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Tech

As painful as the decision to stop printing daily may be for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and its staff, it grappling with a reality that almost every newspaper will have to face sooner or later, whether they want to or not. Read More »

Foursquare is getting its revenue story in order and announced it has hired Steven Rosenblatt, the former director of advertising sales and strategy at Apple’s iAd. Rosenblatt will serve as Foursquare’s chief revenue officer and will lead the company’s new ad products coming out this summer. Read More »

 
 

Facebook’s advertising woes, including the highly publicized departure of General Motors, reinforce the fact that while Facebook may function like a social network, on the business side it looks almost exactly like a media company — and that is going to be a major challenge. Read More »

The appointment of Ross Levinsohn as CEO is a sign Yahoo wants to focus on media as the core of its rebirth, but does the company have what it takes to succeed as a new-media entity? There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Read More »

Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton says he is making the network’s revamped discussion platform the centerpiece of a new advertising effort — hoping to convince brands that they should come and talk about their products and services in Gawker’s comment section instead of on Facebook. Read More »

Email marketing may seem like an old-school, if not quaint, tactic. But LiveIntent is convinced it can bring sophisticated web targeting tools to the aging medium to help companies get the most out of what it considers to be their most valuable asset: email subscribers. Read More »

As it gets closer to what could be a $100 billion stock offering, Facebook faces increasing pressure to prove it is a powerful advertising platform. But some advertisers still appear to be skeptical about how much value they are getting from the giant social network. Read More »

Brands and publishers face quite a challenge in capturing the attention of distracted consumers because it’s hard to pinpoint where to target a marketing message when people are constantly moving across different forms of media. But for New York-based SocialFlow, there’s opportunity in the chaos. Read More »

A year after eBay bought mobile ad network WHERE, it’s ready to show how it will put the Boston startup to work. WHERE will become PayPal Media Network, as it moves beyond serving location-based mobile ads to offering inventory across eBay’s different online properties. Read More »

Facebook’s latest securities filing contains some eye-popping numbers but also some red flags — particularly a sharp rise in costs. As the company’s IPO approaches, investors need to ask themselves, Is Facebook unlike anything we have seen before, or is it just another modestly profitable Web … Read More »

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton talks about whether we are in another technology bubble, what the decline of Facebook and Twitter as conversational media say about social networks, the death of advertising and whether he has any interest in selling his digital empire. Read More »

More Must Reads

Spotify is partnering with Coca Cola in a deal that it says will expand its international reach, giving it a boost similar to the way Facebook integration has supercharged usage. Coke will use Spotify to power its music outreach and will help promote the service internationally. … Read More »

Chartbeat announced a $9.5-million round of funding and a series of new features aimed at giving websites and publishers better insight into how users are engaging with their content, something that has become increasingly important as Facebook becomes a major player in online advertising. Read More »

Some traditional media entities seem to be hoping for a single magic bullet that will cure their revenue problems, but it is more likely success will come from making a number of smaller bets. Unfortunately, large media players don’t tend to be good at that. Read More »

Springpad has long been compared to Internet note-taking sensation Evernote, but starting today Springpad will likely be compared to another darling of the startup world, Pinterest. On Wednesday Springpad evolved into its third iteration, transforming the information capture service into a social networking engine. Read More »

Critics of reader comments often argue that they are worthless because they are filled with trolls, and not that many people read them. But despite these flaws, building community through comments and other social features is more important than it has ever been for online media. Read More »

Point Inside is looking to tap the power of indoor location with the launch nSide, a new private indoor ad network for retailers. Retailers will be able to send targeted ad messages based on a user’s location within a store, their shopping route and shopping lists. Read More »

Yummly earned its toque by creating a semantic search engine for recipes, but the 2-year-old Silicon Valley startup has bigger culinary ambitions. It wants to expand beyond recipe search and recommendations to create what CEO Dave Feller called a ā€œcomplete digital kitchen platform.ā€ Read More »

“Google is a crack dealer” is a phrase Larry Page never wanted to hear: but as the company’s relationships with developers begin to fracture across the board — from the web to mobile to apps — it is losing its grip on its own destiny. Read More »

Ad delivery technology firm Videoplaza is unveiling a new built-from-the-ground-up system that it says can help advertisers and media companies make money without having to cope with the headache of managing every new device that comes on the market. Read More »

Twitter and Facebook are both trying hard to show that they are powerful advertising vehicles, in part to justify their multibillion-dollar market valuations. But while each company has shown some growth, there is still skepticism among advertisers about the ultimate value of social advertising. Read More »

Facebook showed off a new suite of premium ads that enables brands to create more engaging stories for users and finally brings marketing to Facebook’s mobile properties. It’s part of a broad effort to generate revenue for the social network as it prepares to go public. … Read More »

