There are a lot of social monitoring products existing online. One of the latest additions to this populated market is Sprout Social, which was announced just today. It enables businesses to monitor all their social networks across the internet on a single web-based dashboard. This includes Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. What's its point of differentiation in a rapidly crowding market?  From Sprout Social: "We’ve put the most comprehensive set of business oriented tools in one place to help you manage your entire social presence brilliantly. We connected all the major networks, built tools to make sense of the information and invented new ways to connect with highly-targeted potential customers. Then we made it

Has Google lost the battle against the companies that game its system of ranking search results? It certainly seems that way from my anecdotal usage. John Byrne, the former BusinessWeek editor seems to feel the same. He recently launched a site that looks at business schools: Poets and Quants. He published a post detailing his frustration at Google's listing of the site, or rather its failure to list the site. C-Change Media Inc.: Google? Where are you? One of the most fascinating aspects of our debut is what Google has been able to discover, or fail to find, about the site. ...So what do you find when you Google "poetsandquants?" Not a single mention of the actual website. ...As you go through the first five pages of

[Editor’s Note: This is a good thing – a practice we encourage here at SiliconANGLE, even amongst those that work with us who’s primary job function isn’t to write. –mrh] Every Forbes reporter will get a blog… this is smart because it forces the individual to build a distinct brand in the market and it gets us closer to a interactive model for journalism. However, having blogs is not the same as having community and if the journalists ignore the activity in the comment streams then little will change. We also hear that every reporter will now be required to have his or her own blog, and that most are starting from scratch. It’s a big departure from the online practices of former Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller, who was deci

I saw some great discussion on Facebook answers by Mark Zuckerberg and Shervin Pishevar (two respected gurus). I had to weight in since this is an area that I've been research and developing products for close to a decade. It's a great discussion that can provide a roadmap to the future. The world is changing and it's very disruptive across both technical platforms and business models. The discussion is What is Social Networking (implicitly the discussion in about the future). Here is great commentary by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Shervin Pishevar, founder of Social Gaming Network, and me John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com. What is Social Networking? Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook weights in: I think tha

Sean P. Aune and I both spotted a couple of posts around the web today pointing to the fact that the Kindle, immediately following the new affordable pricing model, has sold out completely. Sean and I have been particularly attuned to significant pricing changes in the digital reader markets because we’ve long held that the first organization to get a device priced close to the $100 mark will win. I’ve been spending the last hour or so searching my video archives for proof that we’ve said this publicly, but since so much of what Sean and I were saying publicly at the time was on Mashable (and their search functionality leaves something to be desired), I’ve only just now found the video I was looking for (turned out, it was on my pe

Everyone from book publishers to magazine concerns to TV networks have been trying to figure out their tablet and iPad strategies. And now the premium cable network Starz partnered with book publisher Penguin in a deal that helps Starz promote an original series and helps Penguin promote its author Ken Follet’s bestseller The Pillars of the Earth with a so-called "amplified edition." As I report in this week's New Media Minute, this is a marketing initiative that can potentially tap into the storytelling potential of iPad. Apple has sold 3 million iPads.

It was great to catch up with Sol Tzvi, co-founder and CEO of a fascinating startup called Genieo. She's in town this week for meetings with several large companies interested in her company's technology. Genieo installs on a PC and it helps you find all the news and information that is relevant to you from all your sources. It does this without needing any keywords or any specific settings from the user, and it works across all your computers and smartphones so it never duplicates content already seen. I first met Ms. Tzvi earlier this year: Genieo's Sol Tzvi: Why Doesn't My PC Know Me? Genieo is one solution to the media tsunami that is building into towering proportions. The media is not dying, we now have more media, in more forms,

Viral Videos are all the rage these days. I've been tracking a few big viral videos recently. Last week, the big Old Spice video series took the world by storm. EMC and Storwize have been having huge success with their awareness viral video campaigns. If there are any question as to who viral videos reach with campaigns like EMC and Storwize, metrics show that advertisers like Storwize and EMC are hitting a heavy Male audience 35-44 and 45-55 – there are some teens and others non targets, but they reflect the active online nature of that audience on some of the sites where viral video campaigns end up going viral. If there is any question as to “why would tech companies do broad reach viral videos?” the answer is why not? Th

Kevin Shatzkamer is the Chief Architect for Cisco Mobility and speaks to the mobile research Cisco has developed in helping Mobile Service Providers reach their ROI goals and objectives in projecting an increasingly demand driven market. World Cup and Mobility Q. How will current World Cup viewership demand impact the mobile community from a network capacity standpoint? VIEWING SOURCE – WORLD CUP GAMES Source Company % Internet ESPN-ESPN3 31% Radio ESPN Radio 8% Mobile ESPN Mobile Sites 6% “Traditional TV remains the dominate source of viewing for the games” A. There has been specu

I don’t know how anyone could look at the traffic data coming out of Murdoch’s paywall initiative and not conclude that they are ill-advised and monumentally stupid. According to data from Experian Hitwise, which charts Internet traffic, visits to The Times of London and The Sunday Times’ Websites have dropped by 66% since parent company News International put those sites behind paywalls on July 2. [From London 'Times' Sees 66% Traffic Drop, Post-Paywall] Just 12% of The Times pre-paywall audience created a registered account and of that new number of 10% actually agreed to pay for the content. Couple that with 12k iPad apps that have been sold and you are looking at less than $20 million a year in revenue, which come nowhere