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| MySpace Announces Service for Blackberry Posted: 11 Sep 2008 12:08 PM CDT
This sounds like a fairly robust application but the real question is whether the demographics of Blackberry users and MySpace users overlap. Most business professionals that I know are not active MySpace users, instead they tend to prefer Facebook. There’s a good chance that hundreds of thousands if not more than a million individuals with blackberries will decide to install this application. MySpace currently enjoys a larger reach in the United States than Facebook which means that there is a good chance that just as many users may end up installing the MySpace application. MySpace has been increasing their focus on the mobile space as they just recently announced the launch of MySpace Mobile for all European Union countries. It’s interesting to see MySpace targeting a demographic which would traditionally be considered business users. MySpace has been known for having a younger user base which are more focused on entertainment and music. According to MySpace’s press statement, the mobile version of MySpace already attracts more than two million daily unique visits. I’d expect to see continued growth in the social networking mobile space over the next 24 months as the mobile landscape domestically catches up to the rest of the world. |
| Social Ad Summit Final Announcement Posted: 11 Sep 2008 11:22 AM CDT Today I happy to announce the final schedule for Social Ad Summit. We’ve been working hard for the past couple months to put together an incredible lineup and have finally solidified all of our speakers and panels. I look forward to seeing you at the event! Below is the current schedule for the event: 9:00am - 9:45am - Social Network Advertising 10:00am - 10:45am - Media Buying on Social Networks 10:45am - 11:00am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote 11:00am - 11:15am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote 11:15am - 12:00pm - Branded Experiences on Social Networks 12:15pm - 1:30pm - Lunch 1:45pm - 2:30pm - Social Ad Network Solutions 2:45pm - 3:30pm - Social Advertising Metrics 3:35pm - 4:20pm - Widget Monetization 4:30pm - 5:15pm - Alternative Social Advertising 5:30pm - 7:00pm I would also like to thank our sponsors, who without their support this event would not be possible. Our platinum sponsors Social Cash and Offerpal Media and our Gold Sponsors Buddy Media, SocialMedia, appssavvy, Sometrics, KickApps, Sightix and JESS3. If you are interested in attending the event but have yet to receive an invite, please fill out the form on the Social Ad Summit homepage and we will try to get you an invite immediately. There are 15 seats remaining for this event as of last night and it will sell out so please let us know that you are interested in attending immediately. |
| D.C. As a Center of Technology Entrepreneurship Posted: 11 Sep 2008 08:00 AM CDT One of my own personal missions over the past couple years has been to contribute to the D.C. web-startup ecosystem as much as I could and help foster a more thriving environment for entrepreneurs. Over the past couple years a lot has changed and a lot continues to change. Over the coming weeks Social Times will be working on some interesting projects which I hope will continue to contribute to the local technology and entrepreneurial environment. It’s only one component though as it truly takes a community to build the ecosystem. I’m hearing about more and more events and slowly we are beginning to see signs of an emerging hotbed of technology and entrepreneurship. I also believe that we are slowly witnessing the meshing of what was previously distinct sub-communities. There are still serious challenges facing the local environment though. Entrepreneurship & Technology EducationIn the D.C. metro area there are a number of leading universities but when it comes to entrepreneurship and technology, none of them have the national exposure of universities like MIT & Stanford. That’s not to say that the local universities aren’t capable. The University of Maryland for example has the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship dedicated to creating a healthy environment for startups and has a great group of venture advisors as well. The biggest problem is that many of the people filtering through the local universities are not gaining much experience as it applies to technology. In an article yesterday, Howard Anderson highlighted some of the primary factors that help germinate successful tech startups: “sophisticated money; first-rate technology universities; and a few template successes (a Google or a Facebook, and so on) to”. D.C. has plenty of sophisticated money, at least one template success: AOL, but no leading technology universities. So this is something that local universities need to focus on. ConclusionI would list off a number of other factors but I honestly believe that we have everything else in place. The local media is becoming more active in what has become a highly active community, a local startup incubator has succeeded in getting their first company a Series A (I’m assuming more will come in the near future) and the local events are getting bigger and bigger. While D.C. is filled with extremely intelligent individuals, many of them are coming here with jobs already filled. Many of them aren’t young enough to take ridiculous risks and learn from a series of failures. Not that you can’t launch a startup at any point in your life, it just becomes harder when your responsibilities increase. What do you think the next steps should be to build a thriving ecosystem? How can we get the universities building more technical programs? |
| Buddy Media Launches BuddyBrain Service Posted: 10 Sep 2008 04:03 PM CDT This morning BuddyMedia announced the launch of BuddyBrain, a service which enables advertisers to monitor the success of their campaigns on Facebook. The service appears to be oriented toward BuddyMedia clients all of which run campaigns on Facebook and other social networks. The service measures engagement of applications using a number of factors including daily activation, loyalty, recency and daily active users. The service also enables BuddyBrain users with a way to track the location of users engaging with their applications. One thing that doesn’t appear to show up in this service is other demographic information including gender and age. [Update: Apparently one of my screenshots has gender in the corner.] I’m guessing that this is a feature that will be added in a later iteration. The control panel also provides users with access to engagement charts, upcoming events and industry news. There is also a way for BuddyMedia clients to manage client interaction including the management of files and comments on those files. It’s a great internal tool for the company which is becoming one of the leading social web agencies (as I define social web agencies, Buddy Media probably wouldn’t use the same term). Buddy Media also produced some interesting findings which support Buddy Media’s services: 85 percent of users who installed branded applications returned for multiple interactions and 59 percent of users returned 9 times or more in the first month. I’ve included screenshots of the service below in case you are curious how BuddyBrain looks. |
At CTIA in San Francisco today, MySpace announced that they will soon launch an application for the Blackberry. Facebook launched a Blackberry application almost one year ago and now attracts over 1.3 million monthly users to the application. The MySpace application includes messaging (including comments and bulletins), status updates, friend requests, photo integration, and the ability to view events.
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