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How The Future of Mobile Lies in the Developing World

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Erica Kochi, the co-lead of Tech Innovation at UNICEF. Her team started UNICEF’s open source RapidSMS platform which has been adopted in developing countries worldwide. She co-teaches a class ”Design for Unicef” in NYU’s ITP Program, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia University on leveraging technology and design to improve international development. All these views are her own. In less than three decades, the mobile phone has gone from being a status symbol to being a ubiquitous technology that facilitates almost every interaction in our daily lives. One month after the world’s population topped 7 billion in October 2011, the GSM Association announced that mobile SIM cards had reached 6 billion. A 2009 study in India illustrated that every 10 percent increase in mobile penetration leads to a 1.2 percent increase in GDP. Yet patterns of mobile phone use in developing countries are vastly different from what you see on the streets of New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. This is a market underserved by technologists and startups. This is where the majority of future growth lies, and Silicon Valley has yet to realize the huge economic opportunities for network operators, handset developers, and mobile startups. Where are these opportunities? Developing Countries are Powering the Growth China and India account for the majority of new mobile connections, and in developing countries mobile saturation hasn’t yet hit and is still experiencing double-digit growth. This rapid growth most recently driven from the developing world is surprising when you consider that for the average mobile user, procuring the device costs a few months’ salary. Sustaining this connection generates tremendous value and meets many user needs as they continue to invest often over 10 percent of their monthly income in staying connected. The explosive growth of mobile in developing countries over the past five years is what prompted us at UNICEF to leverage mobile to strengthen our programmes in 190 countries and territories. Many of UNICEF’s programmes now use mobiles for a variety of purposes. One program ensures that infants are tested for HIV and put on treatment if necessary. Another gathers direct feedback from communities on everything from water sanitation to access to essential medication. Creativity Despite No Data For those in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to imagine that 70 percent of all handset shipments are feature phones. Most of these phones go to developing countries. The vast majority of the world, especially in low income and rural areas, is still living the mobile revolution through the constraints of voice, SMS and asynchronous connection. These connectivity constraints fuel tremendous creativity. For many communities, simple voice and text connections have brought about revolutions in access to financial, health, agricultural and education services and opportunities for employment. For example, many farmers in rural areas in Africa and Asia use SMS services to to find out the daily prices of prices of agricultural commodities. This information allows them to improve their bargaining position when taking their goods to market, and also allows them to switch between end markets. Another successful example in this space is UNICEF’s RapidSMS initiative: a scalable SMS-based open-source framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication. UNICEF currently supports governments across six countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and over 200,000 RapidSMS users in some of the most underserved and rural communities. Frontline health workers who each serve hundreds of women and children make up many of these users. Success in this space is quantified by time, money and lives saved. It is widely used by governments and the international development community, and has also taken off in business communities. For example, in Ghana, a local entrepreneur uses RapidSMS to monitor the sales of cook stoves around the country. Airtime is Cash In many countries where the majority of people are unbanked, airtime has become another form of currency. Imagine you need to get a small amount of money to your sister who lives in a village that’s ten hours drive away. The easiest way for you to do that is to buy some airtime, but instead of topping up your own prepaid mobile service you top up hers. For a small fee, she can now go and cash out this airtime with an agent that sells airtime. M-PESA, a project out of Kenya that was initially set up to distribute micro-loans to and collect payments from the poorest rural communities of Kenya, has now become a large-scale multi-country mobile cash transfer system run by Safaricom in East Africa and Roshan in Afghanistan. For many governments mobile money is a conundrum. They like that their citizens can access financial services that could significantly improve their lives. On the flip side, it can mean that mobile network operators and other mobile money service providers now operate and benefit from the revenue that normally would go to the central bank? Challenges remain. The price points of using these services are still out of reach for the poorest communities. There are often too few agents to cash out airtime. People often don’t understand or trust non-traditional forms of financial services. Yet this creates a huge business opportunity. Even with all the network operators in this space, there are possibilities for a multitude of services that leverage mobile payments. To be able to successfully develop in this space, we need to better examine how people interact with money across the world and build applications that are flexible enough to be customized and be relevant to different cultural patterns. In San Francisco you might pay your cab driver through his Square reader, but in Nairobi you’ll send him some airtime. A Phone for the Developing World iPhones don’t stand a chance due to their inflexibility and high price points. As it stands, the operating system for the developing world smartphone will be Android. However, even the flagship Samsung Galaxy Nexus isn’t the ideal phone. The ideal smartphone will be: 1. Cheap. Last year, Huawei in partnership with Safaricom unveiled an $80 Android phone in Kenya where 40 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day. At this year’s Mobile World Congress the CEO’s of Bharti Airtel, Telefonica Latin America and VimpelCom came out together and stated that $50 is the magic price point for smartphones to become more widely affordable in emerging economies. 2. Rugged and simple. The Nokia 1100 series is the most popular phone in the world. It is dust proof, water resistant, rugged, has a simple menu system, few separate parts and has a flashlight. Every town across the developing world has a local repair shop with spare parts for simple Nokias. When I travel to the developing world, I rely on my trusty Nokia 1100, not my iPhone. Smartphones are delicate creatures that don’t stand up to the daily wear and tear of people’s lives. 3. Battery life of a week. Recharging your phone every night is not an option if you live in a rural village without electricity. At one of UNICEF’s projects in rural Senegal, I encountered a village entrepreneur who started a business where he would collect everyone’s cell phones and for a small fee, bike to an electrified village a few hours away, then bike back with phones at full charge. People in these countries spend a lot of money to keep their phones charged. Developing a phone whose battery lasts for a week would unlock smartphones to a large market segment. Apps Optimized for Data Use Data is as expensive in developing as in developed countries. Data is unlikely to fall in price as quickly as smartphones, so even when handsets get cheap enough for an average user in a developing country, they still won’t be able to afford run many of the apps that make up the smartphone experience. There will be demand for apps – be it banking, weather, chat, social, and market information – but for them to take off it’s crucial that they use as little bandwidth as possible. One feature to emulate is Android’s Data Usage screen which allows you to set limits for data usage and makes it clear how much data you’ve used. Call to Arms The continued double digit growth of mobile in developing countries represents a tremendous business opportunity. While companies in Silicon Valley fight over trying to develop the top app in a certain category, huge untapped potential still remains in the developing world. Working in this space will require businesses to be able to think through the design of their applications from a different viewpoint. Their end users will have different motivations, experiences, needs and constraints. While handset manufacturers will need to build a phone whose battery lasts, app developers will need to build appropriate apps that use little bandwidth. Photos under creative commons sharealike license by Merrick Schaefer, UNICEF; Jan Chipchase, frog; and Terra Weikel, UNICEF.

Top 10 Twitter Pics of the Week

1. Eclipse Last Sunday, the moon passed between the sun and our planet, causing an awe-inspiring solar #eclipse. This special phenomenon was captured by thousands of people around the globe. This picture, posted to Twitter by aerospace engineer @wikkit (1000+ followers), was tweeted along with the text: "I'm sorry to inform you that Earth is about to be been eaten by a fire demon."Click here to view this gallery. It was another explosive week for pics on Twitter, with the total number breaking records yet again. This week, we analyzed more than 56 million photos shared on Twitter from computers and mobile devices all over the world. Summer, fun and celebrities were the main themes that ruled this week’s top 10. And now that the festival season has kicked off, we can spend hours gazing at pictures from festivals and other beautiful and sunny places all over the world. SEE MORE: Top 10 Twitter Pics of the Week Special thanks to Skylines, whose custom algorithm finds only the most popular and best pics. The best part of this weekly report is the keen insight of Skylines writer and analyst Julie Donders (@IkbenJulie), who makes sense of the top 10 Twitter pics with her context-rich captions. Take a peek at the pictures that made it to the top of Twitter’s visual food chain this week, and please let us know which one is your favorite in the comments below. Bonus: Here’s last week’s Top 10 Twitter Pics.1. Happy Mother's Day This week started off with Mother’s Day, with sons and daughters surprising Mom with gifts and visits, showering them with love. Posting this pic of her mother at age 13: young actress Chloë Moretz (@chloegmoretz, 240.000+ followers, who played in Kick-Ass and Hugo and is now featured in Dark Shadows) along with the tweet ““#HappyMothersDay mama :) you even looked chic at 13 #1971”Click here to view this gallery. More About: Skylines, Top 10 Twitter Pics, trending, Twitter

Top 10 Twitter Pics of the Week

10 Funniest Tweets of the Week

@JoseConseco "Jose Canseco is the Brian Wilson of Twitter and this is his Pet Sounds."Click here to view this gallery.What better way to enhance this three-day weekend than to enjoy a raucous roundup of Twitter comedy? Internet LOL-curator and comedian Jake Fogelnest has selected his favorite hilarious tweets of the week. Whatever you do, don’t google “Neil Young Dubstep.” — Jake Fogelnest (@jakefogelnest) May 20, 2012 “I don’t know how other people use Twitter, but for me it’s a constant stream of entertainment and jokes. It’s also become my first news source,” says Fogelnest. “Sad as it may be, the reality is I find myself seeing ‘OMG DID U SEE THE NEW YORK TIMES?‘ before I actually see The New York Times. This is because I am a ridiculous person and part of the problem!” Fogelnest has requested that all of you retweet the tweets above and favorite them — in some cases, he would like you to print the tweets, take them to a laser cutter and engrave them on the Vietnam memorial. “Some people may say, ‘It’s not appropriate to put a bunch of dumb tweets on the Vietnam Memorial,’” says Fogelnest. “To those people I say, ‘It’s not appropriate to be such an killjoy. Lighten up, you dweeb!!’” (Note: If you have access to a laser cutter, please do not actually vandalize the Vietnam Memorial.) More About: funniest tweets, trending, Twitter

Digital Chocolate Downsizing? Founder Trip Hawkins Out As CEO; Reports Of Layoffs, Marc Metis As Interim CEO

Some significant changes afoot at social and mobile games company Digital Chocolate: founder Trip Hawkins has stepped down as the CEO of the company. And we have also heard a report — yet to be confirmed directly by the company — that president Marc Metis has stepped up as interim CEO; and that Digital Chocolate has laid off up to 180 people across offices in India, San Mateo, Russia and elsewhere. Hawkins’ news was made public by Trip himself in his company blog, where he notes that he is “transitioning into a consulting and advisory relationship with Digital Chocolate.” Without giving away much about the state of affairs at the company, the move, he writes, is being made as the company is “narrowing its focus.” “It made sense to get more streamlined,” he explains. Hawkins founded the company eight years ago. Ironically, the news comes at the same time that Hawkins is marking the 30th anniversary of Electronic Arts, another gaming company that he founded: he incorporated that company on May 28, 1982. Before that he worked at Apple, which he joined in 1978, when it only had 25 employees. Trip’s LinkedIn profile now notes his employment as “computer games professional” with CEO, Digital Chocolate, now as a past position. Meanwhile, Marc Metis, who we have heard is now the interim CEO, still lists president of the company as his most current job on LinkedIn. He has been with Digital Chocolate since 2009 and has held other roles such as head of marketing. Layoffs. Again, we have yet to get confirmation from Digital Chocolate on the 180-layoff figure — we have reached out and will update with any detail we receive — but our tipster says that the cuts are as follows: half the staffs of both the Bangalore and San Mateo offices; the closure of Digital Chocolate’s Mexicali office, an office in Armenia and Sandlot offices in Bothell, Washington, and St Petersburg. (Digital Chocolate bought Sandlot in August 2011.) Digital Chocolate has had nearly $60 million in funding to date, with backers including Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfied and Byers; Sequoia; and Intel, among others. And in its eight years, it’s had a number of hits both in social gaming (eg Facebook) and in mobile, on iOS and other platforms. But lately traffic has fallen. In social games, Zynga, ranked number-one, has 247 million MAUs, according to AppData. In comparison, Digital Chocolate ranks significantly lower, at number-61, with 6.3 million MAUs. Galaxy Life is Digital Chocolate’s most popular social game at the moment, with 1.7 million MAUs and 310k DAUs. Traffic for its games overall is falling, down 470,000 in the last seven days.

