is similar. While link optimization might be a “pro-tip” now, it won’t be for much longer. Companies that aren’t thinking strategically about link placement, closely tracking results, and taking subsequent action, will find the companies that ARE doing these things at an advantage. The most critical areas to spend time on are tracking outbound hyperlinks, building a linking strategy, and refining it based on results. Let’s briefly dive into each. Track your Outbound Hyperlinks The first step to optimizing a site’s outbound traffic is to understand what that traffic looks like. Where do visitors go when they leave your site? What do they do on those other sites? While there is still a lot of room for growth within the outbound analytics space, Omniture (paid) and Google Analytics (free — but requires a modification to the standard Analytics code you add to your site ) both offer tools to help you understand what happens when a reader leaves your site. VigLink (disclosure: I am the CEO there) also offers an outbound analytics suite as part of its content monetization solution. Build a Hyperlinking Strategy What do you want your outbound hyperlinks to do for you? Do you want them to earn you revenue? Do you want them to serve an SEO purpose? Be purely informational? Should they be scarce (keeping readers on your site)? Or abundant (allowing readers to exit as it is helpful)? Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a plan for when your team includes a hyperlink, and when it does not — opening up opportunities for a better reader experience, and deeper engagement. Refine, Refine, Refine Combine a plan with data to track that plan’s performance and you’ve got a gold mine on your hands. Notice a link that is never clicked and your plan requires that links must be useful to readers? Take it out. Or, a heavy percentage of links pointing to non-eCommerce properties, and your goal is monetization? Incorporate fewer links to those non-commercial sites. Refining your hyperlinks will improve reader engagement and overall site performance. Do It, and Make the Web Better Hyperlinks should make the web better — more connected, easier to navigate, and intelligent. Hyperlinks should make your site better — more actionable, insightful and profitable. Today, hyperlinks are falling short. They’re static and largely untracked. Sometimes useful — but often not. As the web becomes ever more crowded, and an organization’s site optimization toolkit begins to produce diminishing returns, the hyperlink is obvious low hanging fruit. What that means to site owners: It’s time to plug the outbound data leak. Implement a tool today that will track your outbound traffic. Choose a hyperlinking strategy and share it with your team. This is at least as much a human problem as a technology one – deciding what you want is always the first step. Be on the lookout for technology that addresses these issues. There are already solutions to track your outbound clicks and the value they deliver but 2012 is going to be the year the hyperlink gets smart.

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Hyperlinks Are Dumb And Bleeding Money; How To Ensure Yours Aren’t

YesterdayMe: A Site That Tracks Yesterday’s Alcohol Consumption

user — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:38:20 +0000

Every few days something really amazing dumps over the transom here at TC HQ. Today it was YesterdayMe.ru . Built by Vladimir V. Tuporshin and partner, Ilja Razinkov, the site essentially allows you to enter yesterday’s alcohol consumption. Why? Because, that’s why. While the Russians are known for their heavy-duty drinking – although they’re moving from vodka to beer and wine these days, perhaps to prevent liver death – this site is ingenious in that it offers a very simple, hangover-proof interface for registering how much you sucked down. By sliding little drink indicators back and forth, you can tell the world or just yourself that you had too many beers. The site existed as a Russian-only tool until yesterday. Tuporshin wrote: “It was 1312’s hobby project, which we thoroughly developed during it’s first year, and then switched to the Pocket Lists project. Now we are dating with YesterdayMe again!” The company, incidentally, has an interesting post about selling a simple To-Do list app on their blog as well, so you can come for the booze tracking and stay for the analysis. Sadly, the sliders on the site only go up to 10 shots, which suggests that they may need to offer a freemium “bottle drinker” offer for folks like me.

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YesterdayMe: A Site That Tracks Yesterday’s Alcohol Consumption

Disney Video Launches In Beta, Bringing Kid-Friendly Clips And Trailers To All Your Devices

