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Echo Strengthens Management Team with Key Executive Hires

Kristin — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:16:47 +0000

Echo is excited to announce the addition of Ron Bouganim, VP of Corporate Development and Partnerships, and Kristin Hersant, VP of Marketing to our management team! These additions come at a time of strong growth for Echo, who is currently serving over 1 billion real-time streams per month for brands in social tv, social music, social news, social sports and social commerce. Both Ron and Kristin are uniquely positioned to help fuel the adoption of Echo’s platform and the rapid expansion of real-time web in 2012.

You can read all about the new hires in our press release. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements soon to come!

Buzzfeed raises $15m to continue the trend of real-time storytelling

chris — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:08:00 +0000

Last year I wrote about the future of journalism. We called it ‘Real-time Storytelling‘. In it, I described that content curation would become as important as content creation.

Today BuzzFeed, a content aggregation and curation destination site, raised $15m to ramp up their execution on that vision.

While these new silicon valley type startups create lots of excitement, the reality is that the mainstream news consuming public still prefer to get their news from their favorite news brands. Brands that work with Echo.

Each of them – each of you – have a chance to start rotating some of your coverage and core editorial activities to include curation. And with Echo, we make the technology, tools and best practices accessible to every major news site. We can work with your editorial, product and technology teams to quickly deliver aggregation, curation, visualization and engagement tools to add first class social curation to your existing set of products.

This is just one of the key trends of the Real-time web and it’s affect on the news business. Read the full ‘Real-time Storytelling’ essay to learn more.

[INFOGRAPHIC] The rise of Social TV

chris — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:44:40 +0000

Just saw a great post on ReadWriteWeb about the changing face of TV. As a TV addict myself I have lived and breathed these changes anecdotally, but, as always hard numbers and pretty pictures help to crystalize what we all suspect.

Of particular interest to me and Echo is the section on Social TV (i’ve cut it out and pasted it below).

The numbers are quite staggering. According to a Yahoo! and Razorfish survey of US adults:

80% are mobile multitasking while watching TV
15% are on their phones for the ENTIRE duration of the programs
38% search the mobile web for content related to the shows they’re watching
94% Exchange email, send IMs, texts, or social network while watching TV
38% say that browsing the web enhances their TV watching experience

There’s also a nice shout-out to the X-Factor USA (An Echo customer for Real-time Social TV apps) as the first and biggest of their kind of show to extensively leverage Twitter. Go Echo!

Get the full graphic and write up over on ReadWriteWeb