SiliconANGLE » Site News

Google+ a Preferred Tool for Brands, Supplementing Facebook Pages

Isha Suri — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:30:04 +0000

A recent report from BrightEdge reveals that Google+ page creation has increased at a rate of over 50 percent month-over-month. And as hoped, Google+ is becoming a promising network for businesses. Within a month, page creation for world’s top 100 brands jumped from 61 percent to 77 percent, and the number of people in circles increased over 50 percent from 147k to 222k. Some of the popular brands jumping on this bandwagon include Starbucks, H & M, and Pepsi.

BrightEdge, a leading search and social management platform for global enterprises, reported that Google continues to have the largest fan contingent of any brand, with more than 77k fans.

“Google is embedding their popular new product with its dominant search marketing position, replicating the tie between social and search channels, just as Facebook’s Open Graph tied sites and search together earlier this year, blurring the lines between social and search engagement,” said Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge.

“Top 100 brands are realizing that they now need to address both channels. Now the real work begins, if they want to extend their social presence on the Web from Facebook to the new Google+.”

Following in Facebook’s footsteps, Google Plus started their business pages just two months back, and received a whopping response. This nascent social network has its own potential, thanks to Google’s extended and integrated network of Apps and services, with frequent updates in its attempt to catch up with the competition.

Google+ has been making some headway as of late, reaching 25 million users relatively quickly. Dubbed as “Google Plus Pages,” the service helps businesses create a presence on the social network platform for connecting with their users locally and worldwide.

Google Plus has also introduced some updates for businesses, along with Circles and Photos. Here are some of the update’s highlights:

• You can now delegate up to 50 named managers as administrators for a page.
• A new notification flow will ensure that these managers stay in the loop on all the activity that takes place on a page, giving managers the ability to stay involved in page conversations.
• We’ll now show an aggregated count of users that have engaged with your page, either by +1’ing it or by adding it to a circle. This way, both you and your page’s visitors can get an at-a-glance summary of who is interacting with your page.

If Google is aggressively working on updating its social platform, how are Facebook and Twitter faring? They’re both actively appealing to businesses to market brands on their networks. Facebook recently added sponsored story integration with feeds, and introduced Private messages for business pages. It’s an update that’s better for one-on-one communication, enabling businesses to better attend to their customers.

Even as Facebook and Google battle it out for user adoption, brands leverage both networks for their own promotions. BrightEdge found that 93% of top brands have a Facebook presence, and Facebook still dominates business brand interest, reaching some 300 million fans compared to Google+’s collective 148k brand followers.

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Adknowledge Expands to Facebook, Acquires AdParlor

Kristen Nicole — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 14:03:26 +0000

Leading the long tail marketplace, Adknowledge has a pretty strong foothold in every type of advertising (in-game, email, etc.), except Facebook. In order to tackle this particularly lucrative area in advertising, they finally completed the acquisition of AdParlor, a leading Facebook Ads management platform. Facebook advertising revenues are expected to grow to about $4 billion in 2011 to over $22 billion in 2016 with 41 percent compounded annual growth rate in the next five years.

Financial details of the acquisition were not revealed, but it’s certainly a substantial buy for Adknowledge, as the company readily admits. With a strong presence on Facebook and some high profile clients (AdParlor is the exclusive publisher for Groupon’s Facebook ads), they’re the catalyst behind some one billion of Facebook’s daily impressions. AdParlor is now looking to further branch out beyond gaming as well, making the acquisition a really significant move for both parties.

“We are excited to provide our existing advertiser community access to the most advanced platform to purchase advertising within Facebook,” said Scott Lynn, CEO, Adknowledge. “AdParlor has consistently proven to be the leading company to help large Facebook advertisers more effectively optimize their ad spend.”

With Adknowledge’s thousands of advertisers, AdParlor will be able to expands its advertiser base who are already aware of bidding on traffic through Adknowledge’s bidsystem.

The AdParlor team and headquarters will remain in Toronto, Canada to deliver both full-service managed Facebook advertising solutions and self-service Facebook promotion and marketing services.

“I think for us we look at gaming, local deals, etc. as an area for growth for brands and agencies as they put more money in social ads, especially Facebook,” says AdParlor CTO Kristaps Ronka. ”Adknowledge will help us with that, even with multiple office locations they already have.”

Contributors: Kristina Farrah

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Springpad Offers Notebook Customization for Recipes, Gifts, and Books

Kristina Farrah — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 17:45:01 +0000

The world has seen a lot of phenomenal things reveal, and as surprising as they were at first, a good deal of them we can’t live without now. I can’t imagine the world without Facebook, without Google, and without the conveniences of the cloud. The Internet has paved way to many great things, and there are just so much of them that it’s hard to keep track without writing them down. It is with this thrust that services like Springpad come in handy.

Springpad is a free application that makes it quick and easy to take notes and save anything you want to remember in one place. They modified their service to allow users to update their notebooks based on three specific needs.

The first modification is called Recipe Notebook. As the name suggests, it’s to keep back clip recipes from websites. You can also use the built-in search mechanism to find popular recipes around the web. It allows users to organize and access recipes by tag.

Next is Gift Ideas Notebook. It’s for saving products users see in stores using the barcode scanner, as well as save clip ideas from shopping websites, or downright for note taking. It’s going to be a nifty tool especially during the holiday season.

Finally, there’s the Book Notebook that’s made for keeping track of books–be it from Amazon or from the stores using the barcode scanner on smartphones. Use this notebook to make a list of your favorite books, books you want to read, books you want to remember, books you want to buy.

Users can further modify their notebooks using configuration tools. They can tweak the add menu to only include relevant types and customize the notebook navigation to their preference. Moreover, users can share the template they come up with, with other Springpad users.

It wasn’t too long ago when Springpad added a feature called Friend Stuff, embedding social aspects into their offering. Friend Stuff makes it easier for you to discover content from friends, as well as show the things that your friends have bookmarked on their Springpad account, and Liked on Facebook, rated on Rotten Tomatoes, or Wish-listed on Amazon. This social side of Springpad caused it to reach 2 million users, having saved 27 million products all in all. It also recently updated its iPad version’s bookmarking capability.

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Twitter Possibilities for Real Time Epidemic Tracking, Google to Launch a Music Store

Kristina Farrah — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 16:41:40 +0000

Social media sure is powerful. It allows people to share thoughts in real time, and has become a tool to amplify small voices that the world has to hear. But the freedom and potency that it offers carry great risks, and this we have to practice with moderation. In fact, during the outbreak of swine flu in 2009, Twitter exacerbated the anxiety beyond the disease’s actual reach.

“Unlike basic Internet search … Twitter seems to have introduced too much noise into the process: As opposed to search requests, which are generally motivated only by a desire to learn more about a given subject, too many Twitter conversations about swine flu seem to be motivated by desires to fit in, do what one’s friends do or simply gain more popularity,” explained one NPR article.

The Internet floodgates have opened due to the influx of tweets–but analyzing them has caused more distraction than actual help. In fact, the uproar about the AH1N1 virus was at its highest when the number of cases were at its lowest, says the computation epidemiology research group at the University of Iowa.

Still, the researchers had hoped that Twitter could not only track the reaction to the epidemic, but the disease itself through contextual information in tweets, apart from search terms. Twitter is potentially an innovative scientific tool for epidemiologists.

In order to use Twitter for real-time disease tracking, they devised a program that will analyze how the Twitter stream fluctuated coinciding with the cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control. There were no human elements during the determination because everything’s done in the cloud, and results show that it fluctuated in relation to actual cases, and was closely related to some facets of the disease such as doctor visits and fever temperature.

The same terms were used in other geographical locations and it turned out that they can skirt the Twitter clamor for actual pointers to the virus. This process is speedier by 2 weeks than the traditional flu tracking means which is going to be a vital advantage in the event of outbreaks.

The research team concluded that while the assessment is promising in measuring disease progress and other auxiliary issues, they pointed out that Twitter have limitations. There are people who don’t use Twitter, and there are places where social media is widely utilized. Twitter’s goings-on is not consistent throughout the week, and it is not by any means a replacement to the traditional means of tracking disease activity.

Google dreams in music technicolor of cloud-based harmonies

On the other hand, Google’s music dream didn’t plummet along with its music store/service last spring. It went on and launched its own cloud-based music locker, and Android boss Andy Rubin today said that they are close to unleashing a music service with help from the 4 music labels. Rubin swore that Google’s upcoming music store “will have a little twist – it will have a little Google in it. It won’t just be selling 99-cent tracks.” However, according to recent reports, they’ve only locked in EMI. Three more to go.

Concerning its previous flop, Rubin justified that “Google is in the very, very early phases of adding consumer products to our portfolio,” he said. “The media industry didn’t see us as that. They saw us a search company.”

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SlideRocket Extends the Niftiness of Applications to Support Education

Kristina Farrah — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:08:07 +0000

It doesn’t seem too long ago when analysts and pundits alike criticized the idea of software because they didn’t believe that something intangible can actually make real money. Today, however, the tech bubble that used to be the target of hardcore criticism is standing tall and proud as the foundation of modern computers. Indeed, there’s only a thin line that divides genius from insanity.

Taking the idea of software to the next level, the world came to know applications. It was in 2008 when the first app store launched, and it was truly groundbreaking. The business and entertainment world wanted it, and then it became a necessity. The world knows all too well that things will never be the same without them.

Knowing the efficacy of applications, high-tech talents are on the race of developing apps that would also boost the way students learn and teachers teach. SlideRocket joins the education app revolution with the launch of SlideRocket EDU, a free interactive app available through Google Apps EDU. It enables students and educators to be more creative, work together and embrace technologies that support them as 21st century learners.

SlideRocket’s free educational platform is accessible to approved educators with Google EDU accounts simply by clicking the SlideRocket EDU page on Google apps.

“With the new SlideRocket EDU, groups of teachers can build a library of interactive web-based presentations together in lesson planning, and students can easily collaborate on class projects,” says John Kuglin, Senior Education Consultant and Retired Associate Dean at the University of Montana who also uses SlideRocket to teach students and collaborate with educators.

It’s the digital age now, and we’re all hardwired to technology. Youngsters ages 8-18 years old spend 11.5 hours a day using these nifty devices, and somehow, we all look forward to (consciously or unconsciously) embedding the way we learn into our virtual lives; one that is “collaborative, untethered and digitally rich.” These needs boil down to applications.

Apart from SlideRocket, the Education Development Corporation also have their eyes on enhancing the way modern people learn and bought stakes from Demibooks, a Chicago-based technology company that has developed a platform to allow publishers and authors to create interactive books for the iPad. Even Apple has a section made especially for educational apps.

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Getting Pumped for Oracle OpenWorld 2011

Dave Vellante — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 15:26:30 +0000

I’m in San Francisco prepping for the Cube’s second annual broadcast at Oracle OpenWorld. While the world is kind of dissing Ellison’s Sunday keynote, it’s important to remember that Larry usually saves his best for the mid-week slam of the competition. If you can put up with the mega (or should I say Exa-) marketing pitch it’s worth listening to his comments. And we’ll be analyzing it all week. Ellison is not the pitchman that Steve Jobs is but he’s pretty passionate about his products and will stop at no length to de-position the competition and place Oracle at the top of the food chain.

While many don’t like his approach – the fact is Oracle is putting its money where its mouth is; literally. To wit:

In the last four quarters, Oracle threw off $12.3B in free cash flow. Oracle is a money-making machine. And while much of that cash is via maintenance…
The company’s new license revenue grew 17% last quarter and it has seen quarters in the past year where new license revenue grew in excess of 20%.
The Sun acquisition is a home run – Next to VMware and maybe PWC it is perhaps the best acquisition ever in the enterprise tech business. Oracle not only secured the ownership of Java (on which it writes many of its applications) but it also is driving a huge profitability focus into Sun’s once-sagging business by leveraging software and hardware integration – something Sun was never in a position to do as a mostly hardware player (more on this in a second).
Oracle is making all the right product moves. Its Exadata platform is exploding in the marketplace with hundreds of new customers each quarter. Exadata changed the data warehousing game and has the competition scrambling to catch up. Its Exalytics appliance takes a page out of SAP’s HANA and is sure to freeze the market and keep many Oracle loyalists on its platform.

On the performance of Sun, Oracle is guiding that revenues may be flat to down next quarter, causing many to question Oracle’s success. But Oracle clearly is winning in the marketplace with Sun’s former business. Oracle is going after profits, not revenue. Ellison recently stated “I don’t care if our commodity X86 business goes to zero.” He means it. Oracle’s operating margins are running in the mid-to-high 30% range consistently and management has stated that next year it will return to pre-Sun acquisition levels in the low 40% range. Let’s think about what that means for a second. Oracle paid $5.6B for Sun (net of cash). It paid less than $1 per Sun revenue dollar. So even if the Sun business shrinks to say $7B it’s a financial grand slam for Oracle.

Why is that? Well Oracle, long after the Sun acquisition is still trading at 4X revenues. So at $7B in revenue, Sun is worth $28B to Oracle shareholders. That doesn’t even take into account the long term strategic value of so many other factors including the integration of hardware and software story that Oracle is pounding, control of Java and its ability to heavily influence mobile platforms, ownership of MySQL and the strong presence of Sun in certain verticals such as telco. Safra Catz has stated Oracle’s goal of getting the entire company back to pre-acqusition operating margins of say 42%. What will that do to the value of the Sun asset. While it’s hard to say because by then it will be one big mashup – I promise it’s more than $30B assuming the broader stock market doesn’t tank.

Oracle is not without warts. It’s mobile strategy seems to be limited to screwing up the mobile open source community by using its legal leverage with Java. While the Google lawsuit seems to have merit one can’t help but wonder if Oracle’s moves will come back to bite it some day. In addition, Oracle’s cloud rhetoric is unnerving to many. Ellison’s flip flop from the Churchill Club rant to last year’s “cloud-in-a-box” announcement is classic cloudwashing at its best. Will Ellison’s “cloud is water vapor” comments become his Ken Olsen “Unix is snake oil moment.” Maybe not but the cloud is as much as a philosophy as was open systems and Oracle is not the poster child for “open” – however you define the term. And when it comes to so-called “Big Data” it’s unclear that Oracle’s strategy will win. Oracle believes that its databases will be the final resting place for big unstructured data. We’ll see if that’s the case or if the Oracle big data boxes are boat anchors.

Nonetheless, whatever your opinion of Oracle, you have to admire its strategy and management’s intensity. The company doesn’t follow – it creates its own path and right now that path is paved with gold.

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#TheCUBE at Oracle OpenWorld 2011

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:00:45 +0000

SiliconANGLE presents #TheCube, broadcasting live from Oracle OpenWorld at the Moscone Center, San Francisco. Join us for in-depth analysis brought to you by the SiliconANGLE/Wikibon team. Full coverage will air from 10:30AM PT – 4PM PT – Monday through Wednesday (October 3 – 5).

Where to watch: LIVE broadcast on SiliconANGLE.tv (replays of all videos will be made available on this site – never any registration required).

Keep an eye on #thecube hashtag to stay abreast of the videos that we post and conversations around the event. Follow the Wikibon Twitter profile for updates on coverage, speakers, and breaking news from Oracle Openworld 2011.

Tune in for numerous informative spotlights, including:

The HP Oracle War: Silicon Valley Inside Baseball
With Friends Like Oracle Who Needs Enemies?
Is Oracle your future or a boat anchor?
Is NoSQL a threat to Oracle’s core franchise?
Oracle performance: How far is Ellison stretching the truth?
Does Oracle think Cloud is “snake oil?”
Benioff says Oracle is faking the cloud – is he right?
How far can VMware customers take Oracle?
Is Oracle throwing open source under the bus?
What is Oracle’s Mobile Strategy?
The future of flash in Oracle database environments
What’s Oracle’s answer to SAP HANA?
What’s new in Oracle backup and recovery?
The future of Intel in the Oracle enterprise

More Information:

Oracle kicked up its war of words with HP and Autonomy to a new level when it published the slide decks Autonomy presented to Oracle when it was selling itself.

Larry Ellison – What The Hell Is Cloud Computing?

In preparation for Larry Ellison’s talk on Sunday evening, focused solely on cloud computing, here is Ellison’s famous rant on cloud computing as being excessive “gibberish” improperly applied to existing technologies.

Additional Resources from #TheCube Team

What is #theCube?
Don’t forget that the entire Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Broadcast can be found here and here. Check out the video below to learn more about #TheCube Wikibon and SiliconANGLE’s collaborative effort to bring out the best in enterprise news, analysis and research.

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Medacity: Ushering a New Media Revival

Maria Pila — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 15:14:50 +0000

Medacity is launching this week, its debut spearheaded by web content development company, Nichenet Pty Ltd. It’s latest site launch focuses on the news from the new media sector, spanning video, audio, blogging, hyperlocal, mainstream media, services providers, and even aggregators. Mediacity is covering all the big trends, from those companies turning to new media for a revival of their own: AOL, Yahoo, Demand Media and similar companies.

Nichenet CEO and founder Duncan Riley will be head of this site. Riley who has a long experience in online publishing, having previously written for TechCrunch, The Blog Herald and The Inquisitr, and was also a co-founder of blogging network b5media.

“The idea of Medacity came about after I realized that no one in the market was exclusively covering the new media sector as a whole” said Riley. “Medacity seeks to fill a gap in the market by providing comprehensive coverage of the latest news and views from across the new media sector.”

“I started my online publishing career by establishing the very first site to cover the then new industry of blogging back in 2003 with The Blog Herald. In Medacity I have gone back to my roots with a site that seeks to chronicle the rise of the new media industry and age.”

Inquisitr veterans James Johnson and Kim LaCapria are also joining Riley as part of the Medacity team.

News has certainly entered a new era, taking on technology with a force all its own. This is still an emerging sector, and few resources have been dedicated to building an entire network around the evolving trends. Flipboard is a notable player in the leveraging of new media content delivery, while news360‘s launch this week also speaks to the growth in this space.

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Google+ Hands-On: Your Pants Are Vulnerable.

Ross LaRocco — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:13:35 +0000

Finally got my hands on Google+ yesterday. It’s the revolutionary new initiative by Google proclaiming they will crush Facebook to its toenails. It will redefine sharing from it’s roots by putting people into circles. Sort of like high school, but the worldwide web is an open book.

Currently, Google+ has closed invitations. I wasn’t able to invite people who didn’t have Gmail addresses anyway. It seems a little strange that Google Apps addresses aren’t working yet.

Users on Google+ are given the option of which Circles of contacts to share a piece of content with, each and every time they post something. The equivalent of other newsfeed site updates in realtime doing most things on the service requires admirably few clicks.

Personal pictures, posts and location check-ins could quickly leak into the public domain this way. The Google+ equivalent of the newsfeed updates in realtime and doing most things on the service requires admirably few clicks. These are very good attributes for a new site that’s seeking to win people over through ease of use,” writes FT Tech Hub.

After getting a circle of friends together, everything is sharable. Similar to Tumblr’s re-blogging feature. If you share a picture of a tuna helper recipe, it can get “stolen” by just about anyone. This may bring security concerns for those who won’t want things like that to happen.

As Uncle Ben (from Spider-man) would say, ”With great power, comes great responsibility”. This applies to social networks as well. Google has just opened a door to a round of security possibilities or regurgitate common ones. Keep your pants buckled.

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MySpace SOLD to the Dungeon of Doom! Crack Those Ads.

Ross LaRocco — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 21:42:11 +0000

The fate of MySpace has finally been uncovered. Recently, I mentioned how Facebook would have benefited by the founders crossing over to the light. It didn’t quite happen that way. The service was sold to an advertising network called Specific Media.

The 35 million dollar Myspace deal gives the company access to data about Myspace users to be used for ad targeting. It also would transform the firm into a media company with its own ad space to sell instead of simply an online ad technology firm that brokers ad space on behalf of other websites,” reports AllThingsD.

An update shortly broke afterwards, which a memo was released to the employees of MySpace announcing the deal is official. It’s time to put the once-popular Social Media giant to rest. Hopefully this won’t mean more annoying ads that just get absorbed by browser extensions.

The data of MySpace users may actually be useful. It was at one time, prior to filling up with sexual offers polluting an inbox. When was the last time you saw an ad that you actually clicked on?

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SiliconANGLE » Site News

Google+ a Preferred Tool for Brands, Supplementing Facebook Pages

In the same vein:

Adknowledge Expands to Facebook, Acquires AdParlor

Contributors: Kristina Farrah

In the same vein:

Springpad Offers Notebook Customization for Recipes, Gifts, and Books

In the same vein:

Twitter Possibilities for Real Time Epidemic Tracking, Google to Launch a Music Store

In the same vein:

SlideRocket Extends the Niftiness of Applications to Support Education

In the same vein:

Getting Pumped for Oracle OpenWorld 2011

In the same vein:

#TheCUBE at Oracle OpenWorld 2011

Tune in for numerous informative spotlights, including:

Additional Resources from #TheCube Team

In the same vein:

Medacity: Ushering a New Media Revival

In the same vein:

Google+ Hands-On: Your Pants Are Vulnerable.

In the same vein:

MySpace SOLD to the Dungeon of Doom! Crack Those Ads.

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