A D M I N — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:48:00 +0000

There’s a new product that just came out of Disney Interactive Labs — a video portal for clips, movie trailers, and even a collection of curated YouTube videos, all designed to be watched online or on any of your mobile devices. The new Disney Video site, located at video.disney.com , combines the best of Disney past and present, with a whole lot of content that might not be found anywhere else. It’s too early for us to know a whole lot about the site — we checked out the portal after it was announced on Twitter by Henry Work, Senior Software Engineer for Disney Interactive Labs. But at first glance, it seems like a pretty cool example of what a major media company can do with a huge library of content that it hopes to bring to multiple platforms and devices. First of all, let’s talk about the content. The site is broken down into movies, shows, collections and YouTube, and highlights a wide range of content across Disney’s family-oriented media properties. In the movies section, Disney Video features trailers, as well as behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with stars of upcoming and recent feature films like Frankenweenie and The Avengers . Its shows page puts the spotlight on popular clips from the Disney Channel and related cable networks. Collections organizes its video library into themes, like Disney Fairies, for instance, or content available from Disney Theme Parks. But the most interesting section might be the YouTube channel on the site, which provides a curated page full of kid-friendly content. The YouTube page is the result of a deal that Disney struck with the video site late last year , through which the media companies will cross-promote each other’s content. YouTube will get some original kids programming from Disney, while Disney is making YouTube clips available on its new portal. As for the multiplatform aspect of the site — as far as we can tell, it’s formatted to work on web browsers, delivered via Flash, as well as on mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Android handsets and tablets. That’s a huge step for Disney, as it seeks to make its content available on whatever device kids are using. There’s no real long-form content on the site — for now it’s all promotional clips and trailers — but it is designed to keep viewers watching, with an autoplay feature that loops new videos in ten seconds after the last one has been completed. Interestingly, the Disney online video portal is being launched at the same time that some analysts are questioning the effect that Netflix is having on the ratings for cable TV networks like Nickelodeon and Disney Channel . While the portal isn’t as kid-friendly as Netflix’s Just For Kids implementation online and on some connected devices, Disney no doubt hopes that its large library of content will keep kids coming back.

Auction-Meets-Group-Buying Site BagThat Bags $3.2M From Oxford Capital

A D M I N — Tue, 15 May 2012 12:15:21 +0000

BagThat , a new UK entrant to the daily-deals/e-commerce space, has picked up an investment of £2 million ($3.2 million) to develop its service, a mash-up of two well-known models for selling products online: auctions and group buying. The funding is being led by Oxford Capital and is the first close on this round. BagThat says it is expecting additional institutional investment in the round. Part eBay and part group-buying site (eg Groupon), BagThat is a clever kind of twist on both ideas, in which a user can bid on an item with a price that he/she is willing to pay for it, using a simple sliding feature to pick a price in a range set by the seller. The system then collects all the bids from other users, and calculates a final selling price for the item, based on the minimum total amount that the retailer was willing to make from the deal. If enough people bid on the item in the bidding phase, with a total amount reaching the seller’s reserve, then they win the product: that final price might be the same price the buyer offered, or it might be lower — but never higher. PayPal is used for all the transactions on the site. The social aspect of the site also includes the ability for bidders to spread the word to their friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks to try to get others to join in on the deal — the more who join, the more likely the final price will be lower. Will this new variation be enough to bring in punters to a new site, in a market that already has established players like eBay, Groupon, Living Social and others? It will probably, most likely, depend not on the new brand but what BagThat offers through its retailing portal. For now, the selection on the site — which launched in November 2011 and is founded by Andy Sutton, who is also the CEO – is relatively streamlined rather than sprawling, and is covering several different bases: food/drink; fashion; home goods and vacations among them, with higher-end rather than cheaper offerings. (Examples: an Apple TV box, a men’s suit, a cute teddy bear) It looks like that list will be growing with retailers like Halfords (a UK sporting goods retailer) and brands like Samsung signing up to BagThat for future deals.

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Auction-Meets-Group-Buying Site BagThat Bags $3.2M From Oxford Capital

Svpply’s “We Want This!” Is A Tasteful Way Retailers Can Target Well-Dressed Shoppers

Achilles — Tue, 15 May 2012 02:13:33 +0000

Svpply , the New York-based startup that replicates the feeling of window-shopping online, is nudging its well-heeled clientele to turn their “wants” into real purchases. The company, which was co-founded by Vimeo designer Zach Klein, is unveiling analytics and targeting features for retailers in a program called “We Want This!” Shops like Free People , CXXVI and All Saints can reach influential members of the Svpply community with targeted promotions based on their “Wants.” On Svpply, a “Want” is pretty much similar to the “Like” button on Facebook. Since the company was founded a few years ago, Svpply members have clicked “Want” more than 5 million times on the site and do it at a current rate of about 160,000 per week. The startup is one of a wave of companies that are trying to make online shopping for high-end fashion more comfortable for shoppers. Over the past decade, as consumers have gotten used to ordering books and electronics online, it’s natural that fashion would be another major industry to transition online. While they’re not really competitors, there are plenty of other startups like Bonobos, Trunk Club, Gilt Groupe, Index Ventures-backed Nasty Gal and Y Combinator-backed Shoptiques that are trying to make higher-end fashion work online. Even Amazon is getting into the fray after signing designers like Michael Kors and Vivienne Westwood. The new ‘We Want This!’ program should help close that last mile between when a user says they want to buy something and when they’ll actually pull out their credit card for it. Since launching a few years ago, Svpply’s CEO Ben Pieratt says the company has been super careful about making sure the site has a tight-knit community. “Our understanding is that high quality also means high quality community,” he said. “Our product is a microcosm of the retail industry where there is a small group of tastemakers that influences what the rest of the community wants.” They seeded it to a small group of New York-based designers who then populated Svpply with products they loved. They made sure that every single product was something you could immediately buy online. “These aren’t things to dream about,” he said. “Everything you see is purchase-able.” Since then the site has grown to have 620,000 product views a week with 140,000 registered members and 700,000 unique users who come by to browse every month. They’ve also seen about 37,000 downloads of their iPhone and iPad apps. To note: the iPad app launched just six days ago. The affiliate revenue they earn is enough to cover server and rent costs for their New York-based staff. A recent Facebook Timeline integration has also bumped registrations by 40 percent as Svpply uses the verb ‘Want’ in the ticker and news feed. Svpply has raised $550,000 from Spark Capital and Founder Collective.

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Svpply’s “We Want This!” Is A Tasteful Way Retailers Can Target Well-Dressed Shoppers

Groupon’s Q1 Earnings Beat Estimates: $559.3M In Revenue, $1.35B In Groupons Sold

jos — Tue, 15 May 2012 02:01:58 +0000

Groupon just published its second quarterly earnings report after going public in 2011. The Chicago-based company made $559.3 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2012, up 89% year-over year. Groupon also announced that the total amount of money it collected from customers for Groupons sold (excluding taxes and estimated refunds) increased 103% from $668.2 million in the same quarter last year to $1.35 billion in Q1 2012. Overall, though, Groupon still reported a net loss of $0.02 per share. Non-GAAP earnings, however, showed earnings of $0.02 per share. The overall consensus among analysts was that Groupon would report about $530 million in revenue and the company itself had predicted revenue somewhere between $510 and $550 million. For the next quarter, Groupon expects revenue to be between $550 and $590 million. After its IPO, Groupon’s shares famously lost about 50% of their value. Today, the stock is up more than 12% in after-hours trading . Update : The stock is now up more than 17.76% in after-hours trading. That’s on top of an 18.54% gain throughout the day while the markets were open. That’s the biggest one-day increase in Groupon’s stock price since it went public. More Highlights From Today’s Report In its report, Groupon also highlighted that its revenues in North America grew 75% year-over-year “and accelerated sequentially faster than they have since the first quarter of 2011.” For the first time, Groupon also served more than 100,000 merchants per quarter in Q1. The company also reported that 50% of the offers it ran in the first quarter were with merchants who had previously run on Groupon. These merchants, Groupon also noted, continue to quickly adopt the company’s Groupon Rewards program. More than 30% of eligible merchants in the cities where the company is piloting this program have signed up for it now. Another interesting number from the report: 30% of transactions in North America were completed on mobile devices in the last quarter. That’s up from 25% in December 2011.

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Groupon’s Q1 Earnings Beat Estimates: $559.3M In Revenue, $1.35B In Groupons Sold