Hey Kids, Get Off My Lawn: The Once and Future Visual Programming Environment

Editor’s Note: This guest post is written by Kwindla Hultman Kramer, who is the CEO of Oblong Industries — the company known for developing the gestural interfaces in the film Minority Report. The company’s current customers and partners include Boeing, SAP, GE, and others. When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years Mark Twain, ”Old Times on the Mississippi” Atlantic Monthly, 1874 When I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab fifteen years ago, my research group went on a retreat every year with Famous Computer Scientists from Xerox PARC. I greatly admired these people and their work. But I was young and in a hurry to get where I thought I was going. And it sometimes seemed that every time us young folks talked about our research, or showed a demo, someone would say something like, “oh, that’s very nice, when we did that at PARC ….” Fast forward to the present. For the last few years, every time I see a new piece of small, open, hackable, networked hardware, or a new reputation engine, or a generative art piece, or a product built around location tracking plus real-time information push, or — well, you get the idea — I have to bite my tongue and think of the PARC folks to keep myself from saying, “oh, that’s very nice, when we did that at the Media Lab ….” All of which just proves that the wheel of history revolves. New work is always new, by definition, even if it’s not entirely new (which nothing can ever be). That’s a long introduction to a short essay on programming tools. In particular, I’ve been intrigued by the online discussion recently around some very nice work on interactive development environments by Bret Victor and a related Kickstarter project — and now YCombinator company — called Light Table, by Chris Granger. Bret’s stuff is great. And Light Table is great. If you’re anything like me, you want to use the tools these two people are building. Go contribute to the Kickstarter project right now. The funny thing is, though, that we had pretty interesting versions of these tools twenty years ago. By the late 1980s, professional LISP and Smalltalk environments were more than a little like Light Table. When I discovered Visual Age Smalltalk in 1996 I was blown away. Visual Age (and other Smalltalk tools) were built around snippets of code representing objects and methods. There were very few file operations. You could run your code and make live changes to the source, which were reflected in the running process. There was no distinction between the development environment and the runtime. You could save out your working “image”. There were good tools for managing forks, versioning and merge — not just of source code, but of the full system image. If you were writing a GUI application in Visual Age Smalltalk, all the elements on screen were interactively inspectable from inside the debugger. And all the system internals, including the virtual environment, the compiler and the debugger, were introspectible and hackable just by writing a little more Smalltalk code. When I raved about this to my friends, some of whom had old SparcStations sitting in their coat closets running their home networks, they said, “oh yeah, that’s nice, when we built all that stuff into our LISP machines ten years ago at Symbolics ….” So one question we might ask is why programming tools like this haven’t taken over, if we’ve had them for a long time and they are, indeed, generally better in objective or widely agreed upon ways? I can think of a few possible reasons. First, the requirement of a dynamic runtime to build these dynamic environments on top of is actually quite a big deal. Bret’s work is in JavaScript. Light Table targets JavaScript, Clojure, and Python. These days, we have two classes of languages. We use heavily engineered languages that are very, very static in their aesthetic and implementation choices. Truly interactive development environments are difficult to build for these C-family languages. And C-family languages have remained dominant until very recently, because they have both real advantages and “worse is better,” inertial advantages. On the other hand, we have dynamic languages that, relatively speaking, are really just prototypes. Javascript and Ruby and Python are useful and interesting. But much of the work on the dynamic languages side of the fence seems to go into tweaking syntax, reinventing the wheel at the VM level, and community-based library development. All of which I’m actually a big fan of, but goodness, it does sort of make me pine for that 200-person (I’m guessing) crackerjack team working on VisualAge for ten years at IBM. Maybe Google — in some ways the IBM of 2012 — will get us there again with JavaScript and V8. Then we’ll have a dynamic language stack that is fully engineered in the same sense that IBM Smalltalk and Symbolics LISP were. Second, I think that the web-enabled explosion of programming and programmers has set back the development of software tooling just as it (temporarily) set back user interface design. Again, I hasten to make clear that I think what the web hath wrought is wonderful, on balance. But there’s no free lunch, and for ten years most of the tech world turned its attention to building out a new global platform that could not, in its early days, support very much in the way of new user interfaces or sophisticated runtime architecture work. The web has grown up, though. The capabilities of modern JavaScript frameworks attest to that, as does the low-level work on implementations like V8. Third, screen real estate matters. The traditional “everything is a file” approach is wonderfully portable. You can build an environment for working with files even for a very small display. Heck, you can work with files if all you have is a line-mode terminal. But flexibly arranged code snippets and fully interactive graphical debuggers require a lot of pixels. And there aren’t always enough pixels. I’m amazed at how often I visit Big Companies and see full-time programmers working at their desks on single, 15″ monitors. That’s an enormous missed opportunity to enable productivity. Pixels have gotten really cheap, though, and come in more and more form factors. We actually could build, today, a development environment designed to make use of a laptop screen and a tablet screen, simultaneously. A MacBook Air and an iPad, used together, would give me more pixels than I had on my dual-monitor desktop back when I fired up Visual Age Smalltalk every day. Finally, if we really want to get away from files and static representations of programs, maybe we want to get away from text altogether. There’s been lots of good academic work on graphical — as in, really, graphical — programming environments over the years. But that’s another entire conversation. Here are a couple of good pages on LISP Machines, which really were the future before the future was quite possible to build. And, as far as I know, the closest anyone has ever gotten to creating a full dynamic environment for a C-language platform is Alexia Massalin’s Synthesis operating system. If you are a programmer of any kind, I’ll wager that Alexia’s dissertation will blow your mind. So, let’s make the old tools new again. I want to use Light Table, and whatever Light Table catalyzes that we can’t yet imagine. But I do promise that when that new thing comes along, I’ll tell you we built an early version of it at the Media Lab at the tail end of the last century.

The 3 Missing Links In Twitter

Three things that are missing from Twitter and having them will definitely increase the user experience.

Facebook’s Plans for the World Wide Web

When you’re the world’s largest social network you find it difficult to let defeat slow you down. Facebook may be autocratic in the way it deals with its membership base and it may want to own the web and all its content but it is also the place where everyone goes to hangout online with their friends and it just keeps on growing

Skygate! TV chiefs move to protect their £260m investment after KP Twitter slur - Daily Mail

Senior executives at Sky Sports made the first move in the furore which resulted in England batsman Kevin Pietersen being fined for criticising Sky commentator Nick Knight on Twitter. Pietersen was reprimanded by his employers, the England and Wales Cricket Board, and fined an ‘undisclosed’ amount — believed to have been £2,500 with a further £2,000 suspended — for questioning Knight’s place in the Sky commentary box during the opening Investec Test at Lord’s. The batsman wrote on his Twitter page: ‘Can somebody PLEASE tell me how Nick Knight has worked his way into the commentary box for Home Tests?? RIDICULOUS!!’ But the outburst by England’s highest-profile cricketer, who has almost 621,000 Twitter followers, irritated senior figures at Sky, whose £260million-a-year investment in English cricket effectively bankrolls the professional game in this country. It is understood that Sky’s head of sport, Barney Francis, made representations to ECB chairman Giles Clarke early last week when he made it clear that he did not believe it was appropriate for a senior England player to denigrate his organisation in public. A Sky source said: ‘It was not about us trying to dictate to the ECB how they run the game but it was about maintaining good relationships between two organisations who value each other enormously. No one told the ECB what to do.’ Pietersen has twice previously been in hot water for Twitter outbursts. He labelled Adelaide ground staff ‘pathetic’ in 2010 and he described his omission from the one-day squad in the same year as ‘a f***-up’. His latest transgression saw him hauled before England team bosses Andy Flower and Hugh Morris on Wednesday, when he was informed of his punishment and reminded of his obligation to treat key sponsors and partners respectfully. On Thursday Pietersen moved to clarify his criticism of Knight when he approached a group of journalists at Trent Bridge after practice and insisted that he did not hold the former Essex batsman’s relative lack of Test success against him. ‘Just so you know… Atherton, Hussain, Gower, Botham. Legends. Love ’em. Bumble’s a superstar,’ Pietersen said with reference to the other front-line commentators in the Sky box. It is believed that Pietersen was expressing a widely held view within the England dressing room that Knight quoted them live on air following conversations they believed had been held in private. The decision to fine Pietersen has disappointed England’s players, several of whom are prolific users of the social networking site. Ahead of the second Test captain Andrew Strauss was keen to distance himself and the rest of the team from the decision, making it clear it was made by the ECB board and was not a direct breach of team protocol. There is no intention to introduce any more formal rules relating to players using Twitter, and Strauss is happy to continue with the current system of self-regulation. Pietersen has since held clear-the-air talks with Knight, who will be back on commentary-box duty for the third Test at Edgbaston. However, Pietersen does not seem to have learned his lesson if his tweeting on Saturday night was anything to go by. The batsman was drawn into a bitter exchange with a fan who wished him bad luck for Sunday’s play. Pietersen replied in strong and angry terms before deleting his response and replacing it with something that was more polite. Sky has had exclusive live rights to England’s home Test and one-day matches since the end of the Ashes series in 2005, which was broadcast on Channel 4, the last to be screened on free-to-air television. Sky’s coverage of cricket has not previously been marked by clashes between the players and the broadcasters, although football has experienced problems. In 2005 Jose Mourinho accused Sky Sports of getting Michael Essien a two-game European ban — causing him to miss the second-round defeat by Barcelona — after showing replays of his two-footed tackle on Liverpool’s Dietmar Hamann. Essien was not booked for the incident, which was missed by referee Herbert Fandel but described by the German midfielder as ‘the worst tackle I have ever received in my life’. The Chelsea manager refused to talk to the channel after his team beat Arsenal 2-0 in the league, saying to Sky’s waiting reporter: ‘You are very popular in Barcelona.’ Last season, Manchester United blamed Sky for Wayne Rooney’s two-match ban for swearing, which meant he missed an FA Cup semi-final against Manchester City. Rooney admitted swearing into a TV camera after scoring a hat-trick at West Ham but appealed against the length of the FA suspension. In his appeal, he and United claimed Sky’s cameraman broke an unwritten rule by going on the pitch to get a close-up of the striker, which provoked the offending language. The appeal was rejected.

Never Take Your Eyes Off This Hacker Metric

Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal. If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That’s why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong. Chen calculated Facebook’s historical ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) and the stats are startling. Since March 2009, when the earliest data is available, approximately 50% of Facebook users logged in daily. As other technology companies struggle to maintain DAU to MAU ratios of 5% or less, Facebook’s numbers appear stratospherically high in comparison. But what is equally surprising is the consistency of that ratio over time. Despite periodic user revolts in reaction to changes in the site, the ratio remained strangely stable. In fact, the number has risen over the past year and is now hovering at 58% as of March of this year. It’s as if Zuckerberg has steered the company by this golden ratio. Which begs the question: is there some wisdom here regarding this ratio as a predictor of Internet success? Obviously, there are no guarantees and starting cutting edge tech companies will always be risky business. But, assuming you have a solid business model, there are good reasons to believe that if there is one metric to focus on while building your business, it’s the percentage of users who come back daily as expressed by this ratio. As I’ve written previously, I believe a mastery of the mechanics of habit design is increasingly deciding startup winners and losers. Not only because habits cement user behavior in an increasingly cluttered digital world, but because a high-engagement product is also a high-growth product. The two are one and the same. A high DAU to MAU ratio is a great indicator of the strength of user habits and, ceteris paribus, I’d bet on a business with the higher ratio over a competitor every time. Here’s why: More is More When it comes to web and mobile startups, high DAU to MAU is more important than the size or growth rate of an entrenched competitor. Case in point, Facebook defeated much earlier competitors like MySpace and Friendster, both of which had healthy growth rates and millions of users by the time Facebook got started. This is because of what I call the “more is more principle.” High user engagement has an exponential effect on user growth. As David Skok points out on his blog, “The most important factor to increasing growth is not the Viral Coefficient, but the Viral Cycle Time.” Viral Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to complete a viral loop and it has massive impact on user growth. “For example, after 20 days with a cycle time of two days, you will have 20,470 users,” Skok writes. “But if you halved that cycle time to one day, you would have over 20 million users! It is logical that it would be better to have more cycles occur, but it is less obvious just how much better.” Having a greater proportion of DAUs dramatically increases Viral Cycle Time for two reasons. First, daily users initiate loops more often – think tagging a photo on Facebook. Second, more daily active users means more people to respond and react to each invitation. The cycle not only perpetuates; with high DAU to MAU, it accelerates. One Way to Grow Those who talk tech split into two dogmatic camps. Some prioritize growth and accept low engagement, while others believe a company needs to nail engagement before focusing on growth. I believe this is a false dichotomy. If you have only one or the other, congratulations, you’ve got squat. Let’s first take a look at user growth. Distribution, of course, is critically important and no company can survive without a sound customer acquisition strategy. Not only is growth essential but it is something engineer-driven companies love to work on. In fact, the title of “Growth Hacker” has recently become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley digerati. Tweaking viral coefficients and instantly seeing the results is intoxicating. It’s startup feedback at its finest. But optimizing growth without engagement has its pitfalls. As Peter Thiel recently told his class at Stanford, the effectiveness of distribution channels tends to follow a power law. Just as businesses tend to have only one revenue stream, they also have only one good growth strategy – the effectiveness of which is 10x the results of other distribution channels. The problem with having only one real way to grow is that the method becomes obvious to others and is quickly copied. For example, in its early days, Facebook capitalized on users importing their email contact list to drive growth. But soon thereafter, so did everyone else. But having competitors copy you is a high-class problem. It means something is working. Worse yet is discovering a fantastic viral loop that drives growth only to see engagement crater when users realize there’s little long-term value in the service. Ringtone businesses, sheep-throwing Facebook games circa 2008, and today’s social video sharing apps using questionable growth tactics, are just a few of the “leaky bucket” businesses that occur when distribution outpaces engagement. When it comes to building a big business, clearly a good acquisition channel is mandatory, but not sufficient. Given the power law of user growth, you will likely only have one major way of acquiring customers and it won’t be much of a secret. You’ll need some other competitive advantage. Engagement as Advantage As opposed to distribution channels, the mechanics driving user engagement do not follow a power law. In fact, it is the nuances of user behavior that make the competition irrelevant, just as it did in the case of Facebook’s early rivals. Discovering non-obvious user needs and creating accompanying habits is accomplished through deep observation grounded in solid behavioral theory, followed by methodical trial and error. It takes time to create new habits and getting the user to act the way you’d hoped is accomplished by uncovering a thousand tiny insights into the user’s psyche. The process of uncovering latent needs is characterized by understanding more about users than they know about themselves. The distribution strategy will always be obvious, but the behavioral insights are important secrets that can only be discovered through rigorous testing. Zynga had one obvious way to acquire users, namely Facebook ads. But the company has a cadre of behavioral insights it uses to craft addictive games. It collects terabytes of information daily to alter game dynamics to boost user engagement. Quora primarily drives users to its site through Google search traffic. But the conjecture about all the reasons why the service is so sticky spills over a long question thread. Instagram posted images to Twitter and Facebook to drive user acquisition, placing its growth strategy in plain sight. However, the founders, one of whom studied psychology as a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford, acquired a deep understanding of what makes users tick and click. But why can’t behavioral design be copied like a distribution strategy? Because competitors are not able to recognize and act upon these kinds of insights. You can know the competition’s product feels better to use, but you won’t know why. Engaging products gain their advantages by leveraging tiny improvements, which together create huge advantage. From the outside, you can’t tell what’s working and what isn’t. For example, the iPhone is objectively a better designed, more user-friendly, and ultimately more engaging product than the Android experience. But why? Nearly everyone, when given the choice between an Android interface and an iPhone, chooses the iPhone. There are plenty of good reasons to own an Android, but intuitive interface ain’t one. Google knows this and yet they can’t replicate Apple because they don’t know the answer to “why?” You can’t make decisions between seemingly identical interface choices unless you’ve walked the path of user behavior. Without this knowledge, copying the competition becomes a game of throwing darts at features. Habit design requires a fundamentally different, though complementary skill set to growth hacking. Designing high-engagement products is an art which is increasingly becoming a science. The craft crosses the disciplines of psychology and design – both fields which are hard to learn in a short period of time. Unfortunately, designing habits often falls in the organisational abyss between the founders’ vision and what is technically feasible. But those companies able to habituate users quickly enjoy massive advantages. Not only does engagement drive growth for the reasons stated above, but users tend to shut out other, sometimes superior, solutions. In fact, business history is peppered with technically inferior products beating competitors because of the fierce loyalty of habituated users (I’m looking at you Apple addicts). Users only have time and brain cycles for a limited number of services. If a high proportion of users are using your service daily, they aren’t using the competition’s. Can’t Have One Without the Other But focusing on engagement without growth is also a losing proposition. For one, virality is not something that can be bolted on to a product after it is in the wild. Distribution is not an afterthought and it needs to be built into the core of the experience. Either the company has a viral growth mechanic or it doesn’t. So no matter how engaging your service is, it will remain niche unless there is a way to get it in front of new users en masse. Creating a company with both high engagement and high growth requires a sound distribution engine fueled by active users. Both engagement and growth are essential to a company’s viability and by adhering to the tao of DAU and MAU, founders have an accurate point of focus to increase their odds of success. Thank you to David King for reading early versions of this essay Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Spanish Soccer Scores a Goal on Social Media

When Mashable took a look at the English Premier League’s social media side last week, the main takeaway was that the 2012 season marked the big social push of the world’s most high-profile soccer league. But Spain’s LigaBBVA — considered a tier below the EPL on the pitch, although it’s home to powerhouse clubs Real Madrid and FC Barcelona — actually looks to be world soccer’s digital leader. To get the fuller picture, we scoured social media sites, and consulted LigaBBVA as well as the Spanish sports and social media site Sportwist. Perhaps the place where La Liga’s social media dominance shines most is with its biggest stars. Three of the top four sports-related Twitter accounts are from Spanish soccer — Real Madrid stars Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo have 10.7 and 9.9 million followers, respectively, while the FC Barcelona club account claims almost 5.2 million. Last month, Kaka became the first sports figure ever to break 10 million followers on the the network. Fellow LigaBBVA stars Andres Iniesta, Cesc Fabregas, Gerard Pique, Carlos Puyol, Xabi Alonso and David Villa each top one million followers as well. The league itself maintains profiles on pretty much all the social web’s major networks — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest and multiple Chinese services. LigaBBVA engages fans extremely well on Facebook in particular. The league’s official page has more than 1 million fans. During a stretch in April, engagement peaked according to Sportwist, with more than 55% of those fans “talking about” LigaBBVA teams, matches and players — an outstanding level of engagement for a brand in any industry. SEE ALSO: English Premier League: The Social Media Season LigaBBVA also dominates world soccer leagues on Twitter. The @LigaBBVA profile counts more than 280,000 followers there, compared with the official @premierleague account’s approximately 209,000 followers. LigaBBVA also has a Klout score of 74, compared to the EPL’s score of 70. The German Bundesliga — considered by many the world’s third-best league in overall quality of play — has a Klout score of 49. On the Chinese social network Sina Weibo, Spain’s soccer league has 155,000 followers, as well as an additional 106,000 fans on the similar Chinese network Ren Ren. What powers LigaBBVA’s social media popularity? Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, arguably two of the world’s three most popular club teams. Consider this, for example: Barcelona has more than 31 million Facebook fans and about 5.2 million Twitter followers; Real Madrid has over 28 million Facebook fans and 4.7 million Twitter followers. No other LigaBBVA team approaches a combined total of 500,000. Why do you think LigaBBVA beats out the EPL on social media? Let us know in the comments. Image via iStockphoto, mikkelwilliam More About: Facebook, Social Media, sports, Twitter, YouTubeFor more Entertainment coverage:Follow Mashable Entertainment on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Entertainment channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Big Data for Beginners

I had a friend recently ask, “What’s the big deal, and why now? And, give it to me in laymen’s terms, please.” The “Why now?” of it is because we have changed as a culture. The “Big deal” about this is, done right, it all translates to lower-priced Tshirts, mobile coupons for terrific sandwich shops, and less time spent at the doctor’s office.

Kelora Patent Found Obvious: Are Other “Obvious” Software Patents In Danger?

Editor’s note: Leonid (“Lenny”) Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, PA. Lenny focuses his practice on patent prosecution and intellectual property transactions in computer-related technology areas. He specializes in developing IP strategy for young technology companies and blogs on this topic at StartupsIP. Follow Lenny on Twitter: @lkravets and @startupsIP. As software patent litigation ramped up over the past few years, software patents have come under the microscope within the technical community. Many investors and technologists believe that software patents should be abolished all together, while others take the less extreme position that many software patents are obvious over known prior art (“prior art” being earlier publications that show a patent is obvious or not new). Courts are increasingly cognizant of these criticisms. Though it is unlikely that software patents are going away any time soon, as the recent summary judgment in eBay v PartsRiver (PartsRiver is now known as Kelora) demonstrates, courts are beginning to do a more thorough job of applying the obviousness standard to software patents. Kelora claims to have the patent on faceted (parametric) search. The company is a hybrid between a practicing entity and a “patent troll” in that Kelora offers a search product, but has aggressively pursued a licensing and litigation strategy against a wide range of large and small Internet retailers. Though Kelora has not received as much attention from the press as some non-practicing entities such as Lodsys, the Kelora patents have posed a significant threat to the Internet retailing infrastructure. In Kelora’s largest lawsuit, defendants include Internet giants such as Microsoft, EBay, Target, Amazon and NewEgg. While the named defendants have chosen to fight Kelora, over the past few years, many others have taken licenses under the Kelora patents. Other smaller targets have decided to turn off their parametric search features to avoid being accused of infringement by Kelora. Many targets of Kelora’s patents believe the patents to be invalid over prior art that goes back to as early as the 1960s. Over the past few years, the Kelora defendants have mounted a significant effort to invalidate the Kelora patents, which were filed in the early 1990s. First, the patents were re-examined by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over newly found prior art, but Kelora overcame the new rejections by amending the claims to perform the parametric search through a resubmission to a server. When the lawsuit was allowed to continue with the amended claims, the defendants argued that the resubmission component was obvious over the known prior art because client/server architecture was well-known by the early 1990s. On May 21st, the court granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment. The court agreed with the defendants’ position that a server resubmission was obvious in view of other client/server systems of that time. The inventors of the Kelora patent, who still own a stake in the company, argued that when they came up with their parametric search invention in the early 1990s, they did not know of the client/“web” server infrastructure. However, in granting the motion, the judge found that such client/server systems were well-known, and it did not matter that the inventors themselves did not know of such a system. While Kelora will almost certainly appeal this decision to the Federal Circuit, this result is promising for opponents of software patents. The summary judgment shows that courts are becoming increasingly sophisticated in interpreting the claims of software patents, and in applying prior art under the obviousness standard. While the Kelora defendants already expended significant resources in this case, finding that the patents are obvious at the summary judgment stage of the case saved the defendants the significant cost of a full trial. Courts (and the USPTO) doing a better job of applying prior art to the claims of software patents is the best news possible for those who hope for a more economical way of dealing with software patents within the current legal system.

The Mysterious Words You Can’t Tweet

The legend goes something like this: as a child, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s father would relentlessly hound him to “Get better”, so Jack eventually banned the phrase from being tweeted. Go ahead and try it, the tweet won’t go through. But the legend? It’s hoax. See, way back when, Twitter wasn’t a popular smart phone app, it was a way to publish up to 140 characters to the Internet via text message. To let people follow and unfollow each other, change their bio, and more straight from SMS, Twitter created a list of commands that when sent wouldn’t be tweeted, but would trigger actions instead. So now when you tweet ”get better”, “get [any single word]“, and several other phrases Twitter interprets them as SMS commands. If you want more to try, there’s “Fav [username]” to favorite someone’s last tweet, and “Suggest” to receive recommendations of who to follow. Some of the commands still work from the web interface and smartphone apps. You can follow someone by tweeting “follow joshconstine” or just “f [username without the @]“. Others like the mysterious “get” command that spawned the rumor on StackExchange Skeptics, don’t work outside of SMS. There’s also no evidence Dorsey’s father ever told him to “get better” or aggressively pushed him to succeed. In fact, Mr. Dorsey senior sounds like a very cool dad who ran a pizza restaurant that inspired Jack’s entrepreneurship, and helped Jack ”build a model of a mass spectrometer out of Legos, ball bearings, and magnets when he was 11″ according to Fast Company. That doesn’t mean the Twitter co-founder and Square CEO doesn’t want you to “get better”, though. When Jack won an award for encouraging others to start their own business, he told the crowd “Don’t just expect the unexpected—BE the unexpected.” [Illustration by Wes Duvall for Fast Company]

Gillmor Gang: Adventures in Medication

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — explodes in opinions about Facebook IPO, Facebook privacy or lack of it, Facebook acquisition frenzy-to-be, and more Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Surprisingly, this one goes on for a record-breaking hour and thirty-nine minutes, proving once again that size doesn’t matter. Except in electronic condoms. Also discussed; Why G-Tar didn’t win the Techcrunch Disrupt grand prize, why Kevin Marks’ Target knockoff doesn’t come close, and why Keith Teare is a venture communist. No animals or Wall Street traders were harmed in the making of this film. As John Taschek implied, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Did I mention we talked about Facebook. @stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Selling Software That Kills

The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention slaughtered wholesale.) McAfee and Nokia Siemens have done the same in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Amesys of France and FinFisher of the UK aided brutal dictators in Egypt and Libya. Sweden’s Teliasonera allegedly took up the same cudgel in Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, back in the USSA, Bain Capital recently bought a Chinese video-surveillance company reportedly “used to intimidate and monitor political and religious dissidents,” and Cisco “has marketed its routers to China specifically as a tool of repression.” You can’t help but be impressed by how globalized the oppression-technology industry has become. So what privacy/surveillance story caused an eruption of outrage this week? Yes, you guessed it: SceneTap, a startup that uses facial-recognition software to (anonymously)track demographics at bars and clubs in major American cities in real time. Forget the dissidents risking their lives for democracy: what matters is that the hipsters are creeped out! Needless to say, the companies in question tend to dodge responsibility with bland buck-passing PR patter that knowingly turns a blind eye to oppression and brutality: “Obviously what an individual customer would do with a product once they acquire it is beyond our control.” (Apparently it never crossed their minds that it’s eminently possible to build technical controls into their product, to filter the filters.) “It’s a legal business [...] Ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions.” This is of course complete bullshit. Whether you’re a company or a person, there’s really no excuse for helping repressive regimes to track and hunt down their dissidents, and “What? Me? Responsible? All I did was give the AK-47 to the psychotic serial killer, how was I supposed to know how he was going to use it?” is almost worse than no defense at all. The EFF has proposed a “know your customer” process similar to that used for the Foreign Corrupt Practices act and export regulations. It has largely been ignored. Not a good sign. The oppression industry is bad enough now … but if nothing happens, it’s going to get a whole lot worse. There’s a desperate information war going on in Syria right now, between pro-democracy dissidents and their international allies on one side, and a shadowy and remarkably sophisticated group of pro-government hackers on the other. Right now that war’s being fought mostly on the desktop. But wait until Android phones become ubiquitous in oppressed nations. (Not iPhones; too expensive.) Unlike desktops, unless they’re rooted, Androids typically are — or at least can be — essentially controlled from birth by their manufacturers and their national carriers … who will naturally be incredibly susceptible to government pressures to install hidden spyware and malware. Imagine an authoritation nation where everyone has a phone running a government-customized version of Android — indeed, is required to have one, because every phone is an eye and ear of the national surveillance network. (Meanwhile, SceneTap-like software ensures that dissident groups can’t meet in person.) It’s an Evgeny Morozov dystopia, and a disconcertingly plausible one. Right now, carrier bloatware and device control is just an irritation, but look just a little ways into the future, and it’s worryingly easy to envision it actually becoming a serious human rights problem … especially if Western companies keep on selling their oppression technology to all comers.

Facebook Camera App: This Week in Social Media

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.What’s New This Week?Facebook Releases Camera: The new Camera Facebook app has similar features to Instagram which was recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion.The new Camera app enables you to "share photos on Facebook faster than ever, and see all your friends' latest shots in one place."Play Games Directly in Your Facebook News Feed: Facebook is launching “the ability for people to try games directly in news feed. Feed gaming enables developers to share a playable version of their game within news feed and timeline stories, reaching new users through some of our main distribution channels.”You will be able to play games in one click, try games out and convert trials into new installs right from your Facebook news feed.Discussion From Our Networking Clubs: Thousands of social media marketers and small business owners are asking questions and helping others in our free Networking Clubs. Here are a few interesting discussions worth highlighting:How do you create passive streams of income?Is a Facebook page necessary?Advice on choosing a WordPress themeYouTube Turns Seven: YouTube was launched in May 2005. And today, 72 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. YouTube users are watching longer videos and spending more time on the site.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLQDPH0ulCgYouTube Opens Merch Store to All Partners: Last year, YouTube launched the Merch Store. Now other YouTube partners in good standing can offer their fans products they have on Amazon, iTunes, Topspin, Songkick, Google Play and CafePress.The YouTube Merch Store is now open to all YouTube Partners. This enables them to have a Store tab on their YouTube channel.Android Phones Get a New Google+ App: “The update includes lots of highly requested features—like the ability to start a hangout on the go, and to edit posts inline—as well as a stream that celebrates the rich content shared across Google+. ”You can start start a hangout directly from your mobile device.Facebook Gives Open Graph Developers More User Data: Facebook now gives developers the information they need to understand how people are using their Open Graph apps.Facebook app developers can consult the Installs dashboard to see the number of unique user views, acceptances and the associated conversion rate.Twitter Supports “Do Not Track”: The Do Not Track feature allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt out of being tracked by third parties. It’s “like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users,” and Twitter has opted in.The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.— Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012Facebook Adds Option of Liking Brand Pages Directly From Posts: AllFacebook reports that “some Facebook users are seeing the option of liking a brand page directly from a post due to the addition of a new Like button near the top, next to the name of the page.”Facebook Provides Reach Data Directly on Timeline Posts: “Some Facebook page owners can now view certain post metrics directly from their Timeline, including the percentage of fans that saw a given post and the percentage of those who saw the post as a result of paid promotion.”Facebook Launches Promoted Posts: Facebook has started rolling out Promoted posts for some Pages in the US. “This means Pages can now pay to “promote” a post from their Timeline so that it will reach a greater percentage of their fans on Facebook.”Here’s a useful social media tool worth noting:SpotOn: A new social media loyalty card to help small businesses drive traffic and create happy, loyal customers. .What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below. Tweet

How Facebook Is Killing Itself!

How Facebook is killing itself by introducing new features in the news feed. The social experience is dying.

Moving Beyond Text and Images in a Web 3.0 World

The web is evolving faster than most of us are even accounting for. Flat text and static images are no longer the default format for the web. Let's look at some of the new trends in new media and see how we might be able to incorporate them into our existing strategies.

Sweating The Small Stuff: Sotheby’s Selling Original Steve Jobs Note About Atari Circuit Improvements

The auction house Sotheby’s is selling an official memo from Steve Jobs to Atari about improving the World Cup Football game. The pages – stamped and signed by Jobs himself – describe circuit diagrams and paddle layouts. Delightfully, the stamp says “All-One Farm Design” and features a Buddhist mantra, “gate gate paragate parasangate bodhi svahdl.” As you do. If you’re thinking of picking this up you’d best have about $10,000 to $15,000 handy – although bidding could get fierce. Quoth MacWorld: The June 15th, 2012 auction features a 5 page memo sent to Atari employee Steve Bristow by Steve Jobs. This memo describes changes that could be made to Atari’s World Cup Soccer arcade game. These changes were designed to add play variety to the game and to extend the ‘shelf life’ for arcade operators. While the memo is typed on Atari letterhead, it also features a stamp imprinted with the name of Steve Job’s company at the time “All-One Farm Design” and the address of the Jobs family garage( and the birthplace of Apple Computer). The memo features a circuit diagram and a hand written addendum. This is the earliest know documentation produced by Steve Jobs and predates the founding of Apple computer by almost two years. No other documents from Steve Jobs time at Atari are known to exist. Sotheby’s sold another Steve Jobs document in December, 2011 for $1.6 million. If you’re really feeling spendy, you can plop down $180,000 on an original Apple I circuit board, presumably in mint condition. Get cracking and don’t forget: Sabbe satta sukhi hontu. Click to view slideshow.

Devils advance to Stanley Cup Final

Adam Henrique scores early in overtime to give New Jersey a 3-2 victory over the New York Rangers in Game 6 to win the series. The Devils host the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday in Game 1.NEWARK, N.J. -- Adam Henrique scored off a wild scramble in front of the goal 1:03 into overtime and the New Jersey Devils defeated the New York Rangers, 3-2, in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals to advance to their first Stanley Cup Final since 2003.

Egan's Twitter Book is a Fail Whale

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan will tweet an entire short story and consequently destroy Twitter as we know it. Apparently, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan began tweeting her 8,500-word short story from The New Yorker Fiction Twitter account (@NYerFiction) last night. She will continue tweeting single lines, to be published every minute from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m., through June 2. As far as I'm concerned, this idea should not only be spurned, but banned. That is, unless you want to kill Twitter. It disregards the entire intention of Twitter and opens the service up for all sorts of abuses and bad ideas. To begin with, this is not spontaneous. The book is already written. So what's the point, except gimmickry, to put it on Twitter line by line and minute by minute? It's idiotic. Should I publish my tech essays like this? Should everyone? There is a reason we use links. If I want to tell my Twitter followers to read this column, I'll link to it. The worst part of this is that it will encourage would-be novelists who cannot get publishers (let alone a Pulitzer) to begin posting crappy stories on Twitter. Besides being a waste of bandwidth, it sets a bad precedent. In my opinion, if it is already written and posted by robot (let's face it, Egan is not going to post this by hand), then it's spam. You can be certain her Twitter book will be published in a commercial form at some point and this is just a publicity stunt to get people to buy it. Also, long form is long form and belongs in an appropriate format. It's generally called a book. Nowadays, ebooks readers seem to be good for most long forms. I don't think even the smartphone cuts it when it comes to reading long form. I've written for various media and it's undeniable that writing for the Web is different than writing for print. Even more, book writing is different than magazine writing, which is different than newspaper writing. It's all different. On the Web, the paragraphs must be shorter—ideally, just two sentences—because the blinking and bright screen makes it easy for readers to lose their place as they read. With short paragraphs, the reading goes much faster. Egan claims to have this awareness and intends to write the Twitter novel so it actually works on Twitter. I hope to heaven that it does not work at all. The bosses at Twitter should, too. If Egan wins a bunch of awards for this exercise, it will ruin Twitter as wannabees jump on board. You can Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter @therealdvorak. More John C. Dvorak: • Egan's Twitter Book is a Fail Whale • Ebook Pricing War Wages On • Get Ready for Multiple Monitors • Can Anonymous Be Stopped? • So.cl Sucks • more Go off-topic with John C. Dvorak.

Social Media Efforts Under-Performing? Use this Technique

Social media marketing touches all digital marketing channels, or at least it should. Are you missing the boat or grabbing the tiger by the tail?

Effective Social Media Strategies Begin With the Right Tone of Voice

Simply put, tone of voice is the way we say things. In a subtle manner, the tone of communications can reveal the attitudes and personality of a brand. Differentiating your company from a growing number of competitors across social media communities like Facebook and Google + can be difficult, but using a distinctive tone of voice that is true to your brand’s identity can help you to stand out from the crowd.

Gadget Of The Week: The Parrot AR.Drone 2.0

There are plenty of ways to get your flight school kicks with your smartphone or tablet — this missile shooting Griffin chopper comes to mind — but few manage to ooze as much style (or cost as much money) as Parrot’s AR.Drone 2.0. Getting the thing ready to fly is surprisingly simple. Once you’ve popped the battery into place, and turned the thing on, the Drone creates its own Wi-Fi network that the control device connects to. From there, just fire up the FreeFlight app on your iOS or Android device and you’re off to the races. The big draw for some will be the ability to record the Drone’s aerial journeys. In addition to providing the pilot with an idea of where the drone is going, the small camera pod mounted on the drone’s nose is capable of capturing photos as well as 720p video. The camera’s small sensor means that quality tends to take a hit in low light, but the bigger issue for some is the tendency to see a wiggling effect in recorded video because of the four rotors whirring away. Let’s be honest here — it’s not the most useful thing to have in your gadget closet (doesn’t everyone have one of those?) unless you’ve got a thing for aerial photography or not-so-covertly spying on people. What it lacks in pure utilitarian functionality it makes up for in sheer fun. There’s something terribly fun about tilting your smartphone around and watching this little quad-rotor aircraft dart around in response to it. It’s even surprisingly easy to fly, provided you start out slow and put in a few minutes of fiddling first. Sadly, our Mobile Editor Matt Burns didn’t take that rule to heart, as he quickly crashed our own Drone at Disrupt. C’est la vie, but be prepared to do your due diligence if you don’t want to screw up a pricy piece of machinery. That said, Parrot has made it terribly easy to wow your friends with some neat aerial tricks — just double tap a button from within the app to make the Drone flip, and take in the applause. The Drone is a hell of a lot of fun to play with, but there’s always that price tag to consider — it’ll run you a considerable $299. The responsible thing may be to take that money and use it to buy a rock-solid juicer instead, but I think your mental well-being is better served by the ability to explore the skies (or annoy your neighbors).

Grown Woman Watches ‘Star Wars’ for the First Time [LIVE BLOG]

Against all odds, there are people on Earth who haven’t seen Star Wars. And I’m not talking about hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest. I’m talking about people who enjoy indoor plumbing, like my colleague Christine Erickson. For 24 years, she’s been bombarded with quotes, jokes, memes, toys, commercials, sequels, prequels, parodies, marketing and countless cultural references that fly right over her ignorant little head like the Millenium Falcon making the Kessel Run. (She has no idea what I’m talking about there.) Today is auspicious. Thirty-five years ago, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope debuted in theaters, blowing the sideburns off countless ’70s sci-fi nerds. George Lucas created an institution — dare I say, a cultural prerequisite — upon which all subsequent sci-fi owes a debt. How dare you, Christine Erickson, work at a nerd emporium like Mashable having never seen this seminal space opera. Do you think you’re better than us or something? Well, do you? To remedy this affront on humankind, we’ve locked Christine in a windowless storeroom asked Christine to watch Episode IV for the very first time and share her experience live on the web. At 2:00 p.m. ET, we launch her into a galaxy far, far away, and you can follow her journey right here in this very post. You can also play along on social media: Follow Christine’s tweets: @christerickson. Follow the official hashtag: #StarWarsVirgin. Lots of awesome people will be chiming in! Follow the plot of the movie in real time as it unfolds: @StarWarsPlot. Lots of people have RSVPed for the event on Facebook. See what they’re talking about! Check in to Star Wars and follow along with Mashable on GetGlue. Be sure to use the hashtag #StarWarsVirgin when you share your updates. We want to hear from you! Are you shocked that someone has never seen this movie before? Are you a Star Wars virgin yourself? Every tweet with the hashtag #StarWarsVirgin will be seen by our team, and the funniest, nerdiest, craziest ones will be included in our live blog, right here on Mashable. So, fire up your hyperdrive and join us for this special, social experiment. A huge thanks to Nick McKaig for providing the soundtrack to our video above. If you haven’t checked out his amazing acapella arrangement of the Star Wars theme, you’re really missing out. You can also download the track from iTunes. What better way to geek out on this holiest of holidays? More About: Entertainment, features, Film, humor, live blog, Movies, Sci-Fi, Social Media, Star Wars, trending, TwitterFor more Entertainment coverage:Follow Mashable Entertainment on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Entertainment channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Behold: The First Video Taken with Google Glasses

Google has debuted the first video taken with its new set of eyewear from its Project Glass project. And for those of you who haven’t been keeping up, Project Glass’ sci-fi-looking glasses allow a person to do many of the same things you do with your smartphone, except without the need of a separate device. The eyewear will display user interfaces for different programs, allow you to snap pictures, and as we said, even record live video that is likely to cause nausea in some people upon viewing. Over the past week, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and others from the company have been field testing the eyewear, and taking pictures to show off what it can do in a real life setting. We’ve embedded the video below of a Google employee performing flips on a trampoline. Let us know what you think in the comments. Photo via Google Filed under: offBeat, VentureBeat

Obama and Romney Go Head-to-Head on Twitter [INFOGRAPHIC]

One of the battles in the war for the White House is being fought on Twitter. It’s common knowledge that Obama’s beating Romney hand-over-fist in followers: the president has more than 15 million followers, compared to Romney’s half-million. However, the number of social followers alone doesn’t mean much — instead, the key to waging a successful political campaign on Twitter is engagement. Along those lines, how does President Obama’s Twitter presence stack up with that of Republican rival Mitt Romney? PeekAnalytics, a social audience measurement service, did some digging to find out. President Obama has more than 5,000 times the “pull,” or influence, than the average Twitter account, compared to Mitt Romney at 466 times the average. That means Obama has 12 times the influence of Romney. That seems like a clear win in the Obama column — until you consider that Obama has 30 times the followers that Romney does, meaning Romney is doing a better job of influencing his smaller audience. SEE ALSO: Obama vs. Romney: The Social Showdown Breaking down both presidential contenders’ followers into demographic categories, PeekAnalytics says Obama’s followers are more international (48% of Obama’s followers live abroad compared to 10% for Romney), they’re younger (58% are between the ages of 18-25, whereas 43% of Romney’s followers are in that bracket), and female (47% for Obama, 29% for Romney) than Romney’s social audience. Meanwhile, Romney’s followers tend to have higher incomes (30% of Romney’s followers make more than $100,000 a year, that category makes up 22% for Obama). Can the candidates’ Twitter following tell us anything about their chances come Election Day? According to PeekAnalytics, a higher percentage of Romney’s followers come from crucial battleground states, save Ohio. For more, check out PeekAnalytics’ infographic below. Do you think presidential campaigns are using Twitter effectively? Sound off in the comments below. Disclaimer: Mashable and PeekAnalytics have a commercial relationship, but Mashable did not pay for this report. More About: 2012 presidential campaign, barack obama, Mitt Romney, Politics, Social Media, Twitter, US

Benchmark In San Francisco

Today Benchmark Capital announced with Mayor Ed Lee our long-term commitment to the City of San Francisco, opening a new office on the top floor of the Warfield Theater, in the heart of the Tenderloin district. It’s our intention to create a counterpart to our existing office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, in keeping with the new spirit of entrepreneurship in the city. Follow the Customer Our move to the city speaks to this change in the entrepreneurial landscape. Two out of every three new investments we have made since 2009 have been in San Francisco. Our partners currently sit on more than 20 boards in San Francisco including Twitter, Yelp, Instagram, Uber, NewRelic, Zendesk, Dotcloud, Asana, OpenTable, DemandForce, NextDoor, ServiceSource, Lithium, Marin Software, 1Life, Second Life, Coverity, EngineYard, Couchsurfing, Grockit and Pipewise. Benchmark’s model of working shoulder-to-shoulder with entrepreneurs who aspire to change the world requires we be close to our customer, the entrepreneur. Our approach requires us to be available 24/7 to our entrepreneurs. In the past decade, this commitment increasingly means being in the city. Our center of gravity is no longer limited to the 5-mile radius around Stanford, and now includes fundamentally the 3-mile radius around Yerba Buena Gardens. What Changed? So, what changed in the last decade? We see several major factors driving the rise of San Francisco. 1. The primacy of Interaction Design The new digital landscape in which entrepreneurs operate is no longer dominated by sales-driven cultures, or by the need to deploy and maintain infrastructure. Instead, amazing products, products that are often bought rather than sold, dominate this new landscape. Designers of these products are increasingly in direct touch with their users. We have spoken of this product-driven versus sales-driven change, and it impacts every sector we invest in. Design moves to the center. We believe designers are choosing urban life in the city over suburban life elsewhere. 2. A deeper talent pool Google pioneered the bus service, and by 2007 25% of its company was being ferried to work. Other companies followed suit. Young engineering graduates could now live in an urban environment, get work done on the commute, and enjoy the pleasures of city life at night and on the weekends. This has expanded the pool of exceptional engineers in San Francisco and many of these people have either started their own companies or joined growing startups. The new wave of companies based in San Francisco is producing a generation of engineering leaders who have real ties to urban life. 3. A new model of production With the advent of the cloud and the proliferation of tools for distributed work, engineers can innovate anywhere in the world. Coding has become more social, more urban; it’s no surprise that the two leading companies in that initiative are both based in San Francisco (Atlassian and Github). This mode of production removes the need for the “bay of cubes”, the norm for many south bay engineering teams. 4. Re-urbanization movement in the United States The New Yorker had a fantastic piece on the re-urbanization of our country a few years ago. After decades of flight to the suburbs, American workers are waking up to the benefits of urban living, trading long commutes and larger houses for the dynamism and diversity of raising families in the city. 5. San Francisco government policy For all the positive forces, there is obviously a long list of things that need to improve in San Francisco. Transportation, crime, blight, tax codes, and education, to name a few. Enter Ron Conway. Ron moved to the city in the mid-2000’s, and took an interest in re-making San Francisco as the Startup Capital. He helped identify and catalyze massive support for Ed Lee as Mayor, attracting a number of firms including Benchmark in that support. Ed brings pragmatic, forward-looking views — in a city notorious for self-interest and cronyism, he operates in an endearing, selfless manner. Ron’s leadership took organizational form with the launch of sfCITI (@sfciti on Twitter) at the beginning of the year, creating a sustained effort to seize the opportunity in front of the city to become the innovation capital of the world. The Challenge & The Opportunity Despite the positive momentum, San Francisco’s rise could easily fall back and fragment if major changes don’t occur. One of the biggest challenges city-based startups face is the potential for distractions in city life. We’ve found open, contiguous floor space materially helps achieve the collective sense of mission and deeper commitment that avoids such distractions. Unfortunately, many of the offices in SoMa are chunked-up, and work against these cultural goals of young companies. But if you go west along Market Street, to the tenderloin and the civic center area, wonderful open floor space abounds. Yet this is ground zero for urban blight. The Warfield Our inspiration for the Warfield location comes from restaurateur and OpenTable board member Danny Meyer. Danny taught us in the context of opening new restaurants to seek locations before there is a “there there” and to play a civic duty in transforming abandoned or disfavored urban areas: “One of the things we love to do is come to a neighborhood before the rest of the world does. We did that with Union Square. We did that with Gramercy Tavern in the Flatiron district. We come down here to Battery Park City, there’s a real dearth of restaurants down here.” So, like Twitter last year, we saw an opportunity to go into a tough neighborhood, and to be part of the transformation. Twitter’s new headquarters are at 10th/Market (80kft+ floor plates), and the Warfield is at 6th/Market. We look forward to seeing you at the Warfield. Just don’t go to the door on the left or the right….

Is Facebook the next Google?

Facebook's IPO took place last Friday. When comparing their performance to that of Google, a number of key differences emerge, questioning the the ~2x multiple vs. Google. Google grew faster, was, and still is, more profitable, while offering a clearer value proposition to their users and customers.

Benchmark to join Twitter in S.F.'s Mid-Market

Twitter will be joined by one of its biggest investors soon after the company moves to San Francisco's Mid-Market neighborhood next month. Benchmark Capital, which bought a stake in the microblogging service three years ago, signed a lease this week for more than 10,000 square feet of space on Market Street, a half-mile from Twitter's new headquarters. The office is just above the Warfield Theater. While Benchmark is keeping its office in Menlo Park, the new urban outpost is the latest sign that the startup hub has moved north from Silicon Valley. In addition to Twitter, San Francisco is home to Zynga and Yelp as well as fast-growing Web companies Dropbox, Square and Airbnb. That's pushed down vacancy rates and raised rents. "The business moved, and we're all waking up to the fact that this is a monumental shift," said Peter Fenton, a general partner at Benchmark and a board member at Twitter and Yelp. "These forces are long term, and we're making a bet consistent with that." Two-thirds of Benchmark's deals since 2009 have been in San Francisco, he said. Fenton and Matt Cohler are the only two of Benchmark's six investing partners who live in San Francisco, though all of them will be using the space starting in the second half of this year. They'll occupy the seventh and eighth floors at the top of the building on Market Street near the corner of Sixth Street. Fenton declined to provide terms of the lease. "That a prominent venture capital firm is expanding from Silicon Valley to San Francisco demonstrates how strong San Francisco has become as a center for innovation and talent," Mayor Ed Lee said. Most of the startups are concentrated in the South of Market area, where scores of social, mobile and cloud-computing companies are emerging. The vacancy rate in SoMa shrank by more than half in the first quarter to 3.8 percent, the lowest since 2000, according to brokerage firm Jones Lang LaSalle. That helped boost San Francisco office rents by 24 percent from a year earlier, to an average $46.66 per square foot. Twitter's six-year lease on Market between Ninth and 10th streets gives the company three floors with 215,000 square feet at an average annual rental rate of $30 per square foot. The company opted to stay in San Francisco after Lee supported a six-year payroll tax exclusion last year geared to keeping Twitter in town and building up Mid-Market. Historically, it's been a rough area, replete with crime and homelessness. Fenton said the ground floor of their building has a strip club on the right and a drug paraphernalia store on the left. The firm wants to be part of the neighborhood revival as well as enjoy the "romantic appeal" of being on top of a music venue, Fenton said. The Warfield opened on May 13, 1922, as a vaudeville and movie theater and became primarily a music hall in 1979. The Jerry Garcia Band was a house favorite until Garcia's death in 1995. "It speaks to a place that will be fun and appealing to young entrepreneurs, not a stuffy financial-services kind of presence," Fenton said. "There's always a risk. In three to five years, people may laugh at this decision or say, 'Hey, there was some foresight.' " Lewis Cirne, founder of cloud-based business software maker New Relic, is working on his second startup backed by Fenton. The first was on the Peninsula, and when he started New Relic in 2008, all the momentum was moving to San Francisco, he said. "Round one for Peter and me was the Peninsula, and round two for both of us (is) in San Francisco," Cirne said. "Benchmark is capitalizing on a trend, and it signifies them being ahead of the curve." Until now, Benchmark's main office has been on Menlo Park's Sand Hill Road, surrounded by other high-profile firms such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital and, more recently, Greylock Partners. Venture firms in San Francisco include Crosslink Capital and First Round Capital, and last year Europe's Index Ventures opened an office in the city, while Trinity Ventures started a co-working space for portfolio companies. Benchmark was founded in 1995 and made its marquee investment in eBay two years later, reeling in billions of dollars after the auction site's 1998 initial public offering. More recently, Benchmark was the biggest outside investor in photo-sharing app developer Instagram, which is being bought by Facebook, and it backed five companies that sold shares to the public in the past 14 months. This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Obama mini Twitter town hall - CNN (blog)

After delivering remarks on his clean energy policy in Newton, Iowa, President Obama sat down at a laptop and answered a handful of questions on Twitter that had been submitted hours earlier by the tweeting public. “This is barack-let’s get this started!” Mr. Obama typed. In 40 characters or less questions ranged from help for homeowners stuck in under water mortgages, energy independence, to assistance for small businesses. “ What plans do u have to keep us & our fellow smlbiz afloat?” one person wrote. President Obama responded by explaining what he had done to give small businesses tax credits for hiring new workers and that he was pushing for more assistance on his to-do list. “items on #CongressToDoList puts more $ in folks pockets, which means more customers for you,” he wrote. On a question about student loans the president blamed Republicans for “not moving fast enough.” When one person asked about help for homeowners trapped in upside down mortgages, president Obama took a swipe at his likely opponent Mitt Romney even though he didn’t mention him by name. “I refuse to let mkt hit bottom,” he wrote, a veiled reference to comments Romney once made about the housing market. “Refi could save folks $3k each mo.” Mr. Obama ended the twitter q & a by telling his cyber audience that he was off to Des Moines, where he was holding a grassroots campaign rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. “thx for questions – keep em coming. remember we're not D's or R's but americans first! –bo”

Manpacks Launches Its Startup Perks Program With Free Condoms

Well, that’s one way to get some attention for your product launch. Manpacks is announcing a new Startup Perks program, and to promote it, the company mailed boxes of free condoms to more than 100 startups, including Path, Udemy, Scribd, and GetAround. Supposedly, the boxes started arriving today — includes a custom URL where workers at that specific company can sign up for the program. Co-founder and CEO Ken Jonson says Manpacks has been working to build a corporate perks program aimed at larger organizations, but then he decided it felt “a little weird” to leave out startups. So it’s launching with startup perks, then expanding to more corporate targets in a couple of months. Basically, the program allows entrepreneurs and their employees to sign up for discounted Manpacks shipments, which include things like underwear, socks, razors, and, yes, condoms — things that guys may not want to spend time shopping for. Startups may be the ideal customer base for Manpacks, since people at a startup often put their lives on hold and work ridiculously long hours, so anything that reduces the time spent on the responsibilities of everyday life will probably be welcomed. So why the condoms? (It probably won’t help with the complaint that startups are increasingly dominated by a “brogrammer” culture that’s hostile to women.) Johnson says he wanted to do “fun and a little irreverent.” I’d say he succeeded.

Yahoo Courts Second Screen App Developers With New Tools To Connect Phones And TV

Launched in 2009, Yahoo’s Connected TV was one of the first platforms to introduce an open app development kit (ADK) for Internet-capable TVs. Now it’s making those apps even more powerful, by allowing developers to build apps that integrate TV and mobile capabilities. At a meeting with developers Thursday evening, the Yahoo Connected TV team is rolling out the newest version of its ADK, in addition to open source availability of its device communication library for Android devices on GitHub. The new ADK let developers connect their mobile and connected TV apps, supported by two-way messaging between the devices through Yahoo’s device communication protocol. That way, developers can build apps for smart phones and tablets that recognize what users are watching or games that are being played on the TV. Useful apps could include those that add smart TV controls and navigation to the mobile device, or allow viewers to share content from the small screen to the big screen. And there’s a huge opportunity for multi-user games that take advantage of both screens: Think Scrabble or poker, in which the playing field is on the TV, but tiles and cards are controlled by the devices in users’ hands. To speed app development, Yahoo has open sourced a library of communications tools, which developers can use to build up and customize their own apps. For now, the library is only available for Android developers, although the company is looking to soon release a comparable offering for iOS devices, according to Ron Jacoby, chief architect and VP of Yahoo Connected TV. The ADK aims to take advantage of new features that will be available in the most recent group of TVs with the Yahoo platform installed, Jacoby told me by phone. Those TVs, which were demoed at CES 2012, come from Sony. There’s also the chance that older TVs with the Yahoo software in them could get the features, but firmware upgrades are rolled out at the manufacturer’s discretion. Yahoo’s Connected TV platform isn’t the only one that’s looking to connect TVs with mobile and tablet devices. The most recent version of Samsung’s Connected TV platform includes similar functionality, as does version 2 of the Google TV operating system. Yahoo currently has more than 1.5 million active monthly users on its connected TV platform. It’s attracted more than 10,000 registered developers for the platform, who have made nearly 200 apps available on Yahoo Connected TVs. Enabling more interactive second screen apps could make the platform more compelling for developers, and more fun for users.

Obama Takes Twitter Questions

President Barack Obama is no stranger to Twitter; he held his first Town Hall on the microblogging network, at the White House complete with Master of Ceremonies Jack Dorsey, just under a year ago. Thursday, with his reelection campaign getting into gear, Obama decided to take a few questions on Twitter. The Q&A session just ended, so check out what the President had to say in our Storify: [View the story "Barack Obama Hosts Twitter Chat" on Storify] More About: barack obama, Politics, Storify, Twitter

Quebec Students Protesting Tuition Hikes Organize on Twitter

The hundreds of protesters that were arrested on Wednesday evening in the Canadian province of Quebec for rallying against university tuition hikes have been organizing their efforts on social media for months. The tuition hikes, which would raise university costs in Quebec by $300 each year for seven years, were first proposed in February. Students and their supporters immediately began rallies to bring attention to the issue, while some argued that the hike is needed for budgetary reasons. Talks between students and government officials to come to an agreement on the tuition increase have fallen apart several times. The tipping point came Wednesday evening when the rallies intensified and ended in hundreds of arrests. Thousands of students and their supporters poured into the streets of Quebec’s two biggest cities, Montreal and Quebec City, banging pots and pans in a protest that was organized on Twitter with the hashtags #manifencours (French for “manifestation en cours,” or “protest happening now”) and #casserole (French for “pan”). By Thursday morning, almost 700 protesters were arrested by Quebec police, according to the BBC. The increased protesting came after the Quebec government passed a controversial rule, Bill 78, which outlawed protesting without prior approval from the police. Mashable has collected a sampling of tweets, twitpics and videos from this week’s heavy protests and arrests throughout Quebec. Check them out below. Is organizing over Twitter the “new normal” for protestors? Sound off in the comments below. [View the story "Quebec Student Protests on Social Media" on Storify] Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr, Tina Mailhot-Roberge More About: Canada, quebec, Social Media, Twitter, World

FB Launches Facebook Camera – An Instagram-Style Photo Filtering, Sharing, Viewing iOS App

Facebook is dead serious about mobile. Today it begins rolling out Facebook Camera for iOS to English-speaking countries, a standalone photos app where you can shoot, filter, and share single or sets of photos and scroll through a feed of photos uploaded to Facebook by your friends. Developed by Facebook’s photos team without the help of Instagram because the acquisition deal hasn’t closed yet, Facebook Camera looks a lot like the app TechCrunch leaked images of a year ago, and is designed for quicker publishing than Facebook’s multi-featured primary mobile app. Facebook Camera lets you rapidly pick one or more photos, apply filters, tag friends and locations, add a description, and post. While its 14 filters, batch uploads, and streamlined interface are a big step up from Facebook for iOS, the design isn’t as beautiful as Instagram and neither are the photos you’ll see in it. When asked if Facebook Camera would become a direct competitor to the photo sharing network it bought last month, a spokesman told me “As Mark asserted, we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently, so I anticipate some healthy competition.” Though for now Facebook Camera is just for iOS in English-speaking countries, it will roll out internationally over the next few weeks as Facebook gets it translated. As for versions for Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, I’m told “While we don’t comment on future products we are carefuly looking at what might make for agood Facebook photos experience across other platforms.” How It’s Better Than Instagram The best feature of Facebook Camera and its one real selling point over Instagram is multi-photo uploads. This helps you tell a story or share the best photos from a day’s outing in a single post. It’s great for if you can’t decide which shot is best and don’t want to go through the sharing flow over and over. Browsing multi-photo stories is smooth too, as they appear as one story in the feed showing the first photo, but you can swipe side to side to view the rest of the set. Rather than having to wait for a photo to load when you browse by like on Instagram, it appears as a blurry placeholder at first and then sharpens up, which is nice. Facebook Camera’s 14 filters are also more sensibly named with title that describe how they change photos, such as Cool, Light, and Copper, rather than Instagram’s less indicative Hudson, Sutro, and Brannan, though Instagram does have 17 filters plus light adjustment and tilt-shift that Facebook’s new app lack. How It’s Worse Unfortunately, there’s several flaws in the current version of Facebook Camera that seem especially glaring compared to Instagram. Like and comment icons and counts are overlaid on the photos, disturbing their appearance. When you click to view existing comments on a photo they take a few seconds to load, which can fool you into thinking they aren’t there. But the first thing you might notice is the photos are decidedly less beautiful than what you’ll see on Instagram. Most weren’t uploaded with Facebook Camera but rather through Facebook’s web interface or primary app, so they’re unfiltered, and weren’t necessarily taken with artistry in mind. While Facebook may be late to the standalone photo app scene, you have to remember that while Instagram has hit 50 million downloads, Facebook has over 500 million mobile users, and somewhere around 220 million on iOS and Android. Facebook Camera may not be perfect, but for those who don’t want to start a whole new social network for photosharing on Instagram, and want an app that sucks in photos shared by their Facebook friends from anywhere, including Instagram and Path, Facebook Camera could find a spot on the homescreen.

Audio Archive: How Do You Scale Personal Engagement? A Fresh Look at Marketing Automation

Social Ad Network 140 Proof Launches Partner Platform, Signs Up Jumptap

Ad startup 140 Proof is opening up a partner platform for companies that want to take advantage of its social ad targeting. The company currently delivers ads to 50 social apps, including Echofon, TweetCaster, and Plume. Underlying the network is something that 140 Proof calls “Interest Graph Targeting,” where users are assigned different “personas” based on what they say and who they follow. Those personas allow advertisers to serve ads to people with specific interests, and the new platform makes this interest targeting available to other companies. Among other things, co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III pitches this as a way for brand advertisers to extend their reach beyond traditional advertising like TV. For example, if an advertiser wanted to reach people interested Glee, they could run an ad during the show, but they could also target social network users who have commented about Glee or follow Glee-related accounts (as illustrated in the image above). Interest-based targeting will also be key if mobile ads are going to make money, he says. Several mobile and social ad companies have already signed up, including Jumptap, Celtra, and OneLouder. It seems like 140 Proof might face one of the common challenges of platform companies sometimes — balancing the needs of the platform with the other parts of the business. In this case, an ad network might be a customer of the platform but also a competitor with the 140 Proof network. However Manoogian says the market dwarfs any individual company, so it will be “a long time before we run into any channel conflicts.” And while advertising is an obvious place to start, Manoogian and his co-founder and CEO Jon Elvekrog see broader possibilities for the platform. For example, they say that an e-commerce site could use 140 Proof targeting to deliver improved recommendations.

5 New Twitter Tools to Boost Your Marketing

Are you seeing the results you want from your Twitter activities?There are over 1,000,000 different apps for Twitter and a new one is added every second. This means it is often quite easy to get confused finding those that actually add real value to your day-to-day tweeting.I took a look at some of the latest and most promising Twitter tools to get you tweeting like a pro.So, if you think it is time to up your game with some new tools, keep reading.Here are 5 tools to help you power up your Twitter marketing efforts.#1: Twylah—Make Your Tweets Live LongerOne of the tools that can make a huge difference to your impact on Twitter is Twylah. Their tagline is “Make Your Tweets Shine” and that is exactly what it does.According to research by bit.ly, your links on Twitter will only last 3 hours. With Twylah, however, you can give your tweets a much longer life—literally forever—displayed beautifully on a custom page.A beautiful fan page for your tweets.The way it works is very simple. After you set up your own Twylah account, this tool will capture, save and display each of your tweets on your personalized Twylah page.Before Twylah, when you glanced over someone’s Twitter stream, you didn’t pick up any great insights about the person. But when you glance over someone’s Twylah page, you get a very good picture of what his or her business or personal Twitter page is all about.Now, you can even click into each individual tweet on any page. Each of these is surrounded by lots of other relevant and related tweets.Keep visitors engaged longer with your tweets.When reaching out to Twylah founder Eric Kim, he mentioned to me:“Because there is so much related content found on the page, visitors spend much more time with your tweets than they would do on Twitter instead—up to 40 times longer.”A feature that is unique to Twylah is the Power Tweet. If you find a link, instead of sending people to that article, you can send them to a designated Twylah page.Send a Power Tweet to show other related tweets.If you want to give more strength to your tweets, be sure to get on the invite list for Twylah. It has had a tremendous impact for me.#2: NewsMix—Discover the Best Twitter Content for Your BusinessA great app I discovered recently is NewsMix. It solves a crucial problem I have with Twitter. If you are new to Twitter, there isn’t much value in your stream yet.Imagine if there was a channel available for you, filled with great curators tweeting exactly about the topics you are interested in.That’s exactly what NewsMix does. It helps you discover great topics based on top influencers for any topic you are interested in.Choose a channel to follow or create your own.You can easily create “channels” to follow on a Flipboard-style interface. Your channels can either be made of individual Twitter users you put together, or even whole Twitter lists.Make a collection of top experts in your niche.NewsMix then allows you to follow these channels either on an iPad or through the web-based version. Here is a powerful social media channel I recently created:Follow your subscriptions (like on Flipboard) on your browser or iPad.#3: SocialBro—Provides Powerful Twitter AnalyticsSocialBro is an app that fits well into everyone’s toolbox. It is a dashboard designed to filter in the absolute best analytics for your Twitter account in an easily accessible way.With Twitter, the quote “You can’t improve what you can’t measure” hits the nail on the head.The first feature I greatly enjoy is to see your Twitter community in charts. You can group your followers by lots of different aspects, for example:LanguageTime zoneNumber of followersTweets sent per dayFind out in which time zones your followers live.In my case, what I discovered with SocialBro was that over 13% of my followers are in the UK, and I was only posting for US time zones. I quickly changed and moved some of my updates to reach the people in the UK as well.You can go even deeper and localize exactly where each of your followers lives on a map.Get the exact location of all of your followers.The final feature I want to highlight from SocialBro is their list-management option. A key to make Twitter work, especially as you grow your network, is to keep track of the most important people via Twitter lists.SocialBro makes it much easier for you to copy lists from one account to another, save lists as a .txt file or specifically move larger groups of people into new lists.Easy list management with SocialBro.#4: Ifttt—Connect Twitter with Your Other Social ActivitiesAn app that can help you automate your social activities in a very powerful way is Ifttt, meaning “if this then that.” In short, it allows you to connect any two web services together, like Facebook with Instagram or Twitter with Dropbox.The different ways you can use Ifttt in connection with Twitter are extremely powerful. By simply sending a tweet, you can trigger a large number of different actions for your other social accounts across the web.Here are 4 ways to use Ifttt for Twitter to make your marketing activities smarter:Send items that you find in Google Reader and tag with “Tweet” straight to Twitter with Ifttt:From Google Reader straight to Twitter.If you post a new picture on Flickr or Instagram, tweet it automatically:Upload a new image and post it immediately on Twitter.If you favorite a tweet, add it to your list for reading later in Pocket:Not enough time to read? Save to Pocket for reading later.If you publish a new blog post, have Ifttt publish a new tweet straightaway:Easily publish your blog posts on Twitter.This is of course only to give you a taste of some of the things you can accomplish with Ifttt and Twitter. There are lots of other connections and channels you can explore for your Twitter account.Above all things, this tool is amazing to discover your own creative ways of using the Internet and Twitter that no one else has done before.#5: Tweriod—Find the Best Time to Tweet to Reach More FollowersThe last tool I want to introduce you to is called Tweriod. This has a very powerful algorithm to analyze your Twitter account and then find out which times will have the most impact for you to tweet.All you have to do is sign in with your Twitter account. The app then prepares a report for you and after a few minutes it sends you a direct message on Twitter with the results. It gives you a detailed breakdown of the most likely days and hours when your followers will be online.Times when your followers are online the most.Once you have your best times to tweet, you will also get a graph like the one below. A recent integration with Buffer allows you to start tweeting at these optimal times through your Buffer account.See your optimal tweeting times in a graph and set them inside Buffer.Tweriod’s algorithm analyzes the performance of your own previous 200 tweets, your followers and the performance of their past tweets and excludes automation apps such as Twitterfeed, dlvr.it, etc. This provides you with the data you need most.Equipped with these 5 power tools I am sure you will be able to up your game on Twitter considerably.What do you think? Which other tools do you use to make Twitter work for you? Which one of the tools mentioned above might be a great fit for your workflow? Please share your comments in the box below. Tweet

THIS JUST IN: Facebook's Still Got Its Mojo After IPO

With over 900 million users worldwide (half of whom are accessing the social media site via mobile), strong monthly user engagement figures (averaging 441 minutes, or over 7 hours), and flush with 16 billion in IPO capital (for you non-math majors, that’s 16,000 million), I’d say Facebook is just getting started. If you need more convincing, read on as I attempt to debunk the principle arguments of the Facebook naysayer class.

Make It Social: VEVO Sees 600% Increase In Facebook Traffic After Redesign

In March, VEVO launched a bold new redesign that provided TV-like viewing, with instantaneous and continuous playback. But the biggest addition to the platform, other than a beautiful new full-screen player, was a new social sharing feature that takes advantage of Facebook Open Graph. Not surprisingly, VEVO seen a dramatic increase in the number of videos that are watched and shared on the social network since then. VEVO has seen a 600 percent increase in Facebook-published or -watched videos when compared to February, to 4.5 million. It’s also signed up half a million new users via Facebook, which represents a 142 percent increase over the previous month. And the total number of impressions on Facebook grew to 171 million, which is a 181 percent change from February. A caveat: VEVO isn’t the only video provider to see a jump in sharing and usage immediately after integrating with Facebook Open Graph. Video applications like Viddy and Socialcam had seen huge increases in the amount of viewership and registrations after adding seamless sharing. But Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away — and VEVO can’t count on that tremendous growth to continue indefinitely. That said, it’s not just viewership from Facebook that is increasing. VEVO is also showing an uptick in engagement from users, who are watching more videos longer. Viewers watched an average of 4.3 videos in March, compared to 3.8 videos viewed in February. And they spent 15.2 minutes on the site, compared to 13.1 minutes during the prior month. Facebook also isn’t the only place where viewers are tuning in to watch music videos on VEVO. The video service is also seeing huge amounts of viewership on mobile devices. In the first three months of the year, VEVO saw 254 million worldwide streams on mobile devices and connected TV apps, which is up 32 percent from the previous quarter. It also saw active users for iPhone grow 28 percent and iPad grow 22 percent during the time period.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk just posted this epic (and much deserved) tweet

Just when he thought his week couldn’t get much better — what could top pioneering private space travel? — Elon Musk, the serial entrepreneur behind SpaceX, got a call from President Obama which prompted him to post this epic tweet. The President just called to say congrats. Caller ID was blocked, so at first I thought it was a telemarketer :) — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2012 As we revealed earlier, following its successful maiden launch, SpaceX has orders for 40 rocket launches, worth around $4 billion, stacking up. According to the Falcon 9′s Wikipedia page (check source notes 45 through 70 for background data), the company has some 29 missions lined up through 2017, the last of which, set to take place over several years, will include up to ten total launches, with multiple satellites in each payload. That phone isn’t likely to stop ringing for some time.

Make It Social: VEVO Sees 600% Increase In Facebook Traffic After Redesign

Yahoo Debuts Axis, Their New (And Impressive) Desktop And Mobile Search Experience

Late last year, Yahoo filed for a trademark on the phrase “Yahoo Axis.” The filing raised more questions than answers at the time, but after six months Yahoo has finally spilled the proverbial beans — Axis is both a new search-oriented add-on for your web browser, and a new browser app for iOS. Before I talk about what it’s like to actually use Axis, let’s first discuss why the hell they’re doing this in the first place. TechCrunch spoke to Yahoo’s Director of Product Management Ethan Batraski, and he told us his his job has been to figure out what search looks like over the next few years. Yahoo Axis was one of his answers. “No one’s innovated on ‘How do I get rid of the search results page altogether’”, Batraski said. “That is what we want to do.” That’s exactly what they did. Once you download, install, and log into Axis with your Yahoo credentials (you do have Yahoo credentials, don’t you?), a small back bar will begin to live in the bottom left corner of your preferred web browser. Right now Axis plugs into Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, though Batraski didn’t completely rule out the possibility of Yahoo eventually releasing their own browser should there be enough interest. That little black pill has a search bar nestled in it, and mousing over it causes it stretch across the bottom of your browser window. Actually clicking in the search box and plugging in a search query makes the bar expand to fill roughly the bottom third of your browser window, displaying easily-scannable thumbnails of Yahoo’s search results. Yahoo’s idea here is to give their (or perhaps more accurately, Microsoft’s) search engine its own flexible space to live in outside of the traditional browser paradigm. With Axis installed, users who need to find things online don’t need to tear themselves away from the page they’re currently looking at by navigating to a different page or opening a new tab. There’s no question that it takes a little getting used to — as a longtime Chrome user, it’s become second nature to open a new tab a bang a search query into the address bar — but it’s been very thoughtfully executed. When Axis works (which is most of the time) it works very well. Occasionally, the black search box will fail to close properly, leaving behind a partial remnant of the last search result thumbnail in its place. Perhaps one of the most annoying things about Axis (at least on a Mac) is scrolling horizontally through the thumbnails of search results. Users can click and drag through them with a mouse or hit buttons mounted to the left or right of the results panel, but scrolling side to side with a trackpad can be tricky. It causes the results to move over three results at a time, which sometimes means you miss seeing some results.It’s a relatively minor point of contention (and one that’s probably easy to fix), but still, there you have it. But Axis on the desktop is only one part of the equation — its other half lives on your iPhone (or your iPad). Yahoo has also whipped together a standalone browser app for iOS that seeks to bring that same revamped search experience to the mobile space. This is where Yahoo actually manages to make me swoon a little bit. The iOS app is surprisingly good — it’s more than handsome enough, it runs very smoothly (thanks mostly to its WebKit underpinnings), and your bookmarks sync between devices quickly once you make sure you’re logged in. I’ll also admit right here that I’m a bit of a sucker for their font choices, but let’s not dwell on that. If anything, the big thumbnails for search results play out even better on a small screen. There’s no angling to make sure your finger touches the link just right. That said, I’m not sure it’ll be replacing the stock Browser app for me — what’s great about Axis for the desktop is that it fits into whatever browser you’ve decided you like enough to use. On iOS though, there’s no way to set a default browser so it takes a conscientious effort to use Axis there. For now, the Axis browser app remains an iOS exclusive. It’s not entirely impossible that we’ll see a version make its way onto Android someday, though I imagine Google may not take too kindly to a another search company trying to set foot in their territory. Batraski referred to Axis as an “experiment,” but to my utter pleasure, it’s a pretty damned good one. Is it enough to make a dyed-in-the-wool Googler convert? Probably not, but with nearly 700 million users still using Yahoo, I reckon a solid chunk will find something to enjoy here.

How the Right Tools Can Help Remedy Your Website's Traffic Problem

Got low site traffic? If you're an inbound marketer, you know that investing in expensive tools and technology won't solve that problem for you -- you need to consistently create content to do that. But if you're just creating content and lack the right tools and technology to back up your efforts, you'll soon find you've hit a traffic wall. We've talked a lot about how to increase site traffic on this blog, but we haven't given a lot of real estate to the subject of using the right tools to support your efforts. To remedy that, we've not only written an entire whitepaper about using technology to support your marketing efforts, but this blog post will highlight an important section from that whitepaper that teaches us exactly how it can help you grow site traffic, too! Setting the Stage: Identifying Your Traffic Problem Let's say you already have a robust analytics package in place. You take a look at your funnel, and your problem becomes abundantly clear: you don't get much traffic to the top of your funnel. Just take a look at your numbers! So a decent chunk of the people who visit your site convert to leads -- even better, 75% of people who become leads on your site end up converting to customers! Your problem isn’t converting visitors to leads, and it’s not converting to leads to customers. Your problem, as you can see in the table above, is simply getting people to your website. So what do you need to do to attract visitors to your website? In the traditional playbook, the answer was simple: buy traffic. Today, the smartest marketers are focusing on search engine optimization, blogging, and social media. In fact, HubSpot's 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report showed that SEO, blogging, and social media were most frequently cited by marketers as channels with a below average cost-per-lead, and channels that were growing in importance. So it makes sense that marketers might want to invest in some technology to make their efforts with these channels even more effective. Hey, if your CPL is below average you have some change leftover! So how do you ensure that change isn't wasted? Here's what to look for when you start shopping. What to Look for in SEO Technology Search engine optimization is no longer the sexiest new online marketing technique (social media stole that honor some time ago), but it's still critical to generating site traffic. There are two basic pieces of search engine optimization -- on page, and off page. On-page tactics focus on the code you can actually change on a page. The good news is that on-page SEO is easy to control; the bad news is that it's not critically important. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, revolves around the links that go into your site. Ready for some more good news/bad news? The good news is that off-page SEO is super important. The bad news is that it's harder to control. But a marketer looking to generate more site traffic needs to be concerned with both, and understand these three main factors when evaluating technology that will help them pursue better on- and off-page SEO. 1) Keyword Analysis - Keyword analysis should be the first step in any SEO process. It helps you understand which keywords you're ranking for now, and which keywords you should try to improve your rank for. To get this kind of insight, you need to be able to generate a report of all your keywords, and compare them by traffic, difficulty, and current rank. Those factors should dictate what keywords you need to focus on. You don't want to waste your time trying to rank for keywords for which you're not currently ranking, that are highly contested, and that generate relatively low traffic levels. Instead, you want to focus on keywords that you're already ranking for but could have a higher rank, that generate large volumes of traffic, and that aren't very competitive. A good keyword tool will help you find these keywords. 2) Website Tools Designed for SEO - Keyword analysis tools help you develop metrics and plans for SEO; the right website tools will help you actually implement your SEO plan. When picking website tools, make sure that it's easy to change page attributes like the title, the meta description, and the keywords, and that new pages are created with default optimization like keywords in the URL address, and automatic sitemap generation. These are all on-page SEO elements that you can fully control and optimize. 3) Page-level SEO Analysis - The final key piece of SEO technology is page-level analytics. You need to be able to assess the SEO quality (and inbound links) of each of the pages on your website. Ideally, you'll be able to get a report on each of your pages, listing inbound links, their authority, as well as keywords the pages rank for, and any SEO errors on the page. What to Look for in Blogging Software SEO is a critical part of building traffic to your website, but it shouldn't be your only strategy. SEO tactics need to be coupled with content -- ideally, blog content! Think of it this way blogging is kind of like playing the lottery; would you rather have a fixed level of opportunities to rank well for a given term, or hundreds of thousands? Every time you write a new blog post, you're giving yourself another opportunity to win the SEO lotto. So if you're blogging to improve your SEO, and by extension your site traffic, here's what you should look for in a piece of technology to help supercharge your efforts. 1) Ease of Use - You need to be comfortable using your blogging software multiple times a week. Writing is hard enough, so you don't need to make matters worse with difficult software. Make sure it's easy to create, edit, schedule, and publish a post. Managing comments should also be simple. 2) Built-in SEO Tools - Business blogs should be designed with SEO in mind. The post URLs should have good SEO structure and page-level SEO features. You should have an easy way to add or change keywords for specific posts. Ideally, you'll also be able to get SEO feedback like keyword suggestions as you write. 3) Social Sharing and Email Subscription - Social sharing capability is a critical -- and fairly standard -- component of any blogging platform. Most blogging platforms make it easy to share your posts through social media. In addition to social media following, make sure your readers can subscribe to your blog by email, too. What to Look for in Social Media Tools Blogging and SEO are absolutely critical to driving traffic to your website, but they often struggle without a third element: social media. For consistent traffic growth, businesses need to continue building a community of fans and followers on social networks with whom they can share their optimized content and attract new site visitors. So it only makes sense that if you're investing in SEO and blogging software to improve your site traffic, you'll want some social media software to help you out, too. Here's what any social media software should have to help solve your traffic problem. 1) Social Media Monitoring - The first rule of social media software is don't talk about social media software. Just kidding, the first rule is actually, "listening." Many marketers do this for Facebook; then they hop over to LinkedIn; then they move over to Twitter; and before long they have 5 tabs open in their browser and spend the whole day hitting refresh. In other words, platform-hopping is complicated and time consuming. Ideally, your social media software allows you to monitor most social media discussions within one single application. 2) Integrated, Multi-channel Publishing - Chances are your customers and prospects are clustered across different social media sites. So if you want to reach all your customers and prospects, you need to publish to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other sites where your audience hangs out. It's a lot of work to publish a single piece of content on multiple sites, so you should make sure your social media publishing tools allow you to publish to all of them at once. 3) Easy Social Media Following - Building a following is a critical part of social media. The bigger and more engaged your network, the greater your ability to use social media to generate traffic for your site. You should have an easy way to encourage your community to follow you on your website, on your blog, in your emails, and in other places that you generate lots of new traffic. 4) Reach Tracking - Reach is a key metric for marketing teams. It's an indication of your ability to generate attention and traffic. A great piece of content will have a much bigger impact if it's driven by great reach. Your social media tools should make it easy to track the aggregate reach of your social media channels. A Note on the Importance of Integration All of these components are critical to a great piece of SEO, blogging, or social media software; but integration with one another -- and your other marketing technology, as well -- saves marketers time, money, and a whole lotta grief. Let's take your SEO tools, for example. Wouldn't it be nice if your page-level SEO tools were integrated with your website management software? It would be a whole lot easier to fix errors that the report turns up if that were the case. Similarly, if your SEO tools are integrated with your marketing analytics tools, you can see the leads and customers generated from the keywords you're targeting. Same for your blogging tool -- if it's integrated with your marketing analytics tool, you can track the blog posts that drove the most leads and customers. And your social media publishing tools should be operating right alongside your website, blog, and landing page tools! Just think how much easier your life would be if you could track the social media activity of contacts in your marketing database, and track the leads and customer generated by social media. The point is, you can do all of these things separately, but time is rarely an excess resource within a marketing department. If all of your tools and technologies are integrated with one another, you spend less time compiling data and reports, and more time analyzing and improving upon your marketing activities. Want to learn what other marketing problems the right technology can help you solve? Download our free whitepaper How to Avoid Marketing Technology Paralysis. Image credit: zzpza

Fake Facebook Suicide Gets Teen Suspended From School

A Facebook page and a six minute video tell the story of a 12-year-old girl whose mother died when she was 3 years old, grew up being abused by her father and bullied on her Facebook page. Eventually, the girl commits suicide. There’s just one problem: this is all fake. The story was fabricated by a high school student who said she created the Facebook page and video for a class project asking students to highlight an important issue. The project resulted in 15-year-old Jessica Barba being suspended from school for five days. A concerned parent saw the Facebook page after Barba posted a message pretending to be the made-up 12-year-old saying, “I wanna be dead.” The police contacted the school and the teen was brought to the assistant principal’s office. Barba said she included a disclaimer on the Facebook page and video, but when school officials confronted her with printouts of the pages, they did not include the disclaimers, she told Matt Lauer on TODAY. The teen’s mother tried to show school officials that the pages included disclaimers, but that didn’t get Barba out of trouble. Here’s the video Barba released: There have been numerous stories of people creating fake Facebook pages to impersonate, bully or humiliate others, and in these cases all involved ended up in legal trouble. Barba says she was coming from a good place when she created this project to bring attention to the issue of bullying. Do you think school officials overreacted or should Barba be punished? Sound off in the comments. More About: cyberbullying, Facebook, Teenagers, teens

The Verdict Is In: Google Did Not Infringe On Oracle’s Patents

Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge Alsup has this afternoon dismissed the jury and decided that the search giant’s mobile OS did not in fact infringe on Oracle’s patents. The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle’s Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.) The jury’s decision was obviously a laborious one, following two years of a legal back-and-forth between the two tech giants. Oracle had initially filed the lawsuit back in August 2010, in which the company asserted that Android infringed on certain parts of the technology it acquired from its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Of course, that decision was only the first act in the three-part deliberations, which was slated to be followed by consideration of copyright, patent issues, and finally the damages Google would be liable for were they found guilty. Updating

The Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn

LinkedIn is considered the non-sexy, sleeping giant of social networks. It keeps a low profile, perhaps due to the professional nature of its users. Nonetheless, LinkedIn continues to exert a powerful influence on connected job seekers, brands, recruiters and industries. Founded by Reid Hoffman in 2002, LinkedIn has grown to 161 million members in over 200 countries, making it the world’s largest professional network on the Internet (by comparison, Twitter has 500 million registered users, and Facebook has 900 million). Currently available in 17 languages, LinkedIn remains a relevant platform the world over. That being said, we doubt you spend 20 minutes on LinkedIn per day, like Facebook’s power users do. So, if you need a crash course on what LinkedIn has to offer, browse the network’s most prominent features below. Or send this to your recent grad as he or she prepares to enter today’s daunting job market. SEE ALSO: The Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Have you used LinkedIn to find a job, network with professionals or research hot topics in your industry? Please share your own tips in the comments below. 1. Profile Like most social networks, LinkedIn hosts your personal profile, a page on which you may list information like job experience and professional skills. However, unlike many other social networks, it’s important to complete your profile to the best of your ability — especially if you’re using LinkedIn for the job hunt. LinkedIn measures your “profile completeness” from 0-100%. The higher your profile completeness, the more likely you are to appear in search results. For instance, when you list skills like “Final Cut Pro” and “Photoshop,” potential employers may come across your profile when they perform an advanced search based on those keywords. Handy. To ensure that your profile is 100% complete, LinkedIn recommends including the following information. Industry and postal code A current position with description Two more positions Education At least five skills Profile photo At least 50 connections A summary For more information about optimizing your LinkedIn profile, see these additional resources: 6 Things on Your LinkedIn Profile That Shouldn’t Be on Your Resume 8 Job Search Tips From the Co-Founder of LinkedIn The 10 Most Overused LinkedIn Profile Buzzwords of 2011 2. Connections Of course, to get those “50 connections” mentioned above, you’ll have to expand your network on LinkedIn. Don’t worry — LinkedIn’s algorithms and data mining make it pretty easy. I recommend first performing a series of basic searches to find people you know by name. (See the search box at the top of each LinkedIn page.) Click the “Connect” button next to people’s names to add them to your network. You may send a custom message along with that invitation to make the connection more personalized. Once you have made several connections, head to the “People You May Know” page. LinkedIn’s algorithm will likely have begun determining additional suggestions based on your connections’ networks. LinkedIn labels these connections by degree. People you’re already connected to are “1st degree” connections. People you’re not yet connected to, but who are linked to your 1st degree connections, are 2nd degree connections. And so on. You’ll see a blue icon that says “1st,” “2nd” or “3rd” next to their names. You may also choose to connect your email’s contact list to LinkedIn for the purpose of finding additional connections. Head to “Import Contacts” and allow access your contacts to pull up a list of potentials. Be aware, however, that this may generate a huge list of people, especially if email services like Gmail tend to save every address you’ve ever contacted. 3. Groups LinkedIn groups are spaces in which professionals and experts can share content, ask advice, post or search for jobs and network with others. Groups are tailored to brands, associations and societies, support groups, causes, publications and industries in general. That can mean anything from “On Startups – The Community for Entrepreneurs” to “Cal Alumni Association | UC Berkeley.” On the other hand, don’t confuse LinkedIn “groups” with “companies.” Coca-Cola has a “Coca-Cola Current & Former Employees” group, but its business lives on “The Coca-Cola Company” company page. More on that later. With over 1.3 million groups to choose from, you’re likely to find at few that fit your field and interests. Keep in mind that many groups require authentication before the manager permits you to join. However, nearly one-third of groups don’t require review, and are labeled “open.” Once you’re familiar with group functions, you may choose to create your own group. That means you’re the group owner, but you may also appoint a group manager and moderator, who are responsible for supervising discussions, subgroups, settings, etc. To get the most out of your LinkedIn group, take a look at the following features: LinkedIn Rolls Out Polling for Groups LinkedIn Unveils Dashboard for Groups Statistics 4. Companies Just as you have a personal profile page, many companies choose to represent themselves on LinkedIn, too. Like Facebook brand pages, you may choose to follow the activity and updates of companies on LinkedIn. Company pages contain general information, such as a business overview, list of employees and press mentions. Many companies also choose to list job openings on their pages, and some even encourage applicants to apply through LinkedIn, a very handy tool of the network. Once you follow a company, you’ll see its updates appear on your LinkedIn homepage alongside those of your connections. Mashable, for instance, tends to post business-related articles on LinkedIn, since that seems to be the content most pertinent to the network’s audience. Businesses also use LinkedIn to post company announcements, such as acquisitions, new hires or updated policies. LinkedIn warns against update spam, however: “Businesses that post updates excessively are subject to review by LinkedIn and could risk having their page deleted.” If you’re interested in adding your own company to the network, LinkedIn advises you take the following steps. You’re a current company employee and your position is on your profile. A company email address (e.g. john@companyname.com) is one of the confirmed email addresses on your LinkedIn account. You associate your profile with the right company. You must click on a name from our company name dropdown list when you edit or add a position on your profile. Your company’s email domain is unique to the company. Your profile must be more than 50% complete. You must have several connections. If you’re interested in learning more about how companies can use LinkedIn, see the following resources: 9 Ways to Add LinkedIn to Your Company Website 5 Ways to Market Your Brand on LinkedIn Why Your Non-Profit Needs to Stop Ignoring LinkedIn 5. Jobs Job search and recruitment tools are among LinkedIn’s most valuable features. More and more companies are encouraging candidates to apply for jobs via LinkedIn, due to the social network’s credibility and ease-of-use. Head to the “Jobs” tab, where you’ll find options for applicants. Perform an advanced search for available jobs by keyword, title, location, company, salary and industry. (A search for “developer” within 50 miles of Manhattan turned up 488 results.) Save jobs to review later, and even save searches to check back later for updated results. As an employer, you may post an available job to LinkedIn for $295 for a 30-day period. (Bulk packages are available for better deals.) Once posted, these jobs will not only appear in search results, but also in the “Careers” tab on your company page. Finally, recruiters may “find talent” on LinkedIn, but they must upgrade to a premium subscription plan to search for potential hires. 6. Updates Unlike content shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn updates tend to be industry- and professionally-focused. Keep that in mind if you’re attempting to increase engagement. You can share updates from a number of different places, both on LinkedIn.com and from outside web properties. Post a status update from the LinkedIn homepage, and it will be shared as well as posted to your profile under the activity feed. Also, when you engage in discussions in LinkedIn groups, that activity counts as an update. Post updates from sites like The New York Times by clicking the LinkedIn social share button next to an article. Or add the LinkedIn sharing bookmarklet to your browser toolbar to quickly share most sites as an update. Finally, you may also connect your Twitter account to LinkedIn. This not only expands your network, but allows you to post tweets on LinkedIn as if they were status updates. Once tweets post to LinkedIn, users can interact with them as if from Twitter.com, by retweeting, replying and favoriting. Like updates, tweets post to the homepage and live in the activity feed on your profile. Just as LinkedIn advises brands to cool it on excessive updates, you should practice the same self-control. Users appreciate information, not excessive traffic on their feeds. That being said, you can mute certain connections, if you choose. Hover over a user’s update on the homepage and click the “hide” button to stop receiving updates from that user. 7. Applications Applications allow LinkedIn users to customize their profiles and share content in different ways. For example, you may choose to add the WordPress app so that your latest WordPress blog posts share with your LinkedIn network. Do the same for SlideShare presentations you or your company have created. Keep in mind that most apps require permissions to access some of your basic profile information, such as your name or job title. However, all applications must abide by LinkedIn’s privacy policy, which means they’re not allowed to reach any private information not easily accessible by browsing the site. Learn about some of the top LinkedIn apps here: 5 Essential LinkedIn Apps for Sales Teams 8. Mobile LinkedIn has mobile applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Palm devices. The app is useful for posting status updates and checking group updates on-the-go, but its inherent advantages lie in networking. Pull up the mobile app to find LinkedIn connections and exchange information at events. After meeting someone, you may choose to email that person a link to your profile, so he or she may connect with you later — no business cards needed. Or search for that person on your LinkedIn mobile app and add him as a connection then and there. You may also choose to download LinkedIn connections to your smartphone’s address book for later contact. For more information on LinkedIn’s mobile presence, see below: 5 Tips for Using LinkedIn’s Mobile Site LinkedIn Launches iPad App, Takes New Direction 9. Upgraded Account Once you’ve explored LinkedIn Free, you may choose to upgrade to a LinkedIn account with more features. Starting at $15.95 per month, LinkedIn has premium subscription plans for businesses, job seekers, recruiters and more. One of the distinguishing features of most upgraded accounts is the ability to send InMail to anyone. InMail is an internal LinkedIn message sent to a person with whom you are not connected. You can message people you are already connected with free-of-charge, but you can’t message non-connections; you must InMail them — and those InMails are limited. The Basic business premium account allows you three InMails per month, while the Business Plus plan allows 10, and the Executive 25 per month. So, choose your InMails wisely. Upgraded accounts also have access to more search results, which can be a huge bonus for LinkedIn recruiters. You also have access to additional tools for saving and organizing profiles, and you can view the full list of people who have viewed your LinkedIn profile. Image courtesy of Flickr, Coletivo Mambembe. More About: Business, features, jobs, linkedin, Social Media

Donate via Tweets and Texts With Givey

The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place. Name: Givey Big Idea: Givey provides a free payment platform for users to easily donate to charities through Twitter and text messaging. Why It’s Working: The service lets people make “on-the-fly donations” with short tweets and SMS that benefit charities. Givey 2.0, launching in August, will act as a record of all donations and rank users by their charitable acts. Most messages on Twitter inform or entertain, but UK startup Givey wants some tweets to help charities. Since launching in May 2011, Givey has pulled 6,000 charities onto its online platform, which allows people to quickly register for an account and then start donating to UK charities via tweets and text messages. “We knew that the future was in mobile donations and engagement, so we had to think of ways in which we could never be limited by a single platform or a single device,” Robert Haslam, spokesperson for Givey, told Mashable. The service, which Haslam says will be available to U.S. charities by early 2013, links users’ profiles with their PayPal accounts — fitting because the service spawned from a PayPal hack day in 2010. To donate via Twitter, users include two hashtags in their tweets: #Givey and a tag for specific charity, such as #ADVOCACYFI for Advocacy First) or the charity’s Twitter handle and the donation amount. When donating through texts, users just send the charity tag and donation amount to 88008. Givey CEO David Erasmus hopes his charity donation service will become the world’s number one “giving platform” by 2014. To get there, Givey is revamping its website to become the digital record of its users’ real-world charitable behaviors. “By creating a way to keep a record of everything that users have done to help, they will be able to fully understand the impact their small actions have on the world around them.” “Givey 2.0 will bring a raft of new features, including logging the time volunteered to causes, stuff donated to charity shops, campaigning and fundraising capabilities,” says Haslam. The actions will earn users Givey Points and appear on Givey’s site in real-time in a timeline and dashboard. “This will be used to create league tables in a way that means a time-rich person can be on an equal level as someone who is cash-rich,” Haslam explains. “It could also become a way for companies to identify future employees or leaders based on the glance of their Givey Score.” The remodeled Givey launches in August, and the startup plans to release its API so third-party developers can infuse Givey features into their apps or websites. “By creating a way to keep a record of everything that users have done to help, they will be able to fully understand the impact their small actions have on the world around them,” says Haslam. “Smaller charities have benefited the most from Givey. It’s really going to be the new version of Givey that will start to help charities achieve some brilliant things.” For now, people can sign up to be notified as to when the site construction ends and when the service will be released in their countries. Givey recently earned funding from Nesta, an independent charity that disperses grants to UK companies, and signed deals with two big, unidentified companies to help with site remodeling and global expansion. Series presented by GE The World at Work is powered by GE. GE Works focuses on the people who make the things that move, power, build and help to cure the world. Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, raywoo More About: charity, features, mashable, Mobile, Social Good, text messaging, Twitter, United Kingdom, World at WorkFor more Business coverage:Follow Mashable Business on TwitterBecome a Fan on FacebookSubscribe to the Business channelDownload our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad