The mash-up results in a technology that enables companies to listen to product or service related conversations across social media, blogs, news and forums in real time.  When integrated with thismoment’s Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC), brands will be able to simultaneously drive content engagement and customer conversation management across all social media channels, including both YouTube and Facebook.  This is the first offering of its kind to feature a social content management system that possesses both listening and engagement features.

“We are thrilled to acquire such an advanced technology platform and team as we continue our drive to provide the strongest, most powerful brand management solution available to enterprise customers,”  thismoment CEO and Founder Vince Broady said.

“As we look to expand internationally, Brand Monitor also provides us with close to 500 customers around the globe, with a particularly strong footprint in Asia. With the addition of Brand Monitor, thismoment DEC customers will now, better than ever, listen, discover and engage with their audiences on social media networks, and have an enhanced understanding of marketing campaign performance with conversation metrics, including volumes, sentiment, and share of voice.”

The need for content marketing is influenced by the yearning to create brand awareness, gain new customers and solidify brand loyalty.  And with that, thismoment has been busy keeping their business competitive.  Just last month, thismoment announced the appointment of  John Bara as the company’s new Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), the first CMO of the company whose role is to lead the development and execution of the company’s marketing strategy team.

A new era for content marketing

Other content marketing providers are up to par as well.  The startup company XYDO that offers socially curated, personalized news streams through a consumer-facing web platform as well as in your e-mail announced that it will be pivoting to a business-to-business (B2B) approach by  launching an email marketing solution for businesses.

And the new media sharing platform LoopLogic announced a new way to mix, share, and analyze real-time results of video and other content.  The LoopLogic platform integrates seamlessly with existing sales, marketing, helpdesk and other business systems by mapping viewers with existing or new customer data. Made for B2B marketers who need better insight into their content marketing performance, or anyone who simply wants deeper insight as to who watches their content, for how long, and when they tune out.

“LoopLogic isn’t another complex content creation tool or a simple video sharing site. It’s an intelligent platform that complements existing business applications,” said Scott Mitchell, CEO of LoopLogic. “Users can finally know if their content is fulfilling its intended purpose and then take action quickly. We think this is an important piece of the lead generation puzzle.”

thismoment’s Latest Buy Brings Fresh Blood to Content Marketing is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• BlueGlass Acquires Voltier Digital to Shore up Marketing Services
• Facebook IPO – A Sign of Yahoo’s Decline
• Social, Mobile Challenges for thismoment’s New CMO
• Freemium Validation: SurveyMonkey Acquires MarketTools, Valued at $1 Billion
• Are We Turning to the Outer Dimensions of What Support Means? [Infographic]
• The Big Data Behind User Engagement: Get Smart (Fast!)

Amazon Expands its Catalog with Viacom

The online retailer has a deal with the media group Viacom that allows it to expand its range of videos available to stream on the internet, and represents the final steps in a plan to launch a subscription service to compete with Netflix.

The online video market, currently dominated by Netflix, should become increasingly competitive in the coming years as large companies are entering this segment.  Netflix currently streams service with nearly 22 million subscribers in the United States.

Subscribers to Amazon Prime, benefiting from both improved delivery times for their free online shipping and web-based video streaming, will have access to a total catalog of 15,000 movies and TV television programs, with the addition of Viacom programs covered by this new deal.

Viacom, which claims MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount Studios in its conglomerate, will now be available on Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service. Until now, major media companies like CBS, Warner Bros. Time Warner, News Corp Fox, Sony, Comcast, NBC Universal and Walt Disney have licensed programming to Amazon.

The improvement of this catalog also allows Amazon to provide even more attractive content to its multimedia Kindle Fire tablet.  Amazon wants to open its collection of licensed films and television programs as a separate service for clients outside the prime segment, and use it to boost the Kindle Fire tablet.

Analysts estimate that Amazon sold about five million Kindle Fire tablets in the fourth quarter, and the company can sell more than double that in 2012. An essential part of Amazon’s strategy is to have lots of content, including video, music and applications for tablets users.

Blip Raises $12-Million Round of Funding

Online video network Blip.tv announced a $12-million round of funding. The company is also re-branding its name from Blip.tv to simply Blip.

Blip will use the new cash to develop more sophisticated tools and products for web content providers. Blip will also utilize the funding to enrich its advertising and distribution platforms.

The new round of funding includes investment from Bain Capital and Canaan Parters. The company earlier had raised an equal amount of debt funding from Silicon Valley Bank.

Blips currently has more than 13 million unique monthly visitors in the US. The company provides 330 million video views per month to its 30 million users globally, counting one fourth of these are paying subscribers. It also streams video content to a number of other platforms such as iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Roku, Verizon FiOS, TiVo and Sony TV.

Redbox Acquires Blockbuster Express

Movie and video game rental kiosk provider, Redbox (parent company Coinstar), has entered into an agreement to buy NCR Blockbuster Express kiosks and related assets for $100 million. The acquisition includes the purchase of the DVD kiosks, certain retailer contracts, and DVD inventory from NCR’s entertainment line of business.

The latest move comes just after Redbox entered a deal with Verizon to offer a new movie streaming service similar to Netflix. Redbox, which currently has 35,400 kiosks installed nationwide and roughly 9,000 existing Blockbuster kiosks will rebrand the acquired Blockbuster kiosks with its Redbox label.

“We are very pleased to enter into this agreement with NCR,” said Scott Di Valerio, chief financial officer of Coinstar, Inc. and interim president of Redbox. “As the global self-service solutions leader, NCR has strong technology, manufacturing and servicing capabilities, and we look forward to leveraging their expertise as Coinstar continues to grow its core automated retail businesses and expands its offerings.”

YouTube still leads the online video market.  But the majority of big and small players are now looking to create more video inventory and a range of services around premium content to attract more users and create a new online video advertising ecosystem.

Amazon, Redbox Expand Streaming Video with M&A, Blip Raises $12M is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Amazon Elite Get Instant Movie Streaming, Jabs at Netflix
• The Promise of Amazon’s Tablet Ecosystem Rests on the Cloud
• HTML5: Savior in the Uprising Against Apple In-App Rules
• Amazon Kindle Fire Could be More Profitable Product Than You Think
• Amazon Seeing Success on both Sides of the Kindle Aisle
• The Year of the e-Reader: Where Price Meets Necessity

When Brent called me last year and said he was putting together an event I said “sign us up” without even knowing what he was planning. I trust Brent and have confidence in his ability to pull together an interesting roster of speakers, participants, and most importantly, an audience to engage with.

Trust… let’s talk about that for a minute. The social technology industry has come up with an entire array of words that ultimately just convey the notion of trust between and institution and constituent, or person to person. These words include the ever popular “authentic” but also words like “transparent”, “open”, and “honest”. Whatever you name you give it, it is TRUST that we are talking about and the ultimate objective for companies using social technologies to engage the world around them should be using trust as a currency for influence.

The night before the event the speakers had a little dinner and over the course of the meal I learned a lot about the audience, the market, and my fellow speakers. After dinner and the next morning I put my deck together and assembled my thoughts into speaking points. I began my presentation by sharing this chain of events and then started with:

“Why did I tell you that at 11:00 last night and 6am this morning I put my deck together for you? Well it’s because I want you to trust me and know that what I am saying to you isn’t boilerplate, scripted, or slickly presented, because if nothing else I say makes an impression upon you let it be this, brands are lies, half truths and good intentions.”

Why are brands lies, half truths and good intentions? Keep in mind that I don’t subscribe to the notion that companies are inherently untrustworthy or that the people in a company, any company, are dishonest… I am part of a company, you probably are as well. The reason why brand statements are untrustworthy is that they reflect what a company, specifically those in the leadership of a company, want to believe about their organization, not what the customers of that institution reflect back to them as their values.

50 years of broadcast advertising has conditioned people to not believe what companies tell them is the truth, which is why Edelman’s trust barometer regularly ranks “people like me” as more trustworthy than any institution. As a society we have a generalized trust issue with institutions of all kinds and yes it should concern you as much as it does me because institutions of government, private enterprise, and everything in between form the backbone of society, and the demise of institutions has historically been a leading indicator for the demise of a society.

