The theme this week was about bringing order to chaos. Whether it’s Centzy aggregating local business data online, comScore’s new Multi-Platform measurement, Apple’s acquisition of indoor mapping company WifiSLAM or Planspot’s event marketing platform, the goal is the same – bring more clarity and definition to heretofore messy problems.
This is … Marketing Biz.
Centzy is focused on bringing detailed business data online – especially information that doesn’t exist anywhere else. As Shek explained earlier this year, 90 percent of Centzy’s data isn’t found anywhere else online because the business has never put that info online to begin with.
Centzy is one of a number of new companies trying to bring order to the chaos of small business promotions. I like that Centzy is focused on ‘errand’ type of businesses which brings focus to what could easily become a frustrating boiling-the-ocean proposition. Marketers should keep a close eye on Centzy and others to ensure they ride this wave of new data.
“We are excited to formally introduce Media Metrix Multi-Platform, a revolutionary development that combines comScore’s flagship products to accurately account for unduplicated audiences across the desktop, smartphone and tablet platforms,” said Jeff Hackett, executive vice president of comScore. “This unified view of digital audiences not only establishes a new measurement standard for the industry, but also has the potential to unlock insights that can deliver substantial, currently unrealized value to our publisher, advertiser and agency clients.”
Love them or hate them, comScore is a consistent standard of reporting for Internet properties and this official launch is good news for marketers who want greater clarity on screen penetration.
At the event, Twitter plans to announce additional types of Cards beyond the three that third parties currently have available, according to sources. The aim, Twitter will argue, is to help app developers incorporate their content into the tweets themselves, which will help drive traffic back to developers’ applications.
Twitter Cards are essential to developing a platform of meta-entertainment. While Twitter may argue that it will help drive traffic back to sites or apps (and it will to some degree) the larger effort is to make Twitter a robust and visual destination for social conversations about entertainment and events.
The two-year-old startup has developed ways for mobile apps to detect a phone user’s location in a building using Wi-Fi signals. It has been offering the technology to application developers for indoor mapping and new types of retail and social networking apps.
The mapping wars are going indoors. And remember, maps are directly connected to search and offers making it a very powerful and lucrative space.
The company was founded in 2010 and has operated in beta for the past 18 months as FoxTranslate and FoxTranscribe. It charges $1 a minute for transcription and delivers most transcriptions within a day.Unlike oDesk, customers of Rev.com don’t have to manage the freelancers they hire through the service.
Whether or not Rev.com turns out to compete with oDesk more broadly, the initial market of transcription and translation is huge and growing in importance as video adoption grows and companies move into other geographies.
Offset’s purpose is to offer high-quality commercial and editorial imagery with simple and clear licensing terms through an elegant customer experience. Offset images will be available with royalty-free licenses at flat, per-image pricing.Offset images are gathered from world-class assignment photographers, publishers, and agencies, with a focus on unique, authentic content. This collection of images is not available on Shutterstock or vice versa, and Offset images are not available by subscription. Offset images are independently sourced and do not come from Shutterstock contributors.
Offset is to Shutterstock as Banana Republic is to Old Navy or Lexus is to Toyota. It’s a smart move as the Internet continues to get more visual. The hand selected, curation angle seems aimed at lowering the friction to finding high quality images. Reducing the time it takes to source visual content sounds like a winning strategy to me.
Today, Posthaven is launching its public beta and is available to anyone who would like to pay $5 a month to host their Posterous data forever. Yes, Tan and Gibson have promised to keep the service running as long as it has users. The best part about Posthaven is that you can continue to use it just like you did Posterous, so it’s not merely storing your old posts. You can keep going. Its creators are also inspired by Google Reader’s recent demise and hope to set a good example for how to continue a service for the folks who really love it.
I never got on the Posterous bandwagon but I think marketers should watch Posthaven because they seem to have a larger goal in mind, preserving content from the evils of bitrot. Should they pivot completely, this might be a great tool to retain brand assets built on other platforms.
Competing with the likes of London-based Evently, and indirectly, HootSuite, Sproutsocial and Mailchimp, the web app’s dashboard hooks into social media, Press Release distribution, mailing list management, and partner publisher and event-listing websites to take the pain out of event marketing and promotion online.
Event marketing is a bear. It’s messy and it’s time consuming and full of last-minute surprises. So anyone who tries to make it easier is likely to get some traction. The question is whether the services truly reduce the headaches or just create different ones?
Mobile devices are shifting our daily routines, and users have changed not only what, but how much information they consume. Yet most articles and web pages were formatted for browsing with mouse clicks. The ability to skim them on a phone or a tablet can be a real challenge — we want easier ways to identify what’s important to us.Summly solves this by delivering snapshots of stories, giving you a simple and elegant way to find the news you want, faster than ever before. For publishers, the Summly technology provides a new approach to drive interest in stories and reach a generation of mobile users that want information on the go.
This is the most important move by Marissa Mayer to date. Very few seem to be thinking about whether the content needs to be changed per screen instead of just the design. Summly was one of the outliers in that regard and Yahoo!’s purchase points to their desire to be a major content delivery platform of the future.
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