MediaNews Group chief executive John Paton reiterated his “digital first” message in a fire-and-brimstone speech to a journalism group in Toronto recently, saying media entities of all kinds must let go of their attachment to the “information gatekeeper” model or they will surely perish. Read More »

Finnish startup ThingLink has been trying to find ways to encourage users to get excited about its “rich pictures.” Now it’s hoping it may hit the mother lode by helping advertisers and marketers build interactive images inside Facebook pages. Read More »

Apple has once again cut prices on its iAd system for rich in-app advertising on iOS applications, as ad buyers continue to balk at the up-front cost of participating in Apple’s vision of how mobile advertising should work. Read More »

Shopping apps are like InMarket’s Checkpoints apps are becoming powerful discovery tools for brands looking to get the word out on their products. InMarket said 50 percent of its users discovered new products using the Checkpoints app in the fourth quarter last year. Read More »

Media industry executives love to talk about the “original sin” that newspapers supposedly committed, by not charging for content when the web was young — but this theory misses the point that the media game as a whole is being played according to fundamentally different rules. Read More »

The New York Times has signed up over 300,000 people to its digital subscription plan, but that doesn’t even come close to making up for continued declines in ad revenue. A new CEO is going to have to think creatively about where the paper goes now. Read More »

Twitter on Wednesday switched on enhanced brand pages for accounts owned by National Public Radio, NBC News, Volkswagen, and others. This is the first batch of premium Twitter pages from companies other than the handful of launch partners who unveiled enhanced brand pages in December. Read More »

As everyone awaits the $100-billion Facebook IPO, the biggest question hanging over the offering is whether it marks the beginning of a new era for Facebook — or if it’s just a massive cashing-out exercise, a sign that this generation’s version of AOL has peaked? Read More »

NRelate, a small boot-strapped fellow New York City start-up, is growing quickly with its content marketing and recommendation widget and just eclipsed 20,000 publishers after a breakout year in 2011. NRelate focuses on medium and small publishers and blogs, helping them monetize and build more engagement. … Read More »

Almost a year after it angered users with its ‘quick bar’ advertising, and several months into its new Promoted Tweet service, Twitter’s ad platform seems as shaky as ever. Is targeted advertising a myth, or can Dick Costolo and team turn it around? Read More »

Rich media ad firm Medialets is launching Medialets Private Marketplace, a buying platform that lets advertisers directly plan, buy and execute on Medialets’ collection of top publishers. The marketplace reflects the emergence of private exchanges in mobile and the growing maturation of mobile advertising. Read More »

A breathless report says Facebook is going to use its new Timeline feature to appeal to advertisers. But is this really surprising? Like most free web services, Facebook has always relied on advertising — and adding social elements to advertising is the future of the medium. Read More »

Global mobile advertising and marketing is expected to grow from $3.4 billion in 2010 at a compound annual growth rate of 37 percent to $22.5 billion in 2016. Berg Insight said that by 2016, mobile advertising worldwide will represent 15.2 percent of all online ad spending. Read More »

Outbrain, a content discovery platform that helps online publishers drive engagement, has raised $35 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors Carmel Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. That brings Outbrain’s total funding to $64 million dollars. Read More »

After finding Groupon’s U.K. operation in breach of advertising rules nearly 50 times this year, officials are now referring complaints to regulators conducting a wider investigation into the company’s business practices. Read More »

LiveIntent, a New York City-based start-up is announcing today the release of LiveIntent for Publishers, a self-serve tool that allows companies that send out email newsletters, notifications and other communications to place ads that are served up in real-time like online display ads. Read More »

The news that Facebook is planning an initial public offering that could value the company at $100 billion just reinforces how it has become a kind of social utility. How does that change the way we look at the network and what it does? Read More »

More newspapers are rolling out paywalls, with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Canada’s PostMedia network the latest to jump on the bandwagon. But while they may have been encouraged by the New York Times, even that paper’s experience shows that a paywall is still a sandbag strategy. Read More »

Users are outraged about changes that Klout has made to the way it calculates online influence, and some argue these scores are meaningless. But measuring “reputation rank” is clearly a huge potential market, and Klout is far from the only one interested in doing it. Read More »

New social networks — such as the newly launched Unthink, as well as the open-source Diaspora — are pitching themselves as alternatives for those who are upset with or afraid of Facebook. But as Myspace found out, a social network really requires one thing to succeed: … Read More »

Facebook is offering companies more information on the way fan pages are used — and new data shows that it’s for one simple reason: it’s by far the most effective way for brands to reach customers, which makes it an easy way for Facebook to cash … Read More »

Yahoo is in turmoil, as vulture funds circle the company. Co-founder Jerry Yang says he doesn’t want to sell, and there are reports he is looking at taking the company private — which might be the best thing to happen to Yahoo in a long time. Read More »

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