Social Media Marketing Platform SocialFlow Raises $10 Million Series B
SocialFlow, the makers of social marketing optimization technology that helps brands determine when to post their messages to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as which messages they should promote, has today closed on $10 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Fairhaven Capital, and included participation from existing investors SoftBank Capital, RRE Ventures, Aol Ventures and Betaworks, as well as new investors kbs+ Ventures and Rand Capital Corporation. The company says it plans to use the funding to expand upon its current product lineup, and expand its reach through partnerships. Today, SocialFlow offers two key tools known as Cadence and Crescendo. The former helps businesses manage the messages they tweet or post to Facebook, using algorithms that try to figure out when the social audience would be most receptive to that message’s content. It can then automatically post that message on the company’s behalf, and proceed to measure message conversions ...
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Medium Adds Collaboration Tools To Its Publishing Platform, Allowing People To Add Notes To Your Posts
Today, Ev Williams’ latest startup Medium added some tools to bring people together while they’re writing. The collaboration tools are similar to what you’d find in Google Docs, but clearly the key is to working on something to share publicly, together. The service isn’t open to the public yet, but it’s a beautiful set of tools to help you write about the things that interest you and then file them away in collaborative groups and categories called “Collections.” You can add your own posts to someone else’s collection, creating a fun, and social, environment for writers. In a post called “Don’t Write Alone,” Williams discusses the new features and the philosophy behind what Medium is building as a whole: Since starting Medium, we’ve maintained a focus on collaboration. We’ve touched on it with collections, which allow many people to contribute to the same idea. But today we’re taking it a big step forward with pre-publish collaboration. Within your post, you’re ...
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Homegrown Developers, Localization Breathe Life Into South Asian Gaming
Editor’s note: Hassan Baig is an entrepreneur who runs White Rabbit Studios, a South Asian gaming startup he founded four years ago in Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @baigi. It’s an open secret that the social gaming industry is no longer the cornucopia of opportunities it used to be. Rising CPAs, falling k-factors, plateuing ARPUs and channel saturation all have made life difficult for the typical gaming studio devoid of a big network of users or a deep warchest of advertising money. But there’s a new gaming opportunity on the horizon, and the savvy tech investor will do well to take notice of it now that it’s still nascent. This opportunity is the impending mobile gaming boom in South Asia, scheduled to arrive by 2015 for all practical purposes. Read on for a thorough look at the gaming history of the region, emerging fundamentals and future expectations. Fighting Bollywood And TV Spurred by 200,000 gaming cafes popping up across the country, China witnessed an online gaming ...
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Mediafed's Qrius Wants To Make RSS Subscriptions Easier, Give Publishers A Better Way To Distribute Their Content
The end of Google Reader is just a few weeks away, but RSS, the protocol that makes Reader and many other news readers tick, is alive and well. With its Qrius syndication service and the web and mobile news reader Taptu, Mediafed wants to help independent publishers to increase their distribution and make subscribing to news feeds easier. Currently about 130 out of the over 2,000 premium publishers that use Mediafed to monetize their feeds use Qrius and starting today, the service is also open for independent bloggers who want to use it on their sites. Besides making news feed subscriptions easier, Qrius also includes a number of social features that allow users to share feeds directly with their friends on Facebook, Twitter and by email and SMS. Mediafed also plans to work with premium bloggers to help them monetize their feeds. Given that Mediafed also owns Taptu, the two are closely linked together right now, but as Mediafed CEO Ashley Harrison told me earlier this week (before Google ...
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A Glimpse Of How Cory Booker Wants To Fix The Federal Government
Newark’s social media-happy mayor, Cory Booker, regularly grabs headlines for his impressively innovative uses of social media. In response to critics’ tweets, he housed residents in his own home after Hurricane Sandy, brought national attention to food stamps, and taken suggestions on how to spend Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to Newark schools. Now that he’s exploring a widely discussed run for the U.S. Senate, can Booker’s approach to local politics work for the larger and more dysfunctional Congress? Booker tells me during an interview at SXSWi (video above) that its essential to embrace critics in national discussions and aggressively fund experimental innovation. Start A Discussion The lack of access and transparency from lawmakers “creates cynicism from people in their engagement,” says Booker. “They don’t feel like their voice matters as much. And, therefore, they’re pulling back from the democratic sphere.” Booker is right that a sense of trust ...
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