I have been thinking a lot about the notion of brands lately, but what I have been focusing on is how the communications revolution we have been participating in, also known as social media technology, is thrusting forward a notion that companies and customers need a better way of talking to each other.

Let’s not call them consumers… please, they are people and people have an inherent desire to be treated as individuals. The construct of consumer is something that companies created to group customers together because they lacked the ability to address each customer individually. Today we can reach customers as individual people so why do we need things like focus groups, demographics, and behavioral segmentation?

Well they do serve a valuable purpose, which is to roll up things which are best addressed in the aggregate, like product definitions and advertising strategy but when it comes to customer service and a collection of marketing functions we need to drill down to the individual level and treat customers as individual people.

Another aspect of this that I find particularly fascinating is that customer are behaving in a very different way that in generations past, not only do they have needs that have to be met with products and services but they also want companies to intersect them on the basis of values. In generations past we cared a lot about what the brand symbolized, the fashion appeal of it, but today we care about the values of the people that make up the company. Wow.

Couple this with another observation I have, which is that brand loyalty is easy to achieve but hard to hold… a direct inverse of what was the case even just a few years ago when brand loyalty was hard to achieve but very durable once acquired. We quickly embrace companies and products with a profound advocacy but one slip and a company quickly gets black listed. From heros to zeros in no time flat…. just ask the Komen Foundation.

So what does all this have to do with the idea that brands are lies? Well it all came together for me with something that Dion Hinchcliffe passed around on Twitter yesterday titled “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch“. You should read this in it’s entirety but let me quote this one passage for you.

(…in successful companies) Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy.

Just as we need to recalibrate our thinking about customers as people rather than consumers, we need to appreciate that in successful businesses today, and tomorrow’s leaders, the organization exists as a unified body of individuals acting with single minded purpose and empowered with the ability to carry forward on the basis of what is right and wrong for the organization. Wow.

Brands are Lies is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Life With Android, 1 Year Later
• Voice of the Customer is Dead
• +1 on +1
• The Crowdsourcing Sweatshop, Not Really
• The Shift from Creating to Liking

Michael Hugos has published an article at CIO Blogs addressing just this question: how can we look at massively multiplayer online (MMO) games as models for business collaboration?

His example game is actually quite brilliant. EVE Online is one of the best-known sandbox MMO games ever produced, run by CCP Games headquartered in Iceland, this MMO has been at the center of a great deal of controversy because it broke the mold for a game played by and for players. In its science fiction environment, players are given all the tools they need to build a career from a multitude of actions that affect other players from resource gathering, hauling, trading, playing with the internal stock market, or even fighting wars as a mercenary.

The high fidelity model of social interaction with a corporate and resource model, however, isn’t what makes EVE Online perfect for looking at how MMOs could be an excellent model for business collaboration. It’s how the game allows players to communicate and pay attention the current status of what they’re working on in relation to everyone that they’re collaborating with. In many ways, the heads-up-display (HUD) and user interface of EVE Online generates a sort of near-technological telepathy between players working together in a corporation to get things done.

Essentially, EVE Online—sometimes chided as being “spreadsheets in space”—envelops a gamified approach to logistics and resource management.

Hugos presents this in  his article and I’d like to expand on it,

Business intelligence and analytics software has something to learn from games and from MMOs in particular. MMOs use well designed heads-up displays that combine data analysis with group collaboration capabilities. This is illustrated below in screenshots showing two of the heads-up displays used by players flying spaceships in a battle. Note how they use moving 3D displays to present information from real-time data feeds provided by the game.

In addition to the moving 3D displays in the center of the screens, notice the other information shown around the edges of the screens. There are dials and readouts with relevant data, and thumbnail displays showing their status and the actions of other players they are collaborating with. To supplement these visual displays, players also communicate with each other moment to moment using text messages via chat features and Internet-based voice messages that can be directed to individual players or the entire group through headphones and microphones.

What makes MMO games engaging and interesting to players often can be boiled down to entanglement and immersion. If what a player does has an impact on the world that they’re playing in, and they can see the fruits of their labor (and that labor is not intense) they feel rewarded by the experience. What I’ve just described may even be seen as the benefits of working for a real-world company, making an impact on that company’s outcome, and providing some sort of tangible labor.

With the advent of the mobile phone and apps that allow for close collaboration we’ve moved closer to having on-demand communication with colleagues through the day. With the introduction of gesture-detection we’ll even be able to bring intense amounts of data into an immersive format with 3D displays (the peripheral relevant data that Hugos refers to.) Video games even present a way to collect vast amounts of behavioral and active big data and democratize massive small-actions by a multitude of people into organized work—directed by a person with an interface that could allow them to direct that work it would become the next-gen of human resources.

While games like EVE Online may feel like “spreadsheets in space” and to some may become a second job (being CEO of a corporation in a video game can be quite stressful) these sorts of social and technological interaction provide keen insights into how we can engage workers, management, and executives in the businesses of the future.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games as a Model for Business Collaboration is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• EverQuest 2 Player Base Swells 300% Since Switching to Free-to-Play
• Free-to-play MMO Spending Up 24 Percent in the US; DC Universe Online Revenue Leaps 700 Percent After Going F2P
• World of Warcraft Turns 7: Players Blow out Candles, Eat Cake
• Blizzard to Experiment with Real-Money for Gold Scheme in WoW via Tradable In-Game Pet
• Blizzard Planning Diablo III Cash Auction House: Items Will be Bought, Sold for Real Money
• Bitcoins for World of Warcraft Virtual Gold? Just Look to Bitmit.net

“It’s no doubt that each year the Super Bowl attracts an abundance of fans from all over the country. JiWire looked across its entire network of the on-the-go audience connecting to cafes, hotels and airports, to determine the top 20 places that fans traveled from to attend Super Bowl XLVI and watch the New York Giants play the New England Patriots live.”

The tops 5 cities were Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, and Philadelphia. Among the devices that were used by the on-the-go audience, smartphones top the chart with 47 percent market share, followed by laptops and tablets at 29 percent and 24 percent respectively. Overall, connectivity in Indianapolis alone increased by 18 percent during the event.

While fans travel across America just to catch the game, brands and advertisers are all about marketing and leveraging the world of social-mobile-local. Instead of paying large sums of money for a 30-second cable ad slot, they might as well take advantage of fans’ heavy mobile usage. Mobile marketing company Velti says users connect beyond their in-person friends and are likely to check their phones 10 times more during the game.

Even popular quarterbacks Eli Manning and Tom Brady didn’t escape analytics, as Twitter sentiment compared their positive impressions, putting Manning ahead with 65 percent over Brady’s 62 percent. Here’s also a thought-provoking article from Sandvine about the plunge of internet traffic and Netflix’s viewership during the event. For more on social-mobile, check out this roundup.

image credit: nj.com

Traveling Super Bowl Fans Inflated Indy’s WiFi Nearly 20% is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• How Social, Mobile was Super Bowl 2012? A Brand’s Dream Come True
• Social Mobile’s True Value for Super Bowl 2012? Business Intelligence
• Mobile Travel: An Industry That Doesn’t Yet Know Itself
• Foursquare Surpases 10M Members. Location Services Here to Stay?
• Android’s Big and So are Local Deals, Study Shows
• WiFi Hotspots Prove Mobile Ad Gold Mine, JiWire Raises $20M

“Such strong product technologists and engineers add great value to the development team we’re continuing to grow in our Palo Alto office,” Groupon spokeswoman Julie Mossler told the Chicago Tribune.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Downside of an Acquisition

These days, startups either go big, fail or get acquired by larger companies.  If a company is acquired, it can either be because of their technology or what they are offering, or because they have outstanding employees that would be a great addition to the buying company.  And that’s what Groupon is doing.  Instead of pirating or hiring just their desired employees, they go and buy the whole company.

There’s a plausible explanation for this: a person might be performing very well because he is comfortable with the people he works with, and taking that person out of his comfort zone could be crucial to his performance.  The downside of an acquisition is the acquired company almost always gets shutdown, and only select employees stay on board.

Last year Groupon acquired OpenCal, the online appointment scheduling and booking site, as well as Campfire Labs, the startup company that gave us Slice, the web-based service that lets users “slice” friends into groups, working with existing social-media sites like Facebook to offer features such as chat, calendar, etc.  And earlier this year, Groupon acquired Mertado, the company that creates “shopping experiences that build bridges between content, commerce, and community.  Of the three acquisitions, OpenCal is the only one continuing operations.  Mertado and Camfire Labs, along with Slice, have been inaccessible to users, and Mertado will be shutting down on February 28, 2012.

First Earnings Call

Today, Groupon will have their first earnings call after they went public last November. Analysts are expecting sales of $473 million, triple the amount from a year ago, with a 2011 revenue amount of roughly $1.6 billion.  Groupon’s market value is at  $15 billion.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason must be sweating bullets by now, because he is faced with the daunting task of delivering an awesome first earnings call, convincing investors that their company is here to stay, and not just a fad that people will soon forget.  More importantly, he’ll have to demonstrate that the company is making money.

Groupon recently announced a new marketing strategy, Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel that lets users spin the wheel and score potential discounts from the available choices.  It is tied up with Facebook to broaden their reach.  That is just an example of Groupon’s marketing strategy and we’d like to believe that it’s working, taking on new subscribers and maintaining their current subscribers.

Still, a lot of people will probably unsubscribe to their service in the long run, and Groupon has to face this reality.  How many people unsubscribe from their service every month?  How many new users sign up every month?  Of their total subscribers, how many of those actually use the service?  Will merchants continue to participate in group-buying deals?  These are just some of the questions that investors would probably want to ask Groupon.

“We remain concerned that merchants are wary of the longer-term impacts of offering steep discounts through Groupon and other daily-deal sites,” Jordan Rohan of Stifel Nicolaus wrote. “But it is hard to predict when that wariness will create a real drag on fundamentals.”

Groupon Acquisition Amidst First Earnings Call After IPO is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Lawsuits and Probes Don’t Slow Down Groupon’s Latest Acquisition
• Lot18 Closes $30M Round as Deals Sector Takes Off
• Groupon Beats Expectations With “Unneeded” IPO Cash
• Groupon Sets the Date for an IPO on Friday
• Can Groupon Survive Google’s Deals Push?
• IPO Fever: Is the Party Still On?

Since schoolFeed launched in July 2011, the networking site dedicated to connecting high school classmates has gained over 7 million users, and their userbase is growing every second.  The target crowd of schoolFeed are those aged 35-55 who didn’t have social networking sites “in their day” to keep them in touch.

“It’s amazing how many alumni have wanted to find old classmates.  We’re creating over 15 new connections per second.” said Lance Tokuda, co-founder of schoolFeed. “There is a huge market for people that would really want to interact with old classmates. We are excited to offer them a network that meets their needs which is complimentary to Facebook’s social graph.”

schoolFeed features:

• Find and connect with hundreds of old classmates in just one click
• Share an online yearbook with your graduating class
• Follow classmates based on interests
• Earn virtual currency as you engage with other users

And the best part about schoolFeed, apart from reconnecting with high school classmates, is that it’s free and it connects with Facebook.  This leveraging of Facebook’s existing social graph has been key for schoolFeed’s growth, enabling a faster rate of expansion than even RockYou saw during its early days, and later as an initial supporter of the Facebook platform.

But as schoolFeed competes with the likes of Classmates.com more so than Facebook, the newcomer will have to utilize a different monetization scheme for a demographic well accustomed to paying out for direct connections on social networks.  Tokuda thinks it’s high time direct monetization schemes were changed.  schoolFeed will be using its fresh funds to build out new features, as well as its marketing efforts.

“With RockYou there wasn’t a clear way to monetize social media,” Tokuda explains.  ”MySpace was big but advertisers didn’t want to advertise there initially.  Now there’s a clear route for monetization on social media.

“We’re targeting the same people that often used RockYou–a lot of soccer moms, those that play social games.  And even on the brand side, they’re valuable, with a lot of consumer brands targeting them as well, so we think it’s a good fit.  We find that mature demographics have higher monetization rates–they’re the more nostalgic.”

One new feature schoolFeed will offer this mature demographic is event-planning, specifically for school reunions.  They’ll also be building out their search functions, which are still relatively limited at this time.  They’ve already dipped into the highly monetizable social gaming pool with a version of Bingo already engaging users on the site.

schoolFeed Gets $1.7M to Connect Classmates that Missed the Facebook Boat is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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Spil Games’ recent 2011 State of Gaming review revealed some interesting insight about free-to-play gamers. According to the report, those who play free-to-play games end up spending as much as $60 per month on micro-transaction to enhance their experience.

Spil Games parsed data that involved users’ paying and playing habit from January to December 2011. The company first introduced their social games in July 2011, and since then they’ve seen global average revenue per user grow by 30 percent each month. Currently, the company has a mammoth user base of 170 million monthly gamers, and saw 11 billion gameplays in 2011 – that’s 350 every second.

Breaking down the figures gender-wise, teen boys spend the highest average revenue per paying user on Spil Games’ platforms, generating $60 per month per user in Germany. Female players are particularly inclined to farm games, and Spil sees conversion rates of over 4 percent in some countries. By the end of 2011, four of the top five games for women were social or had a social element. Social games are especially popular with girls, with Pet Party being the most popular.

US most active in online gaming

Generally, players spend an average of 85 minutes per month playing online games. US and Brazil account for most of online gamers. Teens prefer racing games, particularly those in which they can show off their achievements to their friends. In 2011 more than 33,610,844 high scores were submitted by teens.

“The breadth of our offering and the personal approach available to developers is driving the kinds of numbers we’re seeing on our platforms,” said Spil Games’ CEO Peter Driessen. “Players clearly want to go to a platform specialized in online gaming, and this is a great opportunity for Triple-A developers. We expect they are positioned to make at least $5 million dollars per title on our platforms this year.”

Social gaming continues to grow

More big news in the social gaming scene, PC Game maker Crytek created a PC to mobile social gaming network called GFace. It’s currently in beta and focuses on cross-platform, multiplayer gameplay. There’s also a report that Zynga accounted for 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue in 2011. But along with it, the game developer was again accused of cloning its new game Zynga Bingo” from Buffalo Studio’s “Bingo Blitz.” Also, Zynga’s chief game designer Bryan Reynolds, along with Nexon America co-founder Min Kin, was appointed board of directors to the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.

In addition, Final Fantasy XIII-2 Japanese version was patched to add Facebook support,which will allow players to post information about their game to their wall. Social gaming is so popular in Japan that Japan’s social gaming market will hit $5.1 billion dollar by 2016, Nomura Research Institute predicts.

Those Free-to-Play Games Earn $60 per User Every Month is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Social Games: For Girls That Spend Money
• DNA Games Buy Out Marks Zynga’s 14th Acquisition in 12 Months
• Angry Birds Maker Rovio Seeks Hong Kong 2013 IPO; Zynga Stock Continues to Drop
• Zynga IPO Voyage Faces Waves of Doubt, Promises To Double Paying Players
• Social Games on a Winning Streak: Zynga Faces Global Competition
• Electronic Arts Throws Down the Social Gaming Gauntlet with KlickNation Aquisition

So what was the giveaway?  The front-facing camera.  You see, the Lumia 800 doesn’t have the front facing camera, even the white one. But the photo of the white device on their page clearly shows a front facing camera, so yeah, it’s the Lumia 900.  And people are already begging Nokia for details: When is it coming out?  How much would it cost?  Will it be available internationally?  Of course, Nokia did not answer their questions.  Guess we’ll just have to wait for it to officially hit shelves.

Apkudo’s Device Analytics Software

Apkudo, Inc., the Android innovation start-up company, announced the Apkudo Device Analytics software.

The Apkudo Device Analytics software helps find device and application performance problems before release to help network operators and OEMs launch their Android devices with greater confidence of commercial success.

“Apkudo Device Analytics helps speed handsets and tablets to market, finding usability problems earlier in acceptance testing,” said Josh Matthews, Apkudo, CEO. “Testing with Apkudo Device Analytics helps OEMs and operators meet the fragmentation challenge and position new devices to be competitive in the dynamic mobile marketplace.”

Longer (Battery-life) Is Always Better

OnTrion, manufacturer of superior-quality mobile phone batteries and accessories, announced that they now offer extended batteries for T-Mobile’s HTC EVO 3D model. All of the extended OEM-quality mobile phone batteries OnTrion manufactures have a battery cover and the original mAh (milliamperes) accurately stated on them.

OnTrion is known for their tagline “Engineered to Last Longer,” as well as their extended battery line for all the major smartphone brands.  With the addition of the extended batteries for the HTC EVO 3D, it just show how much the company is committed to living up to that mission.

Other Mobile News

Apple’s VP of iPhone and iPod Engineering, David Tupman, left the company.  Though this is not something that happened recently, according to 9to5mac he left at the end of 2011, Apple has yet to fill the position but is said to be looking for someone from the inside to replace Tupman.

Apple’s Director of iPod and iPhone Engineering Vic Alessi might be the one to replace Tupman since he worked closely with Tupman on iPhones and iPods.  As for Tupman, the reason for his departure was not disclosed, nor his future plans, but a man with his stature will always have a place in Silicon Valley.

Instagram, the photosharing app made for iOS devices, will soon be available for Android devices.  The giveaway?  A notification that popped up in the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

According to In Flex We Trust’s Tat Wza, “I was just on the 10.1, when this ‘Featured App’ little green guy, and the word Intsagram poked out like….well like Crazy.”  But when he checked the Android Market for Instagram, it wasn’t there.  So it could be a glitch, or a hacker playing tricks or the may soon be available for Android.  Again, all we can do is wait.

Leaked White Nokia Lumia 900, Instagram on Android? is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

In the same vein:

• Google No. 3 Employee Craig Silverstein Joins Executive Exodus
• Traveling Super Bowl Fans Inflated Indy’s WiFi Nearly 20%
• Nokia to Layoff 4,000 Workers, Apple Sued for iPad Trademark
• Apkudo Launches New Android Analytics, MetroPCS First On Board
• How Social, Mobile was Super Bowl 2012? A Brand’s Dream Come True
• Xoom Tablets Sold with User Data on Woot: Privacy Oops!

Totem is a multi-faceted service that can be a useful resource for PR agents, reporters and startups alike.  It centralizes pertinent information about a company so that anyone has access to the information they need.  Information like the company’s mission, their latest coverage, logo and press contact.  Totem lets you package the press release with the images, contacts with the company history–everything you need to learn about a given company.  And the beauty of Totem is that it’s self-serve for every aspect of press these days, whether it’s social media-driven or more traditional.

There’s two initial options for Totem users: a free service with all the basics you need, or a premium account with full customization for a one-time fee of $99.  The founders believe that this type of service shouldn’t be reserved only for the well-funded.  They also believe that the current way news-related marketing works is overdue for a revolution.  As one that digs through press pitches on a daily basis, I’m glad to see someone delivering a high measure of convenience not only for myself, but every person involved, from press agent to the company itself.

Totem hopes that your press page will become a living, breathing entity, readily updated and always accessible.  It’s designed almost as a landing page, combining the press release with a company blog to present a rather evergreen resource.  What’s more, certain aspects of Totem’s pages are embeddable, so they can be placed on a company’s website in an integrated manner, separating the “press” resource as needed.

But what Totem is really doing here is building a database of companies and their information, and Totem’s true value will lie in how this database is leveraged moving forward.  Will Totem target publications in need of embeddable company information to build out their own resources?  That’s something Totem’s considering, Dilworth tells me.  But the next step is really analytics, where users will be able to see how their embeddable data is being received and how content is being shared.

The analytics angle isn’t a surprising one, given Dilworth’s own background and clients.  Even from his days at Porter-Novelli, I often found myself chatting with startups with a heady focus on semantic search, natural language and data analysis.  From Twine to Parse.ly, Dilworth specializes in data-centric businesses, and has always been able to convey this, sometimes better than the startup founders he represents.

It’s important to note that Totem is a separate project from Jones-Dilworth, though there’s an obvious interest in launching a program like Totem–scratching one’s own itch, if you will.  Totem’s a much-needed change in a digital movement that’s already contravened printed media and its traditional subscription model, all the while reforming content distribution, and marketing for a tech savvy people.

What Happens When a PR Guy Scratches His Own Itch? Totem Launches Beta Today is a post from: SiliconANGLE We're now available on the Kindle! Subscribe today.

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