Five Ways Native Monetization Is Changing Silicon Valley

A D M I N — Sun, 13 May 2012 04:30:16 +0000

Editor’s note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough , the native video advertising company. Dan has been honored as an AdAge “Media Maven” and was recently named to the Forbes “30 under 30″ list. You can find him on Twitter at @dgreenberg . With a $100 billion IPO pending, it’s with confident defiance that Facebook has thumbed its nose at traditional web advertising models. On Facebook, despite their $5 billion 2012 forecasted ad revenue, you’ll see no prerolls, no rich media ads, no “punch the monkeys,” and no interruption. Facebook is leading the charge for a new generation of media companies who are building their businesses on “native” advertising models , a fundamental shift away from the traditional interruptive ad models that users have learned to ignore. Facebook’s commitment to native monetization signals significant change to come. Native advertising on Facebook Native advertising is a new form of inventory that seamlessly integrates promoted content from brand advertisers into the fabric of a site itself. Native advertising inventory is content that’s part of the site experience rather than ads that interrupt users, such as pre-roll video ads or boxes, buttons, and banners on the corners of pages. Facebook’s Sponsored Stories are one of the largest bets on native advertising in the ad industry – a bet that’s consistent with the ad strategies of the dominant social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon and the coming ad products from the next wave of internet elite like Tumblr and Spotify. Promoted Tweets on Twitter The appeal of “native” monetization models is that they create an alignment between a company’s business model (create/publish/curate content) with their revenue model (promote brand content that fits into the site experience), just as Google did with search ads that are relevant to search results. Google AdWords was the original native monetization pioneer, paving the way for Sponsored Stories on Facebook, Promoted Tweets on Twitter, TrueView promoted videos on YouTube, Paid Discovery on StumbleUpon, and Sharethrough’s Promoted Videos. These examples are only a handful of a large and growing movement of promoted branded content experiences that have replaced traditional one-way ad formats. Social content sites such as Cheezburger, BuzzFeed as well as publishers like Gawker and The Awl have also followed suit. Native Video ads on The Daily What, a Cheezburger site The success of these companies in figuring out native monetization models has sparked a number of broad-based changes in the startup economy. Here are five ways native monetization is changing the game for startups in Silicon Valley and beyond. 1. Native is now the starting point for monetization strategy. The success of companies such as Facebook and Twitter around native monetization, as well as social content sites such as BuzzFeed , hasn’t gone unnoticed by the next generation of entrepreneurs. For these digital natives, their starting point wasn’t ever going to be display ads, popups, or prerolls – their starting point for monetization is native. You’re already seeing companies like Spotify introducing branded playlists and Tumblr enabling brands to promote their posts . The next generation of internet elite are bypassing the display ad slog altogether and creating ad products that enable brands to engage natively with their audiences. Lionsgate used native advertising on Tumblr to promote “The Hunger Games” 2. Native is turning heads in the venture community. The value of native monetization hasn’t been lost on the venture community either. Imagine an entrepreneur telling a prospective investor that their monetization model is to slap display ads in the corners of their site – not going to happen. For the next generation of startups looking to build long-term businesses, AdSense is just not a viable option. Instead, the startups that can articulate a roadmap for building a native monetization model through ad products that fit uniquely within their sites will find a much more receptive audience. Can you imagine if Pinterest introduced display ad banners to the site (see below)? Users would revolt. Pinterest has an ad-free interface, yet it is proving to be a powerful weapon for brands. 3. Native shepherds in a new wave of ad tech. There are countless sites and apps that have the ability to offer integrated, unique native ad experiences, but instead are still monetizing with AdSense or other standard display options. Why? Because it’s easy to set up, it does not require a direct sales team and their developers can focus exclusively on making their site experience as good as possible. While none of these motivations is going to change for publishers, the desire to offer native ad products will only increase as they see the industry increasingly heading that way. As a result, technology companies that can enable publishers to create and monetize native ad experiences will be a big growth area in the coming years. A new crop of native monetization tech companies have emerged like Sharethrough for native video ads, Outbrain for natively promoted articles, and Solve Media for native ads in captchas, to name a few. The next wave of Silicon Valley ad tech gamechangers will help publishers monetize with native ad formats. 4. Advertising is no longer a dirty word for engineers. The most consistent users of “ad blocker” technology are Silicon Valley engineers. Advertising is just not a sexy pursuit for most engineers, largely because the bulk of advertising detracts from a site experience and annoys its users. So it’s understandable that an engineer is not motivated to put in their blood, sweat and tears to increase the amount of interruption and add to the thoughtless ads on the web. Times are changing, though – native monetization offers a host of compelling technical challenges that are all in service of building a better internet, one where advertisers create value for users instead of interrupting them. Some of the best engineering minds in Silicon Valley, like Kevin Weil and Gokul Rajaram , now work on the “revenue engineering” teams at Facebook and Twitter. Mekanism, a creative agency based in San Francisco, won last year’s “AdAge Small Agency of the Year” award. 5. Native advertising empowers the creative industry in Silicon Valley. A brand’s ability to succeed with native ads is tied to the ability of the creative industry to continue creating great brand content for the native medium. Promoted Tweets, Sponsored Stories and Paid Discovery are all new forms of media that the best creative agencies intimately understand and embrace. Just like the cottage industry that grew up in Silicon Valley around SEO, we are seeing creative shops in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area come up in a big way. Groundbreaking Bay Area creative agencies like Mekanism , EVB and Pereira & O’Dell , as well as production shops like Portal A Interactive and Seedwell , have all been built from the ground up around the DNA of Silicon Valley and have quickly become major players in the global ad game. With a shared vision for a future where brands create and distribute content that creates value, not ads that interrupt and annoy, Silicon Valley’s creative minds are setting the tone for the next stage of worldwide digital advertising. Portal A’s tech-celebrity-inspired video for SF Mayor Ed Lee redefined what a campaign